It’s bizarre to watch angry Right Wingers trying to turn Critical Race Theory into some gigantic boogeyman. It’s along the lines of when Michael Dukakis was demonized in 1988 for being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU”. (Which was an obvious dog-whistle attempt to imply that Dukakis was a communist…)

The reality of CRT is that it’s about perspective. It’s about people learning to look at history from more than one vantage point, and learning that what may have been good for one group of people may not have been good for another. We could just point to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as the best example of this – and it would be a constructive idea to include that book right next to the standard textbook when evaluating various eras. Zinn’s book isn’t anti-American, but it is a corrective for people who assume that American history is one of saints just trying to make the world nicer.

The Right Wing resents this curriculum because it impinges on the narrative they’d prefer to hear – one where women and non-whites knew their place and kept their mouths shut if they knew what was good for them. In other words, a time when America was presumably “great”. But multiple scholars have had the temerity to stand up for themselves and resist the attempts by the Right to bully them.

Every time this happens, we see the Right Wing try to paint the group as a boogeyman. When angry Right Wing goons repeatedly attack various towns and communities and some unorganized Lefties stand up to them as “antifa”, the Right Wing suddenly decides that “antifa” is a “terrorist group”. When black men and women are repeatedly and unjustifiably killed by police and community groups form “Black Lives Matter” to speak out about it, the Right Wing condemns the group and demonizes its members. And now we have this nonsense about CRT.

This all boils down to angry Right Wingers not liking it when the people they’ve bullied actually stand up to them. And the responses we’re seeing, not only from Carlson but from pretty much every Right Wing pundit out there, are essentially just more bullying. Given that the first attempt at bullying failed, I’m thinking this one will not be successful either. But angry Right Wingers are apparently too dug in to process that – the same way that they keep insisting that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 Election.

Nonsense like this is why I do not waste time watching Carlson fomenting it. He’s clearly panicked that much of the Fox News viewer base has been straying to even more extreme propaganda platforms like Newsmax and OAN, so he’s just tossing allegations like this around. The sad part of it for him is that he will not be able to walk any of this back in the future. It’s all preserved for the historical record, which won’t be kind to him.

The basis for this entire false narrative about the January 6 attack is the fact that angry Right Wingers still cannot accept the fact that the Pence White House lost the 2020 election. They can’t admit to anyone, much less themselves. They spent two months from November to January repeatedly refusing to acknowledge that Joe Biden was the President-Elect and making wilder and wilder claims about what would happen on January 6. When that day came, and Pence’s childish spokesman incited the crowd to go commit mayhem, they descended on the Capitol Building. (The spokesman’s intentions become clear once you look at how he responded to a frantic Kevin McCarthy while the building was under seige – first trying his cover story that somehow the attackers were all disguised “antifa” and then admitting it was in fact his supporters and saying “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” Pence’s childish spokesman was clearly hoping the crowd would intimidate the Congress into doing what he wanted – just declaring him re-elected even though he’d lost.)

The idea that somehow the angry Right Wingers who rioted inside the Capitol Building were led by FBI Agents is a bizarre transmutation of events. It sounds like angry Right Wingers are trying to push a COINTELPRO narrative, as this was how the FBI dealt with anti-war protestors and the Black Panthers in the late 60s and early 70s. But COINTELPRO was about small-time protests and petty crimes. The idea that the FBI would lead an open assault on the Congress itself is one that could only be proposed by a particularly desperate pundit who’s already lost the argument. On the other hand, we continue to have angry Right Wingers who think that Mike Lindell and Sydney Powell are somehow the oracles of truth, no matter the extent of the lunacy in their arguments.

The idea that Pence’s childish spokesman thinks he can get away with rewriting the history on COVID is beyond laughable. Given that the Pence White House so badly bungled the pandemic that over 600,000 Americans and millions of people around the world died, it’s actually obscene.

