Oh no they don’t.

If we’re going to play this game, does this mean that the Republicans Harvey Weinstein supported will now be giving back their donations as well? Because Weinstein has supported Republicans, including lobbying Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pete Wilson in California, and sending money at times to GOP candidates. Wynn is a diehard Republican. If Fox News wants to see Dems pilloried for this, then they can show us proof that every single Right Winger who ever got a dime from Wynn has donated that money plus interest to charity. Until then, they can just enjoy their moment in the barrel.

Fox News knows better than this – they’re just hoping their audience doesn’t.

Sadly, this is likely to be what will happen tomorrow. I expect Fox News and the Pence White House to push this idea hard – and it’s something they’ve done before, so it’s not a new idea. DACA recipients coming to the SOTU address should be prepared to be publicly arrested and subjected to deportation hearings. We should keep in mind that these arrests will be taking place during what will be an angry, vicious rant by the Pence White House’s spokesman – full of chest-thumping about stealing Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat and ramming that Tax Transfer through, while repeatedly attacking Democrats for not crying Uncle often enough.

The reality is beginning to set in regarding DACA and immigration – namely that it’s extremely unlikely that any agreement will be reached in Congress before the program is cancelled in one month. This is intentional by the Right Wing, in that they’ve loaded up the discussion with every racist notion in their basket so that the proposal is pretty much DOA. And the Dems have everything to gain from allowing DACA to expire so they can campaign on the spectacle of all those Dreamer families being ripped apart. (ICE has already been public about their preparations for major raids in California around the time that DACA will officially expire – I guarantee that they’ll make a point of sweeping up a bunch of DACA recipients as part of the action. Simultaneously, we’ll be seeing a large number of DACA recipients emigrating to Canada and Europe, where their skill sets can at least be appreciated and compensated.)

As a sidenote, we’re also seeing discussion that the Supreme Court is expected to deal a major blow to unions this term, as the Right Wing majority will be ruling that it’s okay for union members to refuse to pay any dues whatsoever to the union – meaning that the unions will be legally stripped of funding at a time when they are under increasing attack by the Right. Yet another example of how Elections Have Consequences. Had those 2-3 million Dems in the swing states bothered to show up in 2016, we would not now be discussing that situation at the SC, nor would we be discussing the imminent disaster facing the DACA recipients. We must hope that those Dems have learned their lesson by this November, or the situation can and will get worse.

The vicious comments seen here are becoming increasingly common at Fox News. If you look at the articles on their website, you’ll see more and more Right Wing trolls openly advocating for the execution of anyone who does not agree with them. It no longer appears that Fox News moderators are even trying to rein any of this in – they’re just letting these would-be-bullies strut around, in the same way that the Pence White House’s Tweeter-in-Chief regularly emboldens those people to let their inner hater out in public.

If the Dems do not show up to vote this year and in 2020, this situation can and will get worse. If these guys get the idea that they can really push this approach (and they will if the Dems stay home again), we’ll be looking a lot more mass shootings as nearly happened at Comet Pizza, and a lot more mass assaults and killings as inflicted by James Fields in Charlottesville. I note that at the time of Heather Heyer’s funeral, Fox News posters were putting up comments extolling how much fun it would be to kill more protestors. One poster actually posted “Next bowler up! LOL!” Another poster responded that for the next protest, the driver would do better to use a pickup truck with a snowplow on the front. Given this viciousness, and given the actions taken to essentially legalize vehicular assault and homicide in North Dakota (where Right Wingers wanted to say that if you’re in a protest in the road, and a driver rams the crowd, it’s your fault for being there rather than the driver’s fault for trying to kill you.), I would recommend, again, that people keep their eyes wide open. And let’s all work to make sure that voters actually show up to repudiate these deplorables this fall.

It’s fairly obvious that Fox News and the Pence White House believe that a military conflict will be politically helpful for them in a difficult midterm situation. In the same way that Dick Cheney and his ilk pushed war against Iraq in 2002 as a way to make sure the GOP could maintain its Congressional numbers that year.

