Good morning to one and all and welcome to another edition of the Sunday Morning Liveblog, series finale edition, in which all of the previous incarnations of the Sunday Morning Liveblog liveblogger appear at the same time to press a red button and destroy the Sunday morning political scat-chat shows forever, only Billie Piper says, "Oh, piss it, just go ahead and do it, don't have an hour long lamentation over it."
My name is Jason, and today is going to be kind of a unsteady wonder of a day, right before Thanksgiving break. First of all, through some pre-Christmas miracle that may apply only to me, there is no Meet The Press. Any Sunday without a Meet The Press is a frabjous day for America, and I rejoice to see it gone, like I do other lesions.
Also, today is going to be weird because last night some sort of complicated diplomatic arrangement with Iran was reached in Geneva, Switzerland and so we awake today in a world in which Sunday's simpletons will break it down and probably Bill Kristol weeps because what about bombing Iran for sport? It will be a weird day, watching people with a mostly flash-card education grapple with a serious thing that happened with such very little time to spare. (Maybe that's why there's no "Meet The Press" today? Their brains got hurted?)
Anyway, as usual I will type and you can chill out and go back to bed or do any number of other things with your wonderful lives. Or do these things: chat in the comments, drop me a line if you like, follow me on twitter for some reason, or check out the Sunday Reads on my Rebel Mouse page for those long pauses between new words.
FOX NEWS SUNDAY
Here is your P5+1 Factsheet on yesterday's deal. It is hard to type P5+1 over and over again so they will henceforth be referred to as the Scooby Gang, okay?
Today on Fox News, Chris Wallace will talk about the deal the Scooby Gang has apparently come up with, with Senators Bob Corker and Ben Cardin yelling at each other. Then we will court a terrible "nuclear option" segue by discussing the Senate's rule changes with someone named Sarah Palin who I hope someone will remind me about.
First of all, though, the Scooby Gang Deal with Iran. Some reporter is saying that a nuclear non-proliferation expert says that the deal reached last night is probably the best possible deal because it puts caps on every aspect of Iran's nuclear program and those caps are set low enough to avoid the weaponizing of nuclear material.
The "dream deal" that the Israelis and the Saudi's cooked up, in a dream they had together -- in which they were both running down a hill together and then suddenly ended up in their house (but it wasn't really their house, you know, and it was also a really old discotheque?) and they came up with an Iran deal, and then they woke up just as the Saudis and Israelis had started to explore each others' bodies and things were starting to get kind of hot? -- was never going to be possible, except for maybe the erotic parts of that dream.
If there's a sticking point to come, it's over the "right to enrich uranium," because the Iranians are all braggy that they totally have a right to do it now (within the limitations of the caps), and John Kerry is all, "Mofeaux be yappin' their mouths, cuz, there is no right in the agreement now chill." And Israel is all, "OH NO YOU DIDN'T." And Iran gets some alleviation of some sanctions. And we probably don't drop white phosphorus on the Iranian people for a while, at least.
Senators Corker and Cardin are here to yap about this some more. There's not much to say about this. In fact, Corker and Cardin are here to just spit some talking points about it and be done with it. Like I said, we are talking about kids with flash-cards here.
Before Corker went on today they showed him flashcards which said, "be skeptical of Iran" and "emphasize that Congress will take action to make it so that the Scooby Gang deal is temporary and not the norm" and "be upset about the Iranians being pleased with anything" and "especially emphasize the idea that the Obama administration is 'long on announcements and short on follow through.'" He was well trained in explaining how international happiness is a limited commodity, divvied up in zero-sum fashion, and if there are Iranians who have a quantity of happiness that means there is less happiness for Americans. He colors the syllables that were drummed into his head with a homey accent and bad sports metaphors.
Before Cardin went on today they showed him flashcards which said, "the sanctions broke Iran" and "this is a first step" and "of course we'll hold Iran's feet to the fire don't worry," and "this agreement actually honors what Israel and Saudi Arabia wanted."
North Korea looms large because we had a Scooby Gang sort of deal once and now they are crazy people with nuclear weapons. To Corker, past results indicate future performance and to Cardin it is a piece of history that won't be repeated.