Had Mike Pence not gutted multiple cabinet departments and agencies, the pandemic could have been greatly limited. I note that it wasn’t just the CDC that Pence deliberately starved – he was doing this all over the Executive Branch, especially in the State Department, where longtime staffers were hounded out of their jobs and not replaced. With the CDC, Pence took the typical angry Right Wing approach that they were overstaffed with too many people being paid too much. They eliminated multiple positions, including the people who were on the ground in China who could have alerted everyone to the situation months before the situation had spread into an out-of-control worldwide pandemic. The angry Right Wing thinking was that they could bring in “the best people” if anything ever happened. But with potential pandemics, that doesn’t work. The whole point is to have people on the ground BEFORE a pandemic happens, so that it doesn’t mutate into what we just spent the past year enduring.

The Pence White House responded to the pandemic by initially denying it existed, and then taking only rudimentary and inadequate steps here and there, while repeatedly trying to convince the American public that it would all just go away. In nearly every aspect of this, Pence’s childish spokesman either proposed idiotic quack “cures” like Hydroxichloroquine and ingested Lysol, or just dumped the problem on the individual states. There is a strong argument that there are times when the US is 50 individual states and other times when we act as one nation. The angry Right Wing approach has been to deny the latter idea, and the disastrous failure with COVID only illustrates the depth of that fallacy.

When Pence’s childish spokesman realized he was likely to lose the election over how badly they’d bungled COVID, he resorted to flashy statements like “Operation Warp Speed”, which was not a program so much as a desperate hope that someone, anyone, would come up with a vaccine before Election Day and instantly solve the problem. Even when private companies developed their vaccines, the Pence White House proved unable to manage distribution, as they once again dumped the situation on the individual states to somehow manage themselves. The result was a chaotic mess that didn’t get resolved until the Pence White House was evicted in January of this year, and some actual leadership began to be shown by Biden and Harris.

The historical record of Pence’s childish spokesman will be fairly harsh, regardless of angry Right Wingers’ frantic attempts to rewrite the history themselves. The Pence White House will be remembered for:
-its massive incompetence
-its hostility to much of the world and to much of the American populace
-its hatred of the prior White House which it tried to erase
-its hatred for the judiciary
-its emboldening of hate crimes and bullying
-its refusal to even try to perform the basic functions of government
-its refusal to acknowledge that President Biden clearly won the 2020 Election, and its subsequent attempts to incite its supporters into an armed attack on the US Capitol in January
_and of course its spectacular mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, leading to over 600,000 Americans dying and to millions dying around the world.

If Pence’s childish spokesman is looking for one major achievement for the history books, it will be that he goes down as the only named US President to get himself impeached multiple times. I don’t know that any sane person would want that on their epitaph.

Pence’s childish spokesman has no ground on which to stand here. The last thing he should be doing is opining on television about his hatred for President Biden. I would think it would make more sense for him to prepare for criminal charges coming towards his family and himself from the Southern District of New York and possibly from Georgia as well.

The record of the Pence White House in international affairs was a disaster, and that’s even before they bungled the COVID pandemic and allowed hundreds of thousands of Americans (not to mention millions of people around the world) to die when that situation was completely avoidable. The Pence White House would like to point to their supposed “Abraham Accords” in the Middle East, but they never discuss that those discussions weren’t about peace. Pompeo’s attempts to maneuver in the Middle East were entirely about weapons sales – the “Abraham Accords” were about a $23 billion sale of F-35s to the UAE, dressed up with empty platitudes about peace.

Pence’s childish spokesman was laughed off the stage at the UN, and wound up essentially ignored by actual world leaders, who turned to Angela Merkel for guidance since the Pence White House was unreliable. Perhaps the best example of the failures of the Pence White House (aside from the vicious Montenegro Shove of 2017) would be Ivanka Trump’s embarrassing attempt to interject herself into a discussion of issues at the G20 meeting in 2019, a moment that saw the leaders glance at her in mild annoyance and then completely ignore her. The bizarre irony of the Pence White House’s complete fumbling of international relations is the desperate wish of Pence’s childish spokesman to be given a Nobel Prize. As angry Right Wingers showed back in 2005, ANYONE can be nominated for such a Prize, but it doesn’t mean anything unless the Nobel Committee chooses to give the award. In the case of President Obama, they had good reason and did bestow that award. In the case of Pence’s childish spokesman, it’s clear that they laughed it out of the room as vigorously as the UN representatives had laughed him off their stage.