I would advise people to keep their eyes open for attempted provocations both at North Korea and in the Middle East this year. The former situation could heat up very quickly, given how the Olympics are being politicized this year. If NK does another test as I expect they will, on the eve of the Olympics, we could see the US suddenly pull out of the Games and see the international tension level get ratcheted up to 11. The latter situation has two powderkegs being primed to blow by the Pence group – one is the repeated provocations of Iran (in the hopes of getting them to walk away from the Nuclear Agreement that Tom Cotton treasonously attempted to stop before it was signed); the other is the intentional slap of transferring the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem – a move that will almost certainly guarantee an attack.

I believe it’s the fervent hope of the Right Wing that any one (or even all three) of these situations will explode into open warfare by this fall. In that scenario, the Right Wing can play the card of “We’re at war and we all must rally round the flag, and let’s not switch horses in the middle of the race, etc.” I don’t know that this will work for them, but I do know that they are quite willing to expend the lives of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) to attain their goals. They have a history of doing so, going back to the Gulf War and the Vietnam War. Never underestimate their ruthlessness.

It’s not surprising that Gutfeld is trying to play this card. I frankly tend to ignore him, as his comments, like this one, don’t make logical sense and fall apart under any decent scrutiny. His clear intent is to say something as outrageous as possible, in the hope that he’ll be quoted in another media outlet or given further attention. In simpler language, he enjoys trolling. And even though we’ve passed from the Year of the Bully to the Year of the Troll, I still recommend not feeding them.

Fox News and Right Wing radio took this story a further step today, when Daily Beast broke the news that the Dept of Justice is folding to pressure from Pence and Judicial Watch and is going back into the investigation of the Clinton emails. Andrew Napolitano posted today in his yearly predictions that he anticipates seeing both of the Clintons indicted by a grand jury within a year’s time.

Given the intense pressure the Pence White House is feeling right now with the continuing Mueller investigation, and given the lack of accomplishments they can show, it’s not surprising that they are serious about getting that PR opportunity. The one surprise here is that they didn’t push for this to happen last summer.

Interesting that Megyn Kelly doesn’t want to acknowledge the obvious truth about her work at Fox News and the obvious impact Right Wing media has had on the environment around it.

Of course these phrases are intended as dog whistles aka bullhorns. The whole point of criticizing the “lamestream media” and any of that is to say “New York media” which is of course a sidestep from “Jewish media”. These guys have been playing these games for over a century. They know that they can’t say that stuff openly, so they cloak it. It’s the same way that they deal with sports – the current hostility toward black football players, the usual dismissal of black basketball players and that sport in general. I’ve actually heard one Right Winger in person be pretty honest about his real feelings about basketball, saying “I don’t feel like watching those monkeys jumping around”. (His preference was to watch the violence in NHL games – where the players are white.) I should also note that there was a sly tip in this direction when Ted Cruz made his little “New York values” comment in the 2016 campaign . He was actually accusing Trump at that moment of being beholden to “Jewish values” and he knew quite well what he was saying at the time.

Kelly’s guest here made a pretty valiant attempt to teach Kelly about the reality of her work at Fox News but she wasn’t able to hear him. He wasn’t saying that racist groups were corrupting terms that she and her friends at Fox News were using in polite discussion, like “mainstream media”. He was saying that she was using terms that were coined by racist groups to cloak their meaning just enough to get them used by the rest of society. There’s a further level to this – in that Kelly must have known this was happening, and where the language was coming from when Roger Ailes would insist they roll it into their lines of the day. So Kelly is either saying that she was deliberately refusing to pay attention (as she appeared to be doing in this clip) or that she was too foolish to know what she was saying. Either result doesn’t speak highly of her work.

Beyond the dismissal of the humanity or accuracy of the people involved in this racism and bigotry, there’s also the key area that Kelly’s guest pointed out, and which we’ve been seeing in earnest for over 14 months now. Namely, there’s a giant wave of emboldened racists and bigots committing hate crimes across this country, and they’ve taken their cue from the Pence White House, from the extremist Right Wingers in Congress, and from AM Radio and Fox News, not to mention all the extreme Right Wing websites that continue to feed the echo chamber. When they see that they can commit utter mayhem in Berkeley or in Charlottesville and have their behavior approved by the Tweeter-in-Chief, not just once but repeatedly, they get the message that it’s open season now. There’s a good reason these guys aren’t wearing the Klan hoods now. As they see it, this is their time to be out and proud – and to attack everyone else to their heart’s content.

