I realize that Kelly’s piece here can be helpful, and she’s definitely making statements she would never have made when she worked for Fox News, but there’s a part of this that really feels like she’s trying to reinvent herself for a more mainstream audience, and I don’t know that I buy it. Ellen correctly points out that she’s never apologized for some really unfortunate behavior and segments of hers while she was at Fox News. I would guess that to Kelly, that the bias toward the Right and against everyone else was what you had to do in order to rise up in the ranks at Fox News and eventually get a lucrative anchor position. She’s an extremely intelligent person, and all of her steps there and since appear to me to have been carefully calculated. She’s saying some very good things in these clips, and she’s speaking some truths, but she could have done all this much earlier – if not at Fox News, then right after she left that building. I appreciate that she’s exposing the complete lies O’Reilly and others are saying, but I don’t completely trust her motives for doing so.

Juliet Huddy is in a much more unhappy situation. She is stuck with the fact that Fox News and Right Wing outlets will never hire her again, and at the same time, more mainstream outlets are unlikely to hire her after having seen years of her appearances on Fox News and not finding her to be a personality they wish to hire. It’s a major problem for many people who have worked at Fox News – when you leave there, you have no credibility with any legitimate news organization, and it doesn’t just happen that you get to jump from making snarky comments on Fox & Friends to getting a local anchor position at a CBS affiliate somewhere. Huddy is looking at real problems working in this industry, and it’s not all due to her lawsuit – it’s due to the years she spent working for an organization that is known for having made this country a much coarser place than it had been before Fox News existed.

This is not to discount the real harassment Huddy and many other people at Fox News suffered. It is just to note that it’s quite rare to see an on-air personality at Fox News successfully land anywhere else. Greta van Susteren had a career before she went to Fox News – not so much afterwards. Brit Hume had over 20 years at ABC before he jumped to Fox News – and never could go anywhere else afterward. I daresay that even Chris Wallace will be able to ever find another position outside of this one channel.

In reality, Hannity couldn’t care less about sexual harassment in the workplace. He made that clear a year ago and he doesn’t get to suddenly pose as the opposite just because he wants to throw mud at Hollywood.

But what’s more interesting here has been Bill O’Reilly’s reaction to the situation. His comments, to the NY Times reporter, to Glenn Beck, even on his own limited podcast, have ranged from infuriated to genuinely scary. O’Reilly has now even taken to posting PDFs of the settlement affidavit from Lis Wiehl and a couple of friendly cards he received while at Fox News from Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly. Presumably, this is meant to be the big bombshell information he has that will clear his name. Glenn Beck certainly has tried to play the affidavit as something that would somehow portent legal doom for Wiehl, since she’d be punished for perjury if she denied anything in that document. Except that when you read the actual document, you see that Wiehl isn’t clearing O’Reilly of anything. All she’s stating is that she has settled her legal claims against O’Reilly and Fox News, and that as of 1-17-17 she has no claims against O’Reilly. She acknowledges that she gave him legal advice “on occasion” and acknowledges receiving “certain explicit emails” while acting as his counsel. But she doesn’t say that he didn’t harass or attack her, and she doesn’t say that he didn’t send her other offensive material that was not related to her occasional counsel. Meaning that she isn’t admitting anything other than the obvious – she has settled her claims against the defendants and is moving on. Of course, the affidavit does not mention that she was also set to receive 32 million dollars in return, directly from O’Reilly’s bank account.

O’Reilly would also like everyone to believe that because Kelly and Carlson sent him courteous cards at various points during their employment, this must mean that they have no right to call him out for his behavior. O’Reilly repeatedly states that nobody ever went to HR to complain about him at Fox News, ignoring that employees there have made clear that this was never a good idea while Ailes was running the company, even if you tried to do it anonymously. The moment you mentioned that someone like O’Reilly was harassing you was the moment you became a target. O’Reilly blatantly lies when he says that in 40 years of his unbelievable career, nobody ever complained about him, ever. That’s disproven just by looking at the record he made for himself at places like CBS News, where he was removed from the reporter pool for his terrible attitude and his temper tantrums.