Meadows and another angry Right Wing pundit on a Fox competitor got a lot more specific about what they mean by America First. In that appearance, the pundit had a lot of fun playing and replaying the Montenegro Shove from 2017 as many times as they could, and enjoying the look of smug satisfaction on the face of Pence’s childish spokesman as he grabbed Milo Dukanovic and roughly shoved him out of his position in a photo op. These people clearly think that the ghastly conduct of Pence’s childish spokesman in the international community was somehow “feared and admired”. In reality, Pence’s spokesman and his entourage were the laughingstock of the world, and his constant tantrums at various allies, coupled with his unreliability at working with anyone to accomplish even a single thing of note, led to the international community essentially turning their back on him. Their relief at seeing President Biden over the past couple of weeks was palpable – because they can actually talk to the man and hear a response that makes sense.

I note that Mark Meadows never accomplished a single thing of note in the Congress, and he apparently intended to never accomplish anything. His entire purpose was to obstruct the Dems from doing anything. When he weaseled his way into the Pence White House, he simply continued that effort, culminating with his shocking displays at Nancy Pelosi last summer, where he refused to work on a stimulus extension in the peak of the pandemic and instead threw tantrums, pounded his fists on the table and stomped out of the room.

Regarding Jim Jordan, we must not forget that Pence’s childish spokesman besmirched the valuable Presidential Medal of Freedom by throwing it away on various despicable men, such as Jim Jordan, Devin Nunez, Ed Meese and Rush Limbaugh. The Medal of Freedom was meant to commemorate people who have made notable and meritorious contributions to the US and the world – and it normally goes to poets, inventors, innovators, artists and others who have worked to make the world a better place. It was never intended to be given to a vicious opportunist like Jim Jordan or to hatemongers like Limbaugh. It was intended for people like Mother Teresa.

At this point, I’m not certain that the Medal of Freedom can be continued, given how badly it has been tarnished by the Pence White House’s actions. The next Maya Angelou will not accept that award if it means that they must effectively share the stage with the likes of Limbaugh and Jordan. I fervently hope that the Biden/Harris White House will take the appropriate steps and redesignate the award with a new name – say, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Decency. They could then grandfather in all prior recipients of the award, aside from Paul Harvey, Limbaugh, Meese, Nunez and Jordan. That way, we could continue to have this award mean something, and unhelpful individuals like Jordan could keep their now-worthless badge.

McEnany may be trying to demonstrate an age-old paradox. The old saw used to be the eternal liar who tells you “I am lying”. It appears McEnany has figured out to do that without the paradox. She simply lies with her statement that she has “never lied”, when in fact she’s been repeatedly shown to have deliberately misled from the lectern more times than anyone can count.

Daines should listen to his own comment about bullies and how to deal with them. Anyone needing to talk to Daines should stand up to him and remind him that his attempt to gaslight the current Biden/Putin summit with falsehoods about the US/Mexico border is childish and unworthy of any real journalist’s attention.

No need to spend even 30 seconds watching anything inflicted by James O’Keefe and his website “Project Veritas”. He’s not a journalist and he’s just engaging in his usual schtick of trying to smear someone.

In this case, he’s decided to smear Fox, apparently for not letting Hecker do more to promote the Pence White House’s spin on things like their quack “cures” for COVID, and for not letting her spin a tale about bitcoin on the air. Hecker, for her part, doesn’t come off particularly well in this discussion. She’s just unhappy that she didn’t get to do more to push the Pence line, when she figured Fox was all in for four more years.

O’Keefe’s motivation here for attacking Fox appears to be his rage over the reporting of the 2020 Election. Given that Fox News alienated much of its Far Far Right Wing base, which then turned to harsher propaganda outlets like Newsmax and OANN, it’s not a surprise that O’Keefe has joined the pile-on.