This is why many people were truly shocked to see what happened when the Trump campaign in the swing states was able to successfully depress the Democratic Party turnout just enough to get their people across the finish line. It meant that the racists and the deplorables got a huge shot in the arm, and they gleefully went to work. And sadly, this has meant violence in multiple forms being regularly inflicted across this country – and that’s even without dealing with the lesser matter of Trump supporters becoming so emboldened and unhinged that they can no longer conduct a normal conversation without losing their temper and erupting into screaming fury. (I literally just dealt with this over the last weekend, where one Right Winger I spoke to in the neighborhood became so enraged in a normal discussion that he began incoherently shouting and screaming and pounding on the bar in front of us in an embarrassing display.) The hate violence is a much sadder and more dangerous story – it’s the dark side of the notion that “Elections have consequences.” For much of the country, for the people who aren’t the correct race or religion or gender, the consequences here have gone a lot farther than the nastiness of the Pence White House – they’ve gone to the viciousness of the deplorables that Trump regularly inspires to further attacks.

Not surprising to see a Fox News show fail to acknowledge the reality of what has been happening over the past year. To the Fox News viewer who knows nothing outside of Right Wing spin, this approach would make sense – the country and the world are a wonderful place because Mike Pence is running the White House and why don’t the Democrats just find someplace to lay down and die already?

To the rest of the country, and to the world, 2017 marked a vicious turn for the Right Wing, something that Fox News openly applauded – including repeated taunts and bullying coming directly from Fox News anchors to their viewers, with multiple examples coming from Bill O’Reilly (before he was reluctantly fired), Jeanine Pirro and Eric Bolling (before he too was fired). 2017 was a year that has been documented to show Right Wing media frantically trying to prop up a deeply unpopular group of autocrats while they worked to undermine our democracy and a good part of our social infrastructure.

Fox News will go down in the history books as perhaps the most nakedly partisan and one-sided media outlet ever created. An outlet that distinguished itself by nakedly opposing anything that a Democratic Party President would do and by nakedly promoting anything that a Republican Party President would do. This was already obvious enough in their pendulum swings between the Clinton, W and Obama presidencies, where their coverage went from day to night to day without batting an eyelash. But with the Pence White House, Fox News is now on record as marrying themselves to an extremist regime that is willing to go much farther over the edge than anything we’ve seen before. When this is examined in another 50-100 years, the sordid record of Fox News will serve as an example to journalists and to historians about what happens when the Far Right tries to write its own history without regard for inconvenient things like facts.

In years to come, people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly will be trying to pass themselves off as wise elder statesmen as they attempt to opine from on high. The historical record will of course continue to show that they not only do not have any basis for trying to take those perches but that their own misdeeds greatly contributed to a level of hatefulness, bigotry and divisiveness that this country has not seen perhaps since the Civil War. And that those misdeeds were done for their own enrichment and aggrandizement. The same has already been documented for Fox News. They can bray all they want to about everyone else, but the facts are out there for all to see.

No surprise to see Fox News ring out the Year of the Bully with a pair of sneering Pence White House sycophants playing these games. As we begin the Year of the Troll, I’m sure we can look forward to increasingly desperate attempts by Watters and Kennedy on their Fox News perches to try to discourage Democratic Party voters from participating this year. We’ll just have to see if the Right Wing is successful in their endeavors or if they sing a different tune come November.

Bemused, the US is currently a laughingstock of the world. That is, in the moments when people everywhere aren’t extremely concerned that the Pence White House will start a nuclear exchange with North Korea or Iran.