The real reason for O’Reilly’s fury here is not what he claims, that he’s desperate to protect his children. His fury stems from what’s now a really embarrassing situation for him – where his attempt to get back into television and get his “elder statesman” position at Fox News or elsewhere has been quashed again for the moment.

The fact that O’Reilly was willing to give Wiehl 32 million dollars is a direct indication of how serious the charges were. The description of his behavior includes stuff just as awful as what Harvey Weinstein was apparently doing on the opposite coast. It’s no wonder O’Reilly is angry this is coming out, just as he’s trying to finagle his way into a new TV job. (And there is talk that the revelation may have come from Fox News itself, as a way to torpedo him from competing with them.)

The reality is that it was an open situation at Fox News for the women to be harassed by the men – it was built into the culture of the place. And the example was set by Roger Ailes, who got away with the most ridiculous of behavior without any consequences. So it was natural that Bill O’Reilly would get in on the fun, and that others at the network would follow that path. It shouldn’t be a surprise that in such an environment, Eric Bolling thought he could get away with smugly inappropriate statements made toward female co-workers or with sending them sexually explicit texts. Nor should it be a surprise that Tamara Holder was physically attacked by a Fox News exec.

I agree with the statements made about Weinstein – he acted like a pig, and he deserves the brickbats he is currently receiving. But nobody at Fox News has any moral ground on which to stand if they’re going to join in the pile-on. And just because Weinstein is a pig does not mean that Bill O’Reilly isn’t.

I believe Wallace is understandably worried about his credibility, particularly knowing how harshly Fox News will be regarded by history once the Pence White House is sent packing. He’d really like to think of himself as a tough journalist and someone of the quality of his father, but as this article shows, the truth is that he’s usually very comfortable to reinforce right wing memes. His role at the network is normally to reign in the really hardline Right Wingers and to reinforce a notion of the party elders as having a good reason for their actions.

Two quick updates:

1. Trump was asked about the Alexander/Murray idea today and said he thought it was a temporary thing the Senate could do before he got them to completely get rid of the ACA, an idea he isn’t letting go of at all. He reiterated that the ACA is horrible, dead, a failure and “an idea that was never gonna work”. The Pence White House’s intention here is to keep the insurers uncertain that this system will be around very long, which will of course accelerate the collapse of any exchange they can destabilize. There is no thought at all toward working with the Dems, who Trump referred to in the most vicious manner possible. So I wouldn’t put too much stock in Mike Pence endorsing anything that keeps the ACA around.

2. Tom Cotton and Pat Toomey have presented an alternate plan to Alexander/Murray today, which is designed to kill the ACA from within by removing the individual mandate as “cruel and pointless”. Cotton’s version of the attack is to exempt anyone from this mandate who either makes less than 59K per year, has less than 2 insurers in the local exchange or whose state’s premiums have increased over the past year by at least 10%. It’s not hard to see that the intention is to completely gut the mandate, as anyone with a higher income likely has a plan they’re on anyway, and it’s the actions of the Right Wing that have resulted in various states having only one insurer in the exchange and in the premiums skyrocketing. It’s nearly comic that the Right Wing wants to blame the ACA for problems created by the Right Wing in their attempts to sabotage the program.

The point of these updates is that it does not appear that the Pence White House is truly interested in a bipartisan solution, and it is not a done deal that the Alexander/Murray idea can even get to a vote on the Senate Floor, much less get through a completely hostile GOP House of Reps.

There’s a bit more going on here that should be unpacked, but the Right Wing perspective is very clear.