If anything, O’Keefe’s meltdown here against Fox is just one more example of the deep fissures that have developed within Right Wing circles over the past year.

In the middle of Levin’s desperate puffery, he stated multiple baldfaced lies. Possibly the biggest one in a large crowd was his insistence that Ashli Babbit was somehow an innocent victim of Capitol Police run amok. He described her as “a veteran who wasn’t armed who was just walking around” inside the Capitol Building. In reality, Babbit was at the front of an angry mob rushing the locked doors to the Speaker’s Gallery. Babbit helped smash in the window panes on the door and was trying to launch herself through the opening to unlock the doors and allow the mob to overrun the security men. While she was perched in the broken window and reaching to open the doors, she was shot in the chest and fell backward into the crowd, which then backed off.

The notion that she was just having a tourist visit of the building is nonsense. And the other notion – that the crowd was unarmed – is blatantly false. Many of them were carrying implements of various types – including the rope they intended to hang various politicians with. And for the people who weren’t carrying actual weapons, their sheer force of numbers would easily have allowed them to overwhelm the armed security and take their weapons from them.

Johnson and Levin’s conduct here is simply despicable, and they should be called out for it.

This is the sort of interview that causes sane people to burst into uncontrollable laughter.

Pompeo has no credibility. The Pence White House was the laughingstock of the world, as seen more times than anyone could count over the infamy of its four years. In addition to the US being seen as an unreliable former partner by our allies (Angela Merkel and other Europeans took the lead), Pence White House denizens were notable for having retreated in every major area, and for making openly racist comments about the people emigrating to our shores.

The purported “Abraham Accords” that Pompeo hoped would get accolades for Pence’s childish spokesman turns out to have been a major weapons sale deal, including 23 billion dollars worth of F-35s.

Pompeo himself will go down in history as a despicable extremist in Congress and a grifter as a member of Pence’s unfortunate cabinet. (There are over 100 instances of Pompeo demanding that State Dept employees perform personal errands for himself or his wife. And that’s the employees that he and Tillerson and Pence hadn’t driven from government service.)

Let’s not forget that Pompeo is the one who smugly proclaimed that there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump Administration” after it was already clear that President Biden had been elected and that the Pence White House had been fired.

Pavlich’s open viciousness toward anyone with whom she disagrees has long been documented. This exchange only illustrates the usual pattern of The Five – have the angry Right Wing personalities say the vilest things they can about Democratic politicians, and then watch the weak sputtering token liberal try to respond while being shouted down. This has nothing to do with what happens in reality, but one supposes that it makes angry Right Wingers feel good about themselves.

Brady has no ground on which to stand here. This is a man who gleefully skyrocketed taxes on Middle Class employees, particularly the ones in Blue States, and then gloated after doing so. He doesn’t get to suddenly champion the notion of lower taxes, unless he intends to undo the GOP Tax Transfer he worked to inflict in late 2017.

I again note that the Tax Transfer provided barely crumbs to Americans earning under 75K, massively increased the actual tax burden for Americans earning 75K to 415K and then significantly lowered the tax burden for Americans making more than 415K. A working class American earning 30K per year saw perhaps 5-10 dollars more per week before their health costs went up to eat that. Millionaire Americans saw massive gains – especially the ones enjoying the Estate Tax reduction so that they could pass along over 22 million dollars without any tax obligation.

His actual problem with the global minimum tax is that it would compel his wealthiest corporate donors to actually pay SOMETHING in taxes rather than flee to havens where they can get away with reclassifying their income into non-existence.

It is quickly becoming clear that O’Reilly is hoping to use this event as a chance for him to rehabilitate Pence’s childish spokesman for the public eye. He intends to set up questions that will present the Pence White House as somehow being the heroes of the pandemic, the border and the economy. Expect a series of cupcake questions about how tough it was to lead the nation through such a difficult time, and about how terrible the border situation supposedly is today.

O’Reilly clearly thinks he can present himself along the lines of David Frost with Richard Nixon. Except that O’Reilly has nothing near the pedigree of Frost, and Pence’s childish spokesman hasn’t even a tenth of the animal instincts we always saw from Nixon.