Peters is blatantly lying here. Right Wingers have been salivating for months about the possibility of a new armed conflict, particularly one that would allow them to settle the Korean score that’s festered for them for decades. (And it would be another fun punch in the face to Presidents Clinton and Obama and anyone who voted for them) The intention is obviously to act as outrageously as possible and see how much bullying can be inflicted before there’s a response from the North Koreans. This either ends in the nonsensical idea that North Korea would just say “Okay, fine. You got us. Go ahead and bully us. We’ll just say Uncle now”, or it ends in the scenario most Americans and Koreans are increasingly concerned to see: Namely a full military exchange between the US and North Korea. (This approach is the same one that’s been taken with the deliberately provocative move of playing games about Jerusalem – with the same basic intent.) By taking this approach, the Pence White House gets to look tough, gets to feed the hatred of its base voters, and it sets up its opponents, both foreign and domestic, in an unwinnable scenario.

The US is currently at a diplomatic disadvantage here – in that we have a State Dept that’s only functioning at a fraction of its needed capacity, thanks to Pence and Tillerson’s refusal to staff it. We don’t even have an appointed Ambassador to South Korea or much of the rest of the world these days. So we don’t have the ability to have the diplomatic sideline conversations that would be needed to head off a confrontation. All we have is some ineffectual statements from Tillerson and Mad Dog Mattis, and a regular stream of offensive comments from the Pence White House’s Tweeter-in-Chief. Which just tells the North Korean leadership that they might as well respond in kind, since they are not about to submit to bullying.

Peters’ scenario about happily attacking North Korea “all out with everything we’ve got” is one that is extremely dangerous to multiple Asian nations in the area, not to mention potentially to us. In Peters’ dream situation, the US just launches this massive missile attack at North Korea and they just sit there and let us hit them. That’s the same kind of nonsense hawk thinking that nearly got everyone nuked during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The more likely scenario is that Peters gets his way and Pence orders a full launch against North Korea. North Korea sees all that hardware coming at them and immediately launches everything they have – against targets close to them and far away – including lobbing stuff in our direction. The assured result of this is massive destruction and catastrophe in Asia for certain – and potentially destruction here in the US. There would be much further consequences in terms of the US being branded a pariah state and all that, but the most important consequence is all the lives that would needlessly be sacrificed for the sake of Pence and Peters’ egos.

The one thing that can potentially help this situation is if another nation steps in and backs the US off. I just don’t see at this point who that could be, unless China decides to get more deeply involved. The impression I have is that they’ve already warned Pence not to do anything and they’re figuring that he paid attention. I don’t think they’ve calculated in the sheer recklessness and viciousness of this bunch. And the really troubling part of this is that the Pence White House has another 3 years in which they could swing this sword of Damocles.

This is unsurprising, but then 2017 has been The Year of the Bully. The whole point of the Fox News approach for a year has been to attack and bully anyone not on the Far Right and to angrily denigrate them further if they dare to stand up for themselves. Sure, they’ve occasionally offered a gentle criticism of the Pence White House’s spokesman, but nothing that would overly upset anyone.

If we were to compile an actual list of good and poor political behavior for the year, it would look like this:

Poor Behavior:
-Mitch McConnell, for repeatedly making a point of ramming partisan bills through the Senate and refusing to allow any input from Democrats. He gets special points for stealing a Supreme Court seat and then celebrating with high fives on the Senate floor after getting away with it.

-Paul Ryan, for also repeatedly making a point of ramming partisan bills through the House and refusing to allow any input from Democrats. He gets special points for openly lying about the impact and intention behind the legislation he’s repeatedly been trying to inflict. And for celebrating after generating a massive tax increase for middle class families so he could reward large corporations.

-The GOP Congress in general, for failing to accomplish almost anything during an entire year, with the exception of a regressive Tax Transfer that will harm millions of American families.

-The Pence Cabinet, for intentionally wrecking multiple executive departments by deliberately understaffing them, and by ripping up most of the work that’s been done in those departments over the past decade.

-Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn and others in the Trump 2016 campaign, whose illegal behavior is now leading to indictments and plea deals.

-Roy Moore and other racist extremists like the White Supremacists who have repeatedly invaded communities like Berkeley and Charlottesville in their now-emboldened attempts to terrorize everyone else.