Yes, the point of Jon Scott’s Cavuto Mark was to use the premise that the ACA was a ridiculous handout to people who don’t deserve it. It’s the same premise that says we shouldn’t have Social Security or Medicare or anything like that. If you don’t have enough money to support yourself, that’s your problem and you should get a second or a third job. If you have a medical condition that makes this difficult, that’s your problem. If you’re having problems because the economy is in a tailspin, that’s your problem. In short, if you’re in the midst of any hardship, that’s your problem and the Right Wing wants you to figure it out on your own.

There’s also a nonsensical part of the Cavuto Mark – in that it assumes that a lower income person would rather be sick and get to use Medicaid than get a job. This is a common Right Wing meme – that the lower income person would rather live on assistance than support themselves. (We hear it in a variety of ways, particularly when Right Wingers scoff at the people who are on the low end of the wage scale, who blip in and out of Medicaid coverage. The working mom with a couple of kids who has Medicaid coverage will regularly face this problem as she works more – because she will earn just enough to disqualify her from benefits but not enough to be able to pay for any other coverage. The Right Wing reaction is always to paint that woman as a sloth living on Welfare. Or in worse cases, we get Reagan inventions like the Welfare Queen. But this is the core of the ACA coverage – it helps those people in this situation so they can actually get into a work situation and not worry that they just lost their coverage.)

But there’s a further bit of fun here, where Kristen Anderson is following Scott’s Cavuto Mark to say, hey, the lower income people want a decent quality of home life (note that there’s no mention of anyone trying to be healthy enough to go to work), but slashing this subsidy will allow the lower income person to “have a stake in the game” – as though they didn’t have one before.

Anderson is also positing the false premise that this is just a legal matter because these subsidies weren’t approved by Congress. This is another common Right Wing meme, and it ignores that there are many areas of funding that the executive branch does which are not expressly funded by Congress – having this discussion now just means that we will be in for further paralysis when every single program can now be challenged on this basis alone, which is likely what the Right Wing would like to see happen. Since that will prove their thesis that the government can’t accomplish anything. Also, Anderson is deliberately ignoring that the Congress actually refused to take any of these steps in their efforts to destroy the law and attack a President they hated. So President Obama trying to be a responsible manager is now presented as a threat to the Constitution and an irresponsible fool, while GOP haters and obstructionists are presented as tireless workers on behalf of the American People.

I also note that this segment concludes (past the point included here by Media Matters) with Jon Scott trying to portray the ACA as an invented “mess” and dismissing Richard Fowler’s attempt to discuss bipartisan efforts (that Pence and Trump are smugly ignoring) by saying that it will all be better once the insurance is sold across state lines. Something that we already know does not work and is fraught with corruption. (Similar to the Right Wing’s constant harping about e-Verify without admitting how flawed that system is…)

McCaughey is blatantly lying here. The intention of the Pence White House was more than clear – to stop any bipartisan efforts to stabilize the ACA after Trump’s antics all year, and to instead punch its lowest income users in the face.

Trump himself made this clear today in a fairly vicious series of statements in his cabinet meeting, where he openly gloated about having destroyed the ACA, and firmly and angrily declared that it could never have worked and was a failure and a disaster. He also stated that it was only because of his latest attack on the ACA that Murray and Alexander were working together. Which was again, a blatant lie. And he went back to the playbook of saying the only reason reform hadn’t happen was because of Dem “obstruction” – again, a blatant lie.

The reality is that Murray and Alexander have been trying for months to find some common ground to stabilize the ACA, but they’ve repeatedly been stymied by Mike Pence’s demand that the GOP not negotiate with the Dems but instead ram through a 51 vote majority bill on their own to simply kill the ACA. Pence and Trump have been clear throughout that they do not want any Dem input, other than for the Dems to cave and beg for mercy while Trump kicks them in the face again. Since the Dems are not willing to do such a thing, Trump then makes noises about obstruction while making sure that no bipartisan work can happen. Once Trump realized he’d missed the 51 vote window for reconciliation protocols, he clearly decided to just kill the ACA on his own by Executive Order.

Lewandowski is directly on message with what the Right Wing would like you to think is happening. He’s hitting all the correct notes.