Wallace asks Corker a question that he got no preparative flashcards and so he literally says, "I...ah...I...ah...I...ah...I...ah...I...ah," for about twenty minutes.
Now there is this lady named Sarah Palin who made news because an MSNBC host named Martin Bashir said something super-duper disgusting about her on the air about how people should defecate into her mouth and her children's mouths which is like...wow! The good thing about Piers Morgan is that he's way, way, too poncey to come up with something that gross.
Anyway, this Palin person is totally right to complain about this Bashir guy saying that. That's gross. You know, I have been watching the Sunday shows for six years and it is as close as a human can come, metaphorically, to having a gout of fecal matter shot at ones face, and so I can say, very firmly, that I am against people having their faces pooped on. I take a strong stand against that! So, Martin Bashir was wrong to say that stuff about this lady.
To sort of make things up to this lady who Martin Bashir said those foul things about, she gets an interview with Chris Wallace and that's kind of nice, maybe other people who have endured similar hardships can come on this show and Chris Wallace can ask them important questions of the day, like a sort of "make-a-wish" program.
In case you are wondering, this Sarah person doesn't like Obamacare or "socialized medicine" or a government that tries to give people health care or the Senate's new filibuster rules and she doesn't know how to pronounce the word "nuclear."
I mean, this is neat, extending this person a chance to say stuff on the teevee, and I hope that Fox News Sunday continues to find all sorts of ordinary Americans to come on and talk about stuff. That said, I'm glad that this person isn't in politics, she's kind of strident! But hey, she's probably still on edge over that whole weird thing Martin Bashir said. MSNBC should cashier Bashir and let someone like Anna Holmes host a show in the afternoon, anyway.
Still, that was a pretty original segment for a Sunday show. Hats off to Fox News for trying something new and letting someone without serious political credentials have a chance to speak, that was neat.
Okay it is time to panel with George Will and Julie Pace and Nina Easton and Juan Williams.
Pace's appearance is fortuitous because she is on the byline of the AP story that broke last night about the U.S. and Iran having high-level talks in secret over the past year which led to this deal. Read all about it here. The meeting started before Hassan Rouhani was elected, but didn't get moving until that happened. Per Pace, the deal wrought over the weekend was forged first in these talks.
Will thinks it's "surreal" to say that a deal that halts the Iranian nuclear program halts the Iranian nuclear problem. He seems oddly wistful that we won't be attacking Iran anytime soon, and then says "that's probably a good thing." And that's actually a more surreal sentence!
Will is still yapping. He reckons that Iran will now get a nuclear bomb -- I guess because he distrusts the verification/inspection regime that will be imposed on Iran. He also reckons that Saudi Arabia will "seek their own arsenal" of nukes.
Now Williams is talking and he likes the deal and thinks that we have actually averted a certain war in the region. Fox News producers make sure that the camera cuts to Will and Easton, doing the whole "denigrate Juan Williams shot," but you know, it's not the same as when Bill Kristol was doing it. (Part of the reason is that Easton is generically predisposed to the deal itself, and reckons that what really needs to happen is full follow-through on the verifications.)
Easton points out that the last week's sexy-sexy "France is skeptical of John Kerry's deal" is moot now, because the eventual deal satisfied them.
Will de-surrealizes his previous statement, saying, "I'm very opposed to going to war with Iran, but we have to face the fact now that they're going to be a nuclear power."
Now the panel turns to Obamacare. Will reckons that the thirty-day enrollment delay that will push the deadline from October 15 to November 15 is transparently political -- pushing the matter after the election. He further reckons that because the Obama administration has now drawn a bright line around that deadline, it's going to get a lot of media scrutiny, and so all the Obama administration has done here is create one of those "Streisand Effect" situations in which you ensure that more people notice the thing you were hoping to downplay. I think there's a good chance Will is right about all of that.