And this is typical for angry Right Wing coverage of the Presidency. We saw this before multiple times.

When Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush were in office, angry Right Wingers like Wally George and his radio copycat Rush Limbaugh told everyone to show respect for “The President” and told everyone that Reagan was the greatest president anyone ever had, that it was “Morning in America!”. When anyone pointed out all the very real scandals of those years, they were told to shut up.

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, angry Right Wingers went on a massive tantrum, throwing any mud they could, impugning every single step he took and attempting to gin up any “scandal” they could as a way of getting revenge for all the bad publicity of the Reagan years. Fox News came about as part of the machine effort to attack and destroy Bill Clinton. They simply weren’t in place early enough with enough people paying attention to them to have much effect yet.

When W was selected in 2000 by the Republicans on the Supreme Court, we were then told it was “Morning in America again” even when the W/Cheney White House mismanaged the economy into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

When President Obama took office in 2009, the same angry Right Wingers and all their acolytes immediately declared that America was doomed so long as the Obama White House existed. And once again they tried to create any “scandal” they could, only to repeatedly roll snake eyes.

When the Trump campaign squeaked through in 2016, we were then told with a sneer that these people were going to “Make America Great Again”, and that we should enjoy how much damage they were doing.

Now that Joe Biden is in the White House (something most angry Right Wingers refuse to even acknowledge), we are now told that everything is somehow doomed again.

It’s as though these people have gotten a heck of a lot of practice at this game…

Interesting to note that Fox News really didn’t cover Pence’s childish spokesman’s attempted super-spreader this past weekend. They discussed it here and there, but they didn’t stop their programming to air it, the way they would have a year ago. Newsmax of course stopped all programming to fawn over this moment. But not Fox News. Hmmm.

Another sidenote: Even Newsmax won’t give Matt Gaetz a paid position – he already tried to wheedle them into giving him a soft landing after he likely winds up leaving office in disgrace this year. They said NO.

And as of this afternoon, disgraced former Fox News shouter Bill O’Reilly is now saying that he and Pence’s childish spokesman are booking a few public appearance dates together for the end of the year. Not sure on which side the pathetic lives more loudly…

This is typical of the current angry Right Wing approach to the Biden/Harris White House’s successes in combating the pandemic.

In reality, Operation Warp Speed was a publicity announcement, made by the Pence White House in their panic as they realized that they were deeply underwater in their efforts to stay in power in mid 2020. So they frantically told the media that somehow they would be able to provide a vaccine just in time for the November election and then everything would be all better. As it happens, the major companies like Pfizer were already working on that, from well before Pence’s childish spokesman opened his mouth.

And when the vaccines were finally ready to be distributed, it became clear that the Pence White House had no idea how to get them to the public. They had assumed that each state would somehow create their own distribution system, and they hadn’t bothered to do any work of their own. Result – complete disaster in terms of trying to actually get vaccines in people’s arms.

It wasn’t until the Pence White House left office in disgrace that the Biden/Harris team was able to roll out an effective production and distribution plan, one that saw a 200% success rate in Biden’s first 100 days.

I agree with John that it’s pathetic to see angry Right Wingers desperately trying to throw the credit for our current improvements to Pence’s spokesman. But one supposes we should have expected this, given how they played a similar game when President Obama took office. (We went from the Right insisting that there was no recession to suddenly declaring we were practically in a Depression and that it was all President Obama’s fault…)

No surprise that Hannity is spouting the usual angry Right Wing/Libertarian talking points. There’s nothing original in his commentary – he lifted it from other AM Radio hosts like Dave Ramsey.

The basic Libertarian approach is to pretend that there is nothing we can do to help each other and that everyone is living on an island completely apart from everyone else, with no obligation to anything other than ourselves. This is intended to help justify the typical anger that Libertarians feel when it comes to taxation or any kind of community spirit toward lifting the common good. To the committed Libertarian, there is no common good and community spirit is a myth that justifies the individual not being able to just enrich themselves without shame or humility.