The Pence White House made significant moves in three areas this week to push their agenda – that of erasing the presidency of Barack Obama and declaring him a failure.

1. For DACA, they sent a poison pill memo demanding complete capitulation by the Dems on every vicious idea in the Right Wing hive mind about how to deal with undocumented immigrants. And if the Dems cave on absolutely everything? Maybe the Pence White House will let only the current DACA enrollees stay in the country with no hope of ever attaining citizenship. Of course, their families will be deported, but the kids can stay on their own, which should be great for everyone, right? And obviously, the Pence White House knows this will never happen – meaning that DACA will be finished by March (they’ve already stopped taking applications) and the enrollees will be subject to deportation at that time. Pence’s actual intention is to try to blame the coming chaos on the Dems for not caving. I think most people will understand it differently, but that won’t matter to the DACA group, some of whom will relocate to Canada and other countries that want their services, and the rest of whom will go underground again – which was always the intention of the Right Wing here.

2. For Iran, Trump’s nonsensical statement on Friday shows that the USA is leaving the agreement. This will not end the agreement, since multiple other countries are still in it with Iran – it just means the USA is stomping its foot and reneging. Pence’s obvious hope here is that Iran will be angered by the threat of new sanctions and will walk away themselves, thus allowing Trump to blame Iran for the whole mess. My hope is that Iran follows sager advice and stays in the agreement with the other participating countries – and that Iran sends all the civilian commercial business coming out of that agreement (oil, new factory construction, trade, etc) to the countries that stayed in – like France, Germany, Russia. There’s nothing requiring Iran to reward the Pence White House for bad behavior and they shouldn’t. But they hopefully won’t blow off the agreement – after the Pence group has been voted out of office, we may be able to salvage something here. That’s three years away, but it’s the best we can hope for at this time.

3. Regarding the ACA, the Pence White House just showed exactly what it thinks of Dems – complete hatred. Pence was well aware that several Senators from both parties were trying to work together to find a bipartisan solution that would stabilize the markets Trump has repeatedly disrupted and panicked. But rather than allow a bipartisan idea to develop, Pence has instead encouraged Trump to gut the basic rules of the ACA by Executive Order, and now has finally taken the step we predicted here 10 months ago – namely to pull the subsidies from the exchanges, thus crashing them. Since the money is not being supplied (and even a court ruling would not affect this), the insurers are free to leave any situation where they are being asked to lose money. This also means lower income people in the exchanges are in serious trouble – they are likely to lose their policies in short order – which is of course the intention here. The childish action here is not surprising (we’ve known that Trump and Pence are bullies at heart for some time now, and this action was easily foreseeable), but it is being done for a specific purpose – to punish Obama voters and supporters for having had the temerity to think a program like this would ever survive. The best part about the delivery of the ACA news on Friday was the smugness dripping from both Trump and Pence.

Again, the purpose of all of this, which Lewandowski is correctly reflecting, is to bully and attack anyone in the country who believed in the notion of “Yes We Can”. Lewandowski understands that the intent is to kick those voters in the face a few times – to make sure they know what happens if you don’t give up your lunch money when you’re told. My hope at this point is that people remember the anger they are experiencing over this behavior, and that they put it to good use next year and in 2020. It is imperative that Dem voters DO NOT stay home again. I really hope they’ve learned their lesson from 2016, because the results of them staying home have been truly unfortunate.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. The Right Wing has no moral ground on which to stand here. Their total hypocrisy in this matter is startling, but given that this is the Year of the Bully and a time in which they are just flaunting their arrogance, it was inevitable that we’d see this today.

Weinstein is and was a pig. He was always known for overbearing egomaniacal behavior, and the latest revelations just push that to another level. Most people simply knew him as being piggish on the outside and didn’t have to deal with him on a personal level or evade his harassment. Those that did know about it clearly felt intimidated about coming forward about it. Weinstein’s behavior was a dirty secret for those that knew and tried to cover it up.