-Jeff Sessions, getting special notice for refusing to recognize human or civil rights but instead focusing on attacking any minority group he can get away with targeting. Most egregious has been his cancellation of the DACA program, with the intentional effect of terrorizing its recipients into either fleeing the country or into going back into hiding.

-Mike Pence, for directing US domestic and foreign policy as our Acting President over the past year in such a disastrous manner that this nation is now openly the laughingstock of the world. Under Pence’s failure of leadership, the US has backed away from international commitments and is now openly risking serious conflict in multiple arenas, particularly Korea.

-Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Anthony Scaramucci and Kellyanne Conway, for repeatedly and intentionally lying about the above situations.

-Fox News and Right Wing AM Radio shouters, for constantly reinforcing the lies and “alternative facts” from the above group.

-And finally, Donald Trump, for abrogating his responsibilities to Mike Pence and for spending a year essentially watching television, playing golf, and compulsively using Twitter to sow hatred and embolden the above-listed racists and extremists.

-Honorable Mention to the 2-3 million Democratic Party voters who chose not to vote in 2016 in the swing states and bear responsibility for the unfolding disaster we are continuing to endure. It is hoped that this group is learning their lesson from that mistake and that perhaps they’ll make some time to show up at the polls in 2018 and 2020. If they don’t, the mess gets a LOT worse. (And we should keep in mind that the Far Right still has a full year to inflict further damage before the midterms take effect, assuming the Dems show up to vote. Count on the GOP to maximize their opportunity to inflict that damage.)

As for the Good Behavior List, it’s not very long:

-The Democratic Party members of the House and Senate, for standing up for their principles throughout the year – regarding the stolen Supreme Court seat, the initial attempts to destroy the ACA and the successful and regressive Tax Transfer inflicted just before Christmas. It should be noted that many decent and dignified arguments were presented about how unfortunate the Right Wing’s behavior has been over the past year – at least to get those arguments on the record. (It’s true that the Dems allowed a Continuing Budget Resolution to go into effect last week that did not save the DACA group, and there are some very hard feelings about that – but let’s be realistic on that front. There is not going to be a DREAM Act passed by this Congress, and no relief is going to be provided to the DACA group until there’s a new majority in both Houses and an actual President in the White House. Shutting the government down over that reality won’t help the DACA group or anyone else.)

-Individual US Citizens who stand up every day for themselves and each other, and who are keeping track of the many lies from the Right Wing, and who are refusing to be bullied into silence. It is this group that will hopefully make the difference in 2018 and 2020. And we’ve already seen what is hopefully a preview, from the people of Alabama who defied everyone’s expectations and made a point of standing up to Roy Moore and his acolytes.

What she means to say is that she enjoys bullying others, and she’s emboldened to do so because the Pence White House has given her that license.

It’s like looking into a funhouse mirror to hear about Trump being touted as a man of faith, when his behavior over 70 years has been that of a deeply vain, selfish and vicious man.

I doubt the Pence White House will do anything other than bluster about Mueller’s investigation. They and Fox News have spent a full year repeatedly playing the same sequence of cards and nothing has changed. (They regularly dismiss the severity of the investigation, then they blandly state that the investigation is “just wrapping up”, and then they make more panicked sounds when they realize that neither of their statements is sticking.) The more likely scenario is that Pence and company will just limp along until 2020, while an increasing number of their inner and outer circle are indicted and convicted of various crimes.

As for the GOP leadership, they’re wedded to this White House now. And the Tweeter in Chief is a useful fool for them – he provides a tremendous distraction while Mike Pence quietly works in the background to make as many Far Right adjustments to the government as he can. This is why the coming midterms are crucial. If the Dems do not show up and vote, the Right will happily proceed apace with much more serious actions. Remember the gloating that happened in 2004 when W intoned “I’ve earned political capital and I intend to spend it”. That will look like a puff pastry compared to what would happen in 2019 if the Dems do not vote. Think Supreme Court, think wholesale closing of cabinet departments, and think in terms of even more dire legislation being rammed through on a party line vote.

The smugness of the way Fox News has handled this belies what they are insisting is supposed to be a moment of decency and fellowship.