Pace says that the Healthcare.gov website is showing steady improvements and looks like it might get up to patch -- just in time for a new problem: the massive influx of customers trying to use it beginning in December. Pace frets about high volume crashing the website over and over again. I worry less about the site, and more about the meatspace concerns -- how many warm bodies are standing ready to do the warm body work, in December, when most of the people who want to sign up are doing so. If you multiply the number of warm bodies you have by hours in the day, is there enough time to do everything that needs doing?
When I was a government contractor I talked about the 75/25 Rule -- in the time you've allotted for 100 people to do a thing, 75 of the people will do it in the last 25 percent of the time you've allotted. Had I been working on the Affordable Care Act rollout, I'd have painted "75/25" on every surface.
Will thinks that Obamacare will make it so 2014 is the first election where "politics isn't local" and whatever national problems are happening with Obamacare are going to inform voters in every district. Mitch McConnell better hope so! He has a pretty decent Democratic opponent, and the Obamacare website in Kentucky is doing great!
Interested in Ann Romney's Christmas recipes? You will have to find another liveblogger. I'm assuming that most of her cooking involves Miracle Whip and water.
FACE THE NATION
Okay, let's face the nation, I guess, about this whole agreement with Iran. CBS News' Margaret Brennan talked with John Kerry last night and asked him what the agreement does to prevent Iran from building a bomb, and Kerry says, "a bunch of things." These include: the lack of enriched material, the requirement that they destroy the enriched material thay already have, the requirement that Iran build no more facilities or centrifuges.
Is Kerry skeptical about Iran? He says that everyone has the right to be skeptical, because there are lots of Iranians who sought a weapon, and they don't take anything at face value. He says that arms control agreements aren't based on trust, they are based on verification, and he believes that they are "at the beginning" of putting a verification regime in place.
Kerry says that Iranian claims that the agreement gave them a "right to enrichment" are "not accurate," as are claims that military force against Iran is off the table.
Brennan seems to be super-concerned that Iran hasn't started dismantling it's facilities in the seven hours since the deal was reached, Kerry says, "You don't get everything in the first step, that's not how this works."
Brennan asks Kerry how he is supposed to explain this deal to Bibi Netanyahu. Is that required? Uhm, maybe you just tell Bibi Netanyahu that when we need his opinion on something we'll send someone to collect it, like we do for whoever runs Denmark?
Kerry is more politic than I am with people who aren't actually in charge of my country but seem to think we are beholden to them anyway: "It's based on facts" such as the destruction of their uranium and limitations put on their stock. "It's based on all kinds of things we've never had." Iran will continue to pay a high price, sanctions-wise, and "no one is sitting here pretending that Iran is turning over a new leaf, they have to prove it."
Is Kerry confident that Iran won't actually spend the $7 billion we're releasing to them on terrorists? Kerry says that it is a first step in locking in a larger agreement over Iran not having a nuclear arsenal and being allowed into their facilities, which will make both Israel and the region safer.
Brennan says that Netanyahu and the other Arab States are against this deal. How will that affect their relationship with America? No one can say. Maybe Israel and Arab States can come up with a better idea? Gotta grow up and leave the house someday, kids, quit complaining about the meals mommy puts on your plate.
Now David Sanger is here, and he says that the intelligence community figures that the deal adds maybe two months to the time it would take Iran to get a nuclear weapon if they decide to sprint all out for one, but Kerry is right when they say that everyone's better off with this agreement in hand, then we'd be if we didn't have the deal in hand.
Some other white guy is here and he says that it's a "step forward" and a "start and a significant thing" and to think of it more as a "freeze" instead of a "deal." "This is not some breakthrough agreement" right now, says this other white guy.
Sanger says that haters gonna hate this deal, but you have to imagine that if the administration made no effort at all to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran, there would be an even greater reason to criticize them. The other white guy says that Israel will "make a lot of noise" and your Congresscritters will do much the same, but the only danger is that no really big deal emerges. If Iran just uses this step to kick a can down the road regularly, then the sanctions should be reimposed.
Now we are here with Steny Hoyer. It's worth pointing out that Steny is not short for something or a nickname. Someone's mom actually said, "We're going to call him Steny."