Roger Ailes’ piggish behavior was actually far more open at Fox News, and known about throughout the Right Wing, if not celebrated. This wasn’t a behind-closed-doors thing like what Weinstein was doing. Ailes was out in the open about his proclivities, as we’ve found in the suits from Gretchen Carlson and Andrea Tantaros, not to mention the other situations that came out – for example the assault on Tamara Holder that led to yet ANOTHER multi-million dollar settlement from Fox News. As Tantaros pointed out, the atmosphere at Fox News has always been that of a kind of Playboy Mansion party. The women there are regularly treated as objects, both on and off the air – as Ellen has repeatedly shown in little areas like taking the front off the anchor desk when women are hosting.

When we tried to discuss this matter, the Right Wing would repeatedly deny that anything was happening, and powerful voices at Fox News like O’Reilly would try to shout down the conversation. (While at the same time O’Reilly was harassing it up whenever he could, apparently, and while acolytes of his like Bolling were figuring they could get away with the same behavior because, hey, the boss gets away with it all the time…) Gretchen Carlson’s massive lawsuit was derided by Right Wingers in my presence as just a case of an older woman trying to get a big payout from Fox News since she had aged out of their use for her.

When Donald Trump was caught on tape with that infamous exchange for Access Hollywood, the Right Wing laughed off most of it as “locker room talk”. And Trump has been fairly open throughout his life about his piggishness – part of his smugness is about how he’s always gotten away with it and never apologizes. Just like a typical schoolyard bully. His basic attitude is “You want me to apologize? MAKE ME.”

Much of the media will focus on the Weinstein story because it’s a cautionary tale about “how the mighty have fallen” and it’s got a salacious ring to it. For Fox News and the Right Wing, this is about having a counter-story to embarrass liberals. It’s a counter-narrative. It’s the same approach they took when discussing the Clinton and Obama presidencies, where they constantly hunted for anything they could blow up into a scandal, and if they couldn’t find anything, they’d invent something. Because they needed a counter-narrative to all the very real criminal scandals that happened in the Reagan presidencies and the White Houses of both of the Bushes. So they repeatedly attacked Eric Holder without basis and repeatedly tried to smear President Obama over the past decade. They repeatedly attacked and smeared Hillary Clinton and anyone else they could who was a Democrat.

This discussion about how Dems must immediately find any campaign donations from the Weinsteins and publicly burn them is frankly hysterical. If we’re going to have that discussion, I’d like to hear about how many Republicans are turning in their campaign donations and how many of them are willing to acknowledge that they were given millions of dollars of airtime on Fox News by Roger Ailes. Will every GOP candidate for President from just the last campaign cycle agree to donate 10 million dollars to charity, so they can wash out the stain of having benefited from Ailes’ largesse? I didn’t think so. Fox News and the Right Wing should be ashamed of themselves for their behavior here – but it would appear that they really do not have any shame at long last. Not during the Year of the Bully, anyway.

The short answer to your question is yes, but it’s a little more complicated.

Yes, Fox News wants to encourage the Pence White House to get into open hostilities with both Iran and North Korea, and it would like these things to happen as soon as possible. In the case of Iran, Fox News is clearly pushing for Trump to take public actions that will drive Iran away from the treaty – by decertifying it and reimposing sanctions, in the hope that Iran would stomp away from it on their own and they could then blame Iran. The Right Wing never wanted this treaty in the first place – it’s why they worked to sabotage it all along, including Tom Cotton’s treasonous letter just before the treaty was signed. By destroying the treaty and blaming the wreckage on Iran, the Right Wing then gets to erase another part of the Obama presidency and take another punch at the noses of Obama voters. And they get to go with a military option against Iran and look tough, which they need for another reason.