The reality is that there has never been a “War on Christmas”. There has instead been a recognition that people of different backgrounds celebrate the holidays in different ways, and that it’s an act of bullying to demand that every single person follow it your way. And at the same time, the White House and most people would regularly say “Merry Christmas” in any case on most occasions. It wasn’t as an aggressive or nasty thing – just as a celebration of the holidays with your community. Same as it is when you say “Happy Holidays”.

Except that the new mode of handling this in the Year of the Bully is to make an aggressive point of saying “Merry CHRISTMAS” so as to have the listener know that yes, you are indeed bullying them. It’s a way of once again repeating the fun Jeanine Pirro slogan of “We won! You LOST! Deal with it!” Nice to know that these people are consistent in their viciousness – even during a holiday that is meant to celebrate sharing and giving.

Jonah, your comments continue to mystify me.

This has nothing to do with anyone being a “die-hard Democrat”. I’m confused because you are making strange allegations that don’t line up with the facts. Now you’re trying a theory that Trump became the GOP nominee because Clinton had influence over GOP voters? How the heck does anyone think that would work? If the GOP candidates had one thing in common, it was their hatred for Clinton. Same thing goes for their voters. The notion that Clinton’s opinions somehow impacted the GOP primaries is beyond science fiction. The tag about her being a “lying politician” makes very little sense. To what are you referring? Where are you going with this?

The Nixon campaign’s dirty dealings in Southeast Asia have been documented in multiple places. How far that went depends on which source you believe. But the meetings were documented and the impact was of course seen at the time. Your second bit, about “GHW Bush made a deal with Iran”, completely confuses the documented material we have about the infamous “October Surprise” situation from 1980. And that wasn’t with George HW Bush – it was with representatives of the Reagan campaign. The allegation brought up later was that Bush was aware of it, not that he instigated it. Again, how far you believe this scenario went depends on which source you believe. I do not recommend going with the conspiracy theories peddled by the Christic Institute in any case.

I need to ask – what overall point are you attempting to make here?

Ed Henry has been happily joining in the Gloat-a-Thon about the passage of the Tax Transfer. The other part of the gloating has been a lot of sneering about how the Dems stood on principle and refused to vote for this thing. The spin Ed Henry would like you to believe is that this will somehow backfire on the Dems and ruin their chances in the midterms.

Here’s a reality that Fox News has not figured out yet – most people in the country won’t actually feel any effect from the Tax Transfer next year, unless they’re smart enough to adjust their withholding to prepare for the bigger tax hits they’ll take on Tax Day in 2019. There will certainly be millions of people whose health premiums are about to skyrocket. And there will be tens of millions of people in the Blue States who will already be preparing for a big hit since their State tax deduction was brutally reduced. So this big happy glow they’re expecting to see from the country in general is unlikely to appear. But the people in the Blue States are likely to be showing real anger next year. And the people in the swing states who were promised new coal and manufacturing jobs are likely to be even angrier, since nothing has been done for them. Not to mention that the GOP will have a gigantic black eye in March when the DACA enrollees start leaving the country.

I found it interesting that a few of the big corporations are making a point of sending bonus checks to their employees. (And that Fox News commentators are demanding that liberals not cash them, natch) It’s not hard to understand why those checks were sent, or why one of the corporations is conceding that it may go ahead and pay a minimum wage of 15 bucks per hour. In one of the cases, we were hearing about 100,000 checks being sent out for a thousand dollars each – meaning that they just spent 100 million dollars. Why would a company do something like that? Because they’re about to make money in the 10s of BILLIONS. The 100 million is a drop in the bucket to them, and this is intended to forestall the very bad publicity these guys will be getting next year when they don’t bring jobs back to the US and when it becomes obvious that they’re just pocketing their own, much larger bonuses. I’d call it a nice try at changing the subject, but I don’t think it will work come next fall, when people are asking why we haven’t seen a big bump in the economy. (There was another big indicator today, when a lot of majors were actually pulling money out of investment – indicating that they are not expecting to see a big economic boost, which makes sense given everything we know about this.)

