Welcome back to our weekly feature on the state of Our National Dialogue, which is what Duke Ellington would have arranged if his entire orchestra was made up of kazoos, slide whistles, and whoopie cushions.

Yes, I'm going to go waaaayyyyyy out on a limb here and say that the phrase "retroactive retirement" is going to get itself a workout over the next couple of weeks, and I'm also going to declare it Worst. Talking. Point. Ever. and declare the competition closed sine die. Thanks to our old pal, Enron Ed Gillespie, for introducing an easily mocked phrase, and one that readily jumps to mind, into our political parlance. If his old bosses, Kenny Boy Lay and Jeff Skilling had "retroactively retired" back in the early Aughts, a lot of old people would still have their pensions.

Otherwise, the aroma of conservative flopsweat was everywhere on Sunday, as everybody from Bill (Wrong) Kristol to George Effing Will exhibited the biggest public case of buyer's remorse since the people of Hamelin went looking for their children. Kristol told the people on the Fox Sunday show — aka, the last 25 people in American who actually listen to him — that Romney is "crazy" not to release his tax returns. And Effing Will? Over on This Week With The Cute Clinton Guy, he was beside himself, which is one effete charlatan too many for my way of thinking....

Oh, Mitt Romney is losing at this point in a big way. If something's going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why, given that Mitt Romney knew the day that McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest. He's done nothing illegal, nothing unseemly, nothing improper, but lots that impolitic. And this is — and he's now in the politics business... The Republicans have now nominated someone from the financial sector at a time when the financial sector is in extremely bad odor. Hardly a day goes by, the LIBOR scandal, TARP, that conditioned the country to believe that we're allowing the banks to keep profits private and socializing losses, all of this conditions the atmosphere in which this is occurring.

Wait. Whoa. Can a brother get a 20 here? George Effing Will has noticed that our major financial institutions have something of a, je ne sais quoi, how you say?, credibility problem with the general public these days? That the real problem is that the country, having seen its 401K's evaporate, its jobs destroyed, its homes foreclosed upon, and its personal wealth sunk into Middle Earth, has been conditioned to believe that our banks are run by wolverines at whose table the Romneys have supped for two generations? Nothing gets by George, I'm telling you that.

Luckily for the Romney campaign, Mary Matalin was there to offer a rebuttal.

This is a different election cycle. He's released 2010. He's releasing 2011. He has full disclosure. There's no tax advantages to being offshore. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the handpicked Democratic chairman by Barack Obama, has these offshore accounts.

I, for one, await the reign of President Wasserman Schultz with not-so-bated-breath. (Frankly, outside of being Good On TV, I can't for the life of me see what her other political skillz are.) So Mitt Romney keeps his money in the Caymans, why, exactly? For the waters? Talk then turned to Bain Capital, and Romney's retroactive retirement, and coherence abandoned poor Matalin, who began talking in brief fragments, like Geoffrey Rush in Shine. Sarah Palin never has been this unkind to her dependent clauses.

The — the charge is that he was making decisions that somehow sent jobs — which is a complete another distraction, which, by the way, the real issue here is lying to the American people about outsourcing is — is what this election should be about. Outsourcing is not a goal of private equity or — it's — it's a consequence of the global economy. And as one of your earlier guests said, if there were investments made with Bain that produced outsourcing, that — that was with those investors' money. What Barack Obama has done is outsourced jobs with your tax dollars, with our money, and they're complete failures. But that's not what this election is going to be about. It's not...

And then the person typing the transcript threw her machine across the room in horror and ran off to join the Poor Clares.