With North Korea, there’s a more direct idea involved. Bill O’Reilly is already making comments he hopes Trump will follow – namely that Trump should start launching missiles against North Korea pre-emptively to teach them a lesson. That’s the Right Wing way – act tough and punch first. And if that leads to a massive situation and a catastrophe in Asia, then it’s all North Korea’s fault, isn’t it? And it lets the Right Wing once again punch Obama supporters in the face, saying that Obama wasn’t tough enough to handle this.

And there’s a third benefit from all this, which the Right Wing knows the Pence White House desperately needs now. Going to war with Iran and North Korea would hopefully get everyone in the US to rally round the flag and start supporting a deeply unpopular president. Just like they were able to pull off with George W. Bush. If they can get everyone scared enough of these enemies or riled up enough to “support our troops”, perhaps they could get the Pence White House a second term to ensure they could make the biggest impact on our politics.

You might note that this bellicose behavior will lead to a lot of lives being lost – for certain in Asia, but also potentially in various US areas, including Guam and potentially the West Coast if Kim feels he has nothing to lose by launching everything. And you’d be correct. But the Right Wing doesn’t care about those lives – that’s collateral damage.

Interesting that Fox News actively cheerled Tom Cotton’s disgraceful exercise when he authored a Senate letter to Iran, telling them not to sign any treaty with John Kerry – an act by Cotton that qualifies as treason. But because it was intended to foul up something President Obama was about to achieve, this was a good idea as far as Fox was concerned.

And where was Fox News’ outrage when Mitch McConnell openly stated that his goal was to keep President Obama to a single term rather than get anything done in Congress, and when McConnell openly gloated about refusing to hold even a single hearing for Merrick Garland?

The guys running Fox News are well aware that Donald Trump pretty much exclusively watches their network and echoes their talking points every day. “Lock Her Up!” is a talking point they’ve happily encouraged at every opportunity. Trump acknowledged this in his hateful remarks in Alabama last week, when he egged his supporters to contact Jeff Sessions to demand this action.

I’ve frankly been waiting for Sessions to announce an indictment for months. If there’s a surprise at this point, it’s that Sessions hasn’t gotten around to it yet. The Pence White House desperately needs a public distraction, given its inability to accomplish anything, its deep morass of scandal and its extreme unpopularity. A perp walk of Hillary Clinton and maybe even Bill Clinton would go a long way toward making angry Right Wingers feel a little better about their lives, wouldn’t it?

When the North Korea situation escalates into actual conflict, and it’s only a brief matter of time before this happens, we’ll have clips like this to preserve the vicious obliviousness of the Right Wing on the precipice of a totally avoidable disaster that claimed the lives of millions of people. We shouldn’t be surprised at the Right’s childishness or its inability to deal with the reality of this situation. They just enjoy the schoolyard fun of the Trump bully making nasty comments about people they hate. There’s nothing new about this – other than the fact that the Pence White House actually does have the ability to do something truly horrifying in Asia, and appears enthusiastic about taking that action. We must remember this moment – as I’ve previously noted, it’s a shining example of how elections have consequences. The next time someone tells you that your vote doesn’t count or won’t make a difference, remind them about how 3 million people in the US sat on their hands and allowed a spectacular catastrophe to occur.

It’s inconceivable for O’Reilly to understand the notion that Dem Senators are actually standing up for principle when dealing with a dangerous child in the Oval Office. It’s inconceivable for O’Reilly to understand why John McCain would, in his final days, stick up for the notion of regular order in the Senate rather than be bullied into voting for a Far Right freight train where Dems would be completely ignored or shouted down. To O’Reilly, this must have been McCain being angry about a personal slight – because that’s the way O’Reilly sees the world. O’Reilly can’t conceive of a world where someone would actually stand up on principle – because O’Reilly frankly doesn’t believe in that concept.

I’ll be curious to see if O’Reilly is brought back into the fold by other Fox News shows on a faster timeline than previously thought. I’d always thought they’d bring him back in his preferred “Elder Statesman” position, essentially as the new Brit Hume. But O’Reilly’s too much of a back room brawler for that idea to fly very far.