I wonder how the Fox News crowd would have reacted if during the early moments of the ACA going into action, President Obama had said “nothing rolls out with perfection.”

Kidding aside, the Pence White House’s move here should be alarming to anyone paying attention. Given that these guys are panicking about their terrible approval numbers and about the prospects for multiple criminal prosecutions of their people, it stands to reason that they’d openly provoke a confrontation in the Middle East. How else could they try to incite an incident that might give them fodder to start the old “Rally Round the Flag” routine? Also known in some circles as “Wag the Dog”…

One wonders how Fox News will spin the situation after the Pence White House provokes North Korea into a suicidal launch of its weapons. We already have multiple right wing hawks urging Pence’s spokesman to pre-emptively launch strikes at North Korean targets, presumably to bully the North Koreans into docility. Except that such an action is guaranteed to push the North Koreans into defiance and what they would see as an end-of-the-world moment for them, where they’d have nothing to lose by launching their arsenal and taking a few names on their way out. Result of the Pence Approach, almost assuredly: Millions of deaths, massive destruction, catastrophe for Asia and for the environment. And all so that Pence’s spokesman can say “I’m a tough guy.”

Given their spin on everything, I have to believe Fox News will spin this outcome as the fault of Barack Obama somehow…

McGuirk is, frankly, a pig. That’s been his schtick and it continues to be the way he comports himself. So he has no moral standing from which to be opining here.

But let’s note that he’s doing the lowest form of whataboutism in this segment. He gets called out for his vicious comments, and how does he respond? Going to the nonsensical stories about Juanita Broaddrick. First of all, those have been debunked multiple times in the past. Second of all, they are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. But he brings them up to try to derail the discussion Harf is having and pull everyone into the weeds.

A few points of reality, which Fox News and its personalities would prefer we forget:

1. Al Franken’s photo with Tweeden was certainly piggish, and he apologized for it. And he’s appropriately being called to account for it. Tweeden accepts his apology and says its up to Minnesota voters to say if he should be re-elected. Given Franken’s popularity, it’s likely that he will continue as the junior Senator from that state for at least another term, regardless of the wishes of Fox News and AM radio. So, nice try on the attempt to remove a Dem from the Senate.

2. Roy Moore’s situation continues to worsen, given his vicious behavior and comments, and given his unrepentant stance on his conduct. There is a real possibility that Jeff Sessions’ seat could go to a Dem as a result – which is why the Right Wing is so panicked about Moore. The situation is bad enough that the Pence White House is clearly afraid to make any further comments about it. Franken’s nonsense is irrelevant to Moore’s impending disaster, no matter how many times Fox News tries to scream otherwise.

3. Bill Clinton’s past issues have been repeatedly litigated in and out of the media since the 1990s, and there is no point to bringing them up today, other than to play that old whataboutism game. And it’s part of the record that Juanita Broaddrick’s story had a bunch of problems, mainly due to the fact that she changed the story multiple times. She now would like everyone to think that she was raped. But that’s not what she said at the time, and given the multiple versions, it’s difficult to understand what really happened. And that doesn’t mean that she may not have a case – it’s that she herself sabotaged it and cast doubt on the whole matter. The other Clinton accusers have similar issues, and again, all of this was litigated in the past, finally culminating with the embarrassing spectacle of the impeachment, which everyone knew was happening purely for political theater and not for any other purpose. (The upcoming special counsel appointment on the Clintons and the inevitable perp walks from that process will also be political theater, and I’m sure Fox News will run the tape on that footage for decades to follow. I particularly enjoyed Fox News pushing a New Hampshire Republican’s opinion this weekend that the previously held Dems’ fundraising dinner should have the Clintons’ name removed from it.)

4. Donald Trump’s past issues have not gone away, no matter how many lies the Right Wing tries to foment about them. There are 16 women who have described horrible conduct by Trump, and that doesn’t even include his own comments and actions as we have seen them. If Fox News wants to continue to lie about this matter, they will be held accountable by history just as harshly as they will for constantly pushing Pence White House propaganda when this epoch is mercifully completed and we have an actual President back at work in the Oval Office.