What does Hoyer think about all this Iran stuff? He says that our continuing policy is "IRAN NO GET NUKE WEAPON NO NO NO GET ONE" and that the military option that's forever on the table and forever inspiring Iran to seek the means to protect themselves from the military threat that's on the table is still on the table.
It's a marginal improvement, though, he says. "We don't trust Iran," he says, "we need to verify that they are going to do what they say they are going to do." He says that moving ahead to some final status agreement depends entirely on that. He thinks that it's appropriate that the sanctions bill wending its way through Congress should have their implementation delayed by six months to see if this works.
Schieffer says that if the deal works it "will be some needed good news for the political front for the White House." Oh, Bob, I know you needed a segue there, but the real good news is fewer charred human bodies, potentially? Barack Obama is a super-rich political celebrity and is going to have an awesome life no matter what happens in American politics.
Schieffer asks if they are going to have to take Healthcare.gov "down and start over." Has he been on vacation for a bunch of weeks? I mean, he's coming at the Obamacare implementation issue as if it just started on Friday. Hoyer says that the process "has been terrible," but they are going to continue to fix the program so that people can get access to healthcare. He offers an anecdote about someone whose medical treatment was covered because the ACA let him remain on his parents' policy, and now that he's getting his own policy the ACA has removed concern that his pre-existing condition will prevent him from doing so.
Schieffer says 61% of Americans now oppose the ACA. He doesn't know it, but that number includes everyone who opposes it on the grounds that it's not single-payer or some other more liberal health care system. Here's a better way of looking at things.
Hoyer gives good talking point: "Obamacare hasn't failed, access to Obamacare has failed." Okay, but you understand how insurance pools work, right? Because the lack of access could very easily cause the whole thing to fail.
Now Kevin McCarthy is here to yell about all of this. He says that Obama should not "oversell" this deal, because it's not a full dismantling yet. (I think that John Kerry just agreed with all of that, so I don't know what the argument here is.) He says that without a "full dismantling" that he doesn't think there will be "bipartisan support in the House and Senate for calling this a historic deal." That sounds super-serious until you remember that no one calls on the U.S. Congress to adjudicate the historical value of things.
What will House Republicans do now, on Obamacare? Schieffer talked with some GOP operative he was playing handsy with on a plane and he said the GOP strategy was to sit back and say nothing and wait for Obamacare to fail.
As I've been saying, that's a good strategy! Whether everyone likes it or not, both sides have now officially gone all-in on Obamacare. The losing hand is held by someone, and winning or losing is now just baked into the cake. If the site gets fixed and people enroll and basically enjoy having insurance at last it's a big win for the Democrats. If the site never works or the right balance of enrollees never materializes then the GOP wins big. Everyone can and should just relax now, and wait to win or lose. No more of this "government shutdown/debt ceiling cracksmokerface" stuff.
McCarthy, for his part, is mostly making the Obamacare bet. The one thing he's doing wrong for himself, is continuing to set a new standard for health care policy -- anything that causes a person to get a letter from their insurance company informing them that they've lost their policy is a political failure.
That's really important, because McCarthy wants to cut Medicare! He is literally in favor of millions of those letters going out! He should really downplay that stuff -- most GOP healthcare policy -- whether it's ending earned benefit programs or doing stuff like 'allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines' -- is going to cause lots and lots and lots of these kinds of letters going out.
Is immigration reform dead? McCarthy says no. (It totally is though.)
Schieffer monologues about the Senate's rule changes. He wants to add some new rules:
--Ban all fundraisers during legislative sessions. Yes! This is bullshit!
--Pay Congress only for the time they spend legislating, and by the hour. I think members of Congress should also wash my car.
Schieffer thinks that this things would cause Congress to work more and move their families to DC and this would make them all get to know each other and get along better. Hey now, hold on. I like some of these rules, but the incentive should not be towards making the garbage spouses and garbage kids of these garbage people to move to Washington and thus increase the population of awful people in this city. I have to live here.