Over on NBC, Dancin' Dave's Disco Dance Party was back after a brief tennis-and-cycling-enforced absence. It was a weird ragbag of people and issues, although any show that features the unlikely duo of Grover Norquist and Bob Costas in its roster of guests is not to be trifled with. Enron Ed popped up there, too, but with nothing quite as memorable to say. Senator Jon Kyl was there to say, "Let's not politicize the Olympics," and nobody laughed, even though Romney's whole explanation for why he was not in charge of Bain at the same time he was its CEO is that he was too busy getting the bobsleds to run on time. Bob Woodward harrumphed out of history to stick up for the Washington Post's embattled enforcer of balance, Glenn Kessler. The really hilarious part was watching the Dancing Master and everyone else pretend that Norquist is a pundit like they are, and not the guy that has a couple hundred Republican congressional peckers in his pocket, to borrow a phrase from LBJ. And listening to him complain that the president couldn't get his budget passed, while everybody sat there and pretended that one of the biggest reasons wasn't sitting there in front of them, was one of the greatest pieces of prank TV since the death of Allen Funt. As far as Costas, well, he's deeply saddened at what happened at Penn State:

So this does irreparable damage to Joe Paterno's legacy. Does it invalidate every good and worthy thing he did besides winning football games and he did many good and worthy things besides winning football games? No, it does not invalidate those things, but it may overwhelm them. >

Actually, I don't think this whole dispute is a fight over transitive verbs, but that's just me.

But this was nothing compared to the marvelously peanutty cluster of fk that was Face The Nation, starring former Tyler Administration economics correspondent Bob Schieffer, if only because it marked the return of our favorite zombie-eyed granny-starver, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Bob began the interview by saying something that only pigeons truly understood.

Congressman, you are speaking us today from the City of Parks, Janesville, Wisconsin. So we're glad to have you. I take it you're indoors there, you're not out in a park right now but we're glad you're in a good place.

I've been to Janesville. I have no idea what Schieffer is talking about. Does Ryan melt if he goes out in the sun? Does he cast a reflection in a mirror? What are his opinions on garlic, and silver bullets? We do know that he sprouts a fine feathery coat and clucks around the barnyard if you ask him about Willard Romney and the current mishigas over Romney's personal finances.

Bob, you are very clairvoyant. I am not going to answer that question because it doesn't do the Romney campaign any favors to speculate in this area. So I just don't want to comment on it because I just don't think it's helpful to their campaign process.

Translation: They're still vetting my sorry ass, and I can't believe they're actually considering Pawlenty, that loser.

Soon, however, the talk turned to zombie-eyed granny-starving, and Ryan was on sounder footing there.

Look, we in the House have already passed a very specific budget, detailing exactly how it would solve this problem. The Senate hasn't passed a budget for three years. President Obama hasn't tried for four years to deal with this problem. Mitt Romney has put out more specifics on reforming the tax code, cleaning up the corporate system, getting rid of special interest loopholes, lowering rates to twenty-five percent on the corporations. He has put out more specifics on how to reform entitlement programs, to save Medicare from bankruptcy, to cut government spending, to reduce the deficits than Barack Obama, the United States Senate has. So he has put out these specifics, so I think this narrative is kind of false in many ways because what Mitt Romney has done has given us not only specific plans but reapplying those core principles that made America great in the first place, on how to restore economic growth and get the American idea with the safety net back on track because I really got to tell you, Bob, the next few years are going to make it or break it for America.

Okay, first of all, that's one helluva sentence right there. You could walk from Janesville to Kenosha on that sentence and your feet would never touch the rich Wisconsin earth. In fact, the whole passage is altogether remarkable. It's a rare politician who can sum up his entire political career in the answer to a single question. There's the outright lying. (The president hasn't tried to "deal with" the budget? Only in the sense that he has not shown up at the Republican senatorial caucus with an ax.) There's the overt fictionalization of Willard Romney, Wall Street reformer. There's the deficit fetishism, and there's the opportunistic apocalypism if we don't follow the master plan of Paul Ryan, onetime Social Security moocher and taker of economics courses in college.

You know what was the best thing last week? That bit from Bob Draper's New York Times piece that revealed that people didn't believe that Mitt Romney was sincere about his support for Paul Ryan's Genius Economic Plan because most people polled refused to believe that any politician would support a plan so transparently stupid and destructive.

For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed "ending Medicare as we know it" — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.

This makes me optimistic, and then it does not.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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