I’ll note that I’ve never heard Libertarians cry out against wealthy people and business owners being given various subsidies and tax exemptions at everyone else’s expense. Their only complaint is when they are required to contribute to society.

I’ll also note that this narrative serves two purposes. First, it establishes the false premise that anyone receiving money from a government program is somehow a moocher. If they’re getting Social Security, they’re taking an “entitlement” that they don’t deserve. If they’re getting Unemployment Insurance, they’re lazy idlers who won’t go out to do real work. Never mind that both programs are partly funded by the recipients. (Of course, there’s a big exception to this for angry Right Wingers – if there’s a stimulus check that Donald Trump rushed in to plant his own signature on and thus fool millions of Americans into voting for him in 2020, then that’s a wonderful thing that shows how much Trump cares.)

But the main purpose of talking down any kind of community effort of us to help each other is to continue to sow seeds of distrust in that entire notion. By repeating the canard that “we can’t afford it” and by constantly telling everyone that Social Security is “on the verge of bankruptcy”, angry Right Wingers are trying to close the sale on the idea that “government” can’t get anything done. This was the reason why the Pence White House deliberately understaffed every major cabinet department, refused to even appoint ambassadors to much of the world and gutted every agency they could, including the CDC. They were practicing the self-fulfilling hypothesis of saying that “government” was inept while making sure that this would be the case. Had they not been trounced in the 2018 midterms, they would have gutted Social Security and Medicare for everyone under the age of 62, following the published Heritage Foundation playbook for destroying those programs. At which point, disingenuous propagandists like Hannity would have shrugged and said “We TOLD you that you couldn’t trust the ‘government’!”

The approach is as predictable as it is despicable.

Williams unfortunately does not have other options at this point. He tossed those when he took a large paycheck from Fox News after his anti-Muslim comments got him fired by NPR. Ever since then, he’s been paid to be the meek liberal punching bag on various Fox News shows, just like Alan Colmes. His entire purpose of being on the network has been to allow deplorables like Watters and Gutfeld to make extremely nasty comments at his expense.

He’ll of course stay on Fox News as a contributor to various other shows (probably on Perino’s daytime show and on Wallace’s Sunday show, among other things). But I wouldn’t expect to see him trying to join up with any legitimate news organization after this. He simply doesn’t have any journalistic credibility at this point. He knew what it meant to join up with Fox News, and he was happy to accept a lot of money from them to do so. Nobody forced him to do so.

I agree that it’s cringeworthy to see him constantly getting shouted down by attack dogs like Watters, but Williams could have put a stop to that at any point if he really cared about it.

Brady has no grounds at all to complain about tax rates. He gleefully participated in the 2017 Tax Transfer, which skyrocketed tax rates on Middle Class Employees, particularly those who live and work in Blue States, while giving a nice break to his donors.

If he’s complaining about the top individual tax rate (for people earning above 420K) going back to 39.6%, that’s a far far cry from when the rate was 71% for people earning over 120K – which was where the rate sat in 1982, when Ronald Reagan was supposedly in charge of what the GOP wants everyone to think was “the greatest economy ever”. And at that time, the book rate for corporations was 46%. Yet Brady would try to scam everyone that significantly lower tax rates will somehow kill the economy.

If he’s complaining about any tax rate increasing, or any loopholes or deductions being reduced, he can explain why he did exactly that to Middle Class Employees, resulting in tens of millions of Americans seeing massive increases in their federal tax bills. But he’s not about to do that.

And this entire act from him and Payne is nothing but further gaslighting to try to talk the economy down and help the GOP win back some seats next year. The act should look familiar – we saw nearly the same playbook during President Obama’s first two years, where Fox News and the GOP went from insisting that nothing was wrong with the economy during W’s massive recession to suddenly deciding the economy had gone off a cliff the second that President Obama was sworn in. It used to be that these guys hoped you would not remember history from 30 years ago. Now they’re hoping you won’t remember things that happened yesterday.

The Trumps shouldn’t be too concerned about whether their fans will be able to see them after the New York criminal indictments come through.

Visiting Hours are on Thursdays, aren’t they?