Also, do we really want them all getting along? I think a certain amount of dislike for one another is good for America. Think about it -- if these trash people actually came together and learned to like each other, the untold harm they could do to America when they team up with one another would be intense! As it is, when both parties come together to do something "bipartisan" it's usually something terrible! They start a war or they agree to mass surveillance.
I like the status quo of everyone hating each other just fine. But, yes, let's make their lives a little bit more miserable in terms of paying them less and denying them the opportunities to fundraise, because they are despicable people and deserve at least that. Plus, all Committee Chairs in both Houses of Congress should wash my car in return for the privilege of not being punched in the face.
More paneling now. Turns out that white guy from before is David Rohde or Rhode or Rjode from the Atlantic. He and Sanger are back, and so is John Dickerson and Kimberly Strassel.
Strassel thinks that the Iranian deal benefits the Iranians and that there is basically no dealing with them, diplomatically, at all. Dickerson reports that the White House thinks they've six months to try to work out a larger deal. He also notes that while Obama continues to "take a pounding on the domestic front," he is resolutely doing the things he promised to do on foreign policy, based on promises made back in 2008.
Sanger says that Congress will "probably let the President play out his gamble," the idea being that a little relief will incentivize further moderation for the Iranian regime -- citizens will demand that their government take more steps to ease their suffering. Sanger says that it's a tricky gamble for Obama: the Israeli methodology would be to pile on more and more sanctions in the hope that Iran simply collapses.
Obama, he says, "is making the bet that he can push along a reform movement." Sanger makes a fantastic point, though! he notes the second-level obstacle though. Say Obama is wrong in his assumptions. it will be easy to add new sanctions to Iran. We return very simply to the punishing status quo. But what if Obama's right, and we see definitive signs of Iran's compliance/good behavior? Getting everyone to continue to peel away sanctions in return would be quite difficult.
Oh, David Rohde or whoever he is works at Reuters, not the Atlantic. I am really not even making an effort, watching these dumb panel discussions anymore. Oh well, Davis Sanger wins, and he should collect his prize. (There is no prize.)
Schieffer asks about Saudi Arabia's nuclear capability and Sanger tells him that the Saudi's basically "underwrote" the Pakistani nuclear program and so in theory they've already put a nuclear bomb on layaway, the trick is how do you transport such a thing to Saudi Arabia and U.S. intelligence is watching this matter "like a hawk."
Dickerson says that Senator John Cornyn's reaction to the many-years-in-the-works Iranian deal, which was to go on Twitter and say that it was "amazing what the administration would do to deflect from Obamacare," only shows how "super-charged the politics are" around the matter. I rather think it shows that Cornyn is either amazingly, incalculably stupid, or that he has a bottomless contempt for the people he thinks are listening to him, or both.
The problem for Obama, though, is real -- real trust in the polls has fallen precipitously. Getting that healthcare website working is all-important now. There might be a little wiggle room on that end-of-November deadline for fixing the website, but there won't be a lot, and perhaps there shouldn't be.
I think we've now lapsed into another round of Kennedy nostalgia, so we'll move on.
THIS WEEK, WITH SOMEBODY
George Stephanopoulos felt like this Iran news was worth him waking up for to come into work, so hooray, I guess.
Terry Moran and his luxuriously kissable lips spell out what we've already learned about this deal. This yields to John Kerry, who was interviewed earlier for the show.
Stephanoupoulos points out that the deal has drawn early criticism from the likes of Senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham. It must have been pretty late, because Kerry's response is of the "it's 4am and the jazz club is closed, man" variety: "This negotiation is not the art of fantasy or the art of the ideal, it's the art of the possible, which is verifiable and clear in its capacity to be able to make Israel and the region safer." Everyone will be safer because Iran's "20%" uranium will be destroyed and the "3.5%" uranium will be "frozen at its current stock" and the centrifuges not installed. Kerry says that there will be daily inspections, as well.
But not dismantled? Because Lindsey Graham wants them dismantled! That's the next step, Kerry says.
KERRY: Now, the choice people have is, do you want to sit there and argue that you have to dismantle your program before you stopped it and while you're arguing about this dismantling it, they progress. In 2003, Iran made an offer to the Bush administration that they would, in fact, do major things with respect to their program, they had 164 centrifuges. Nobody took -- nothing has happened. Therefore, here we are in 2013, they have 19,000 centrifuges and they're closer to a weapon.
You cannot sit there and pretend that you're just going to get the thing you want while they continue to move towards the program that they have been chasing.
We've actually succeed through the sanctions that congress put in place to be able to get to a point where we're locking in knowledgeably what their current level is and forcing them to go backwards. And while we go through these next six months, we will be negotiating the dismantling, we will be negotiating the limitations. But you can't always start where you want to wind up. And most people I've talked to who have looked at this carefully, say the alternative that they're proposing just doesn't work.
Like I said, it's late.
What is the U.S. position on Iran's claim of a right to enrich uranium? Kerry says there is no such right and the U.S. doesn't recognize any such thing, and the agreement doesn't endorse the notion either. Iran, he says, "could have a very limited, completely verifiable, extraordinarily constrained program, where they might have some medical research or other things they can do, but there is no inherent right to enrich."
Iran does, he says, have the right to negotiate a right to enrich. but "they could only gain that capacity to have some enrichment as some countries do, if they live up to the whole set of terms necessary to prove its a peaceful program." And to do that, he says, Iran would have to clear some "very stiff hurdles."
Don't we want the hurdles to be high? I mean, the stiffness of the hurdle seems to be incidental to the clearing of a hurdle.
Stephanopoulos points out that Bibi Netanyahu's been riding up and down the street on his waaahmbulance all night long. Kerry says, "Israel and the United States absolutely share the same goal here. There is no daylight between us with respect to what we want to achieve at this point." But Bibi is totes bawling about all of this, Stephanopoulos points out. Kerry says that Israel "will actually gain a larger breathing space in terms of the breakout capacity of Iran."
Will Obama veto new sanctions if Congress ignores the request to hold off on new sanctions for six months and passes them? Kerry says that he believes that Congress will recognize that this deal is a good first step. It is like John Kerry hasn't met the people in this Congress, lately.
Does Kerry think that the United States is headed for normal relations with Iran now? Because by the way, their Supreme Leader still be super-cray? Kerry says, "We have no illusions. This is not going to change in one fell swoop and overnight. We have a long building process to engage in here. We need to put to test Iran's words and intentions, without any cobwebs, without any, you know, false assumptions without any illusions. This is a hard road."
Somehow, the retiring Senator Saxby Chambliss has been rustled up to be the guy to yell about everything John Kerry just said. Chambliss for his part, doesn't like the deal, because to his mind it doesn't do enough to limit Iran's nuclear capacity right off the bat. He also doesn't like even the slight easing of sanctions that's been agreed to: "Right now, the sanctions are working. They're doing exactly what they're designed to do. The economy of Iran is heading south. Unemployment is skyrocketing."
Ha, when you think about it, you should call the sequestration "sanctions on the American people" because it is doing the same thing to us as we're doing to Iran.
But it's difficult to say what Chambliss' take on future sanctions are, because he seems to be saying everything and nothing. Probably he hasn't gotten his explicit talking points from TASS, yet. There is going to be simultaneously "strong movement to tighten sanctions" but also "for the next six months this deal is going to be in place" but you "don't ease sanctions when they are working" and "we've let Iran out of the trap."
Anyway, Chambliss takes the position that you sanction Iran until they collapse, rather than offer them a mutually-beneficial deal where the reasons for the sanctions gradually get peeled away in return for the easing of sanctions. At this point, it's a debate between zero-summers and positive-summers, as usual.
Let's panel about it, I guess. Here to do so is Christiane Amanpour and Martha Raddatz and Richard Haass and Bill Kristol.
Amanpour says that the Iranian people want to get the sanctions lifted, because they've hurt the Iranians, without really harming the Iranian regime, who have motored on with their nuclear ambitions, sanctions be damned. Intelligence officials have suggested to her that the interim deal is a positive step. Israel and the Arab states involves in the "Sunni-Shia proxy war" have, meanwhile, "freaked out."
Raddatz sort of restates that AP story about the secret talks in Oman, in order to prove to viewers that someone on the panel read that article.
Kristol of course hates the deal a lot, you don't even need me to liveblog that, I could have told you what Bill Kristol was going to say at the start of today. I always know what Bill Kristol is going to say about something a day before he says it. I live rent-free in his cranium, there is a lot of room there for furniture.
There is going to be an even dumber roundtable, for some reason. This will feature Bill Kristol and Cokie Roberts and Matt Dowd and Donna Brazile.
Brazile says: "But you know with all the conversation this morning about the nuclear deal with Iran, this is a melodramatic phrase to talk about the nuclear option being eliminated."
Donna Brazile, you lose today, for committing the crime of creating a cheap segue between Iran's nuclear program and the Senate "nuclear option." That is easily today's hackiest moment.
Anyway, Brazile is glad the Senate rules have been changed for government to function. Roberts works to out-hack Brazile by saying, "The Senate can't function. The Senate's not functioning. I mean, and I thought it was quite remarkable for Harry Reid to say "the Senate is not functioning." He's the majority leader. Doesn't he have some responsibility for the Senate not functioning?"
Ha yes, he does, and that's why he finally acted responsibly? Because people were all, "It is really dumb that all these appointees keep getting railroaded when you have it in your means to fix it."
Dowd says that what's going around DC is a "virus of hypocrisy," which, ha, I guess, but "going around?" As in, suddenly new thing? LOL, I'm old enough to remember when it was cool for us to walk up to the Iranian mullahs and say, "Here are some really great weapons."
Kristol will accept that everyone on all sides should be blamed but especially the side that Harry Reid is on.
This is really great analysis of the American condition, guys. So glad they've pointed teevee cameras at this.
Roberts keeps pointing out that there are hundreds of nominees waiting a confirmation vote and following that up by saying, "THE SENATE AMIRITE? NOT EVEN ATTEMPTING 'THOUGHT' TODAY."
We read some polls, and Stephanopoulos exclaims, "This is going to poison the well, in terms of Obama's domestic agenda!" DUDE, from day one, mofeaux been pissing poison into this well! I'm amazed that as much as his domestic agenda has been passed.
Kristol says, "The Republicans aren't responsible for gridlock in this situation," and everyone LOLs, because LOL.
Dowd says, "Where we are today George, where we are today is the president in 2008 and 2007 ran on the idea that he was going to bring the country together, bring Washington together. We're going to get past the partisan gridlock. We're going to get past the vitriol. And now we're at a point where the rules have to change in the Senate because it's become so polarized, so vitriolic that we can't get it done."
Dowd actually skipped a step in there, going from the previous condition to the current condition while leaving out step in between.
1. PREVIOUS CONDITION: "The president in 2008 and 2007 ran on the idea that he was going to bring the country together, bring Washington together. We're going to get past the partisan gridlock. We're going to get past the vitriol."
2: STEP IN BETWEEN: ???????????????????
3: CURRENT CONDITION: "And now we're at a point where the rules have to change in the Senate because it's become so polarized, so vitriolic that we can't get it done."
Naturally, the thing that belongs in place of the question marks is "THE GOP SAYS, 'NAAAAH WE'RE NOT GOING TO INDULGE THESE EFFORTS IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER AND IN FACT WE'RE GOING TO RAMP UP THE OBSTRUCTION AND VITRIOL.'"
In a way, that's good, because Obama is so bent on accommodating the GOP that if there had even been a tiny period of comity between them they'd have come together to scuttle what's left of earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare. It can't be said that total lycanthropic intransigence from the GOP hasn't helped the country in some small way!
By the time I look back up at the teevee, they are talking about Kennedy. So let's fast forward.
Now they are talking to Mark Zuckerberg.
Now they are talking to Maya Angelou.
Now I am deleting this show from my TiVo.
Now I am wishing you all a great week.
[The Sunday Morning Liveblog returns on December 8, everyone should have a nice Thanksgiving and not watch the Sunday shows. In the meantime, feel free to check out my Rebel Mouse page, for fun and informative reads from around the web.]