Ellen, I agree that there is a big difference between differing on policy and having major issues with Trump’s casual sneering bigotry. But while I deeply disagree with Right Wingers, I have to acknowledge that someone like Hannity will always try to play that argument in reverse – they’ll try to say that the Left Winger who stands on principle is just complaining about policy or is ignorant, while the Right Winger who snubbed Obama was devoutly standing on principle. To the Right, someone like Matt Birk, and people like Langer, Kuechenberg and Fernandez are principled heroes to be idolized. But that’s because of who they’re protesting. If Birk had refused to go to the Pence White House, Sean Hannity would never have had him on his show. My point is to show the total hypocrisy of Fox News and Hannity in particular – they’re quite shameless about it.

And I don’t weep for Ronald Reagan. I lived through his presidency in my teen years, and I vividly remember that disaster. I remember the graft and the corruption and the selfishness and the greed, all pushed hard by Reagan and his handlers. His was a thoroughly venal administration – one that saw an all-time high in the number of its members who were prosecuted and/or disciplined for criminal behavior. Including, by the way, Ann Gorsuch, the mother of the man who stole the Supreme Court seat that should have been filled by Merrick Garland.

I personally find it tragic that in subsequent presidencies, we have found Right Wingers who have been even more outrageous than Reagan – to the point that people today point to Reagan as a positive figure who engaged both sides, etc. When the opposite was true. The only difference is that in the subsequent years, the Hard Right have pushed the GOP much farther over to their corner. So that now we have truly scary figures like Pence and Bannon trying to dictate policy in this country, and people say that Reagan was much more reasonable. No, Reagan and his group were pretty scary too. It’s just that the W presidency was much scarier, as those guys had taken the gloves off even the public amiability that Reagan worked to project. And the Pence White House is downright horrifying in its viciousness. But just because the current group is a nightmare doesn’t lessen the meanness of the Reagan White House. I don’t know that I would have gone to the Reagan White House or the W White House – those were houses that presided over immense cruelty to others. And I know for sure that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the current White House – it’s an embarrassment to this country and to the entire world.

Payton’s position here is consistent with Right Wing ideology, and with the opinions of Fox News. To this way of thinking, Medicaid is a handout for people who should have made better choices. It’s a Right Winger’s tax dollars being given to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Further, Payton’s comments point to the usual Right Wing talking down of any government program’s efficacy. The basic philosophy says that the government can’t solve problems because government itself is the problem. Meaning that people should just take care of themselves and leave the rich alone.

It’s for this reason that we always hear from the Right about how Medicaid doesn’t work, how Medicare and Social Security are Ponzi schemes that will bankrupt us, about how Welfare is used by people gaming the system and Food Stamps are being abused. (Although I have found some grim humor in Sean Hannity’s obsession with how many people were on Food Stamps during President Obama’s terms, since Hannity wanted to ignore the massive recession until the exact moment that President Obama took the oath of office.) And there’s a strategy to using the code word “entitlements” – that’s supposed to give you the impression that someone is getting something they really don’t need and shouldn’t be taking. They’re just gaming the system because they feel “entitled” to everyone else’s hard-earned tax dollars.

Payton’s just throwing that into the mix as a cheap shot. She’s fully aware that the point of the Graham Cassidy iteration is not to help deal with Medicaid issues or with the hardships those patients face – and frankly, Payton couldn’t care less about those issues. She just wants to get in the dig that “Hey, Medicaid doesn’t really work anyway, so why are the Dems expanding it other than to give out another handout?”

Payton is dodging what this bill would actually do to millions of patients across the country and how it would do it. The bill is designed to shift Medicaid dollars away from blue states that participated in the ACA and give that money to red states who actively obstructed it. In other words, it’s a reward to Right Wing governors who refused to have their states participate and a punishment to anyone who actually had the temerity to be part of it. It’s a fairly mean-spirited move, and one that shouldn’t surprise us coming out of this Congress or the Pence White House. It’s more than a punch in the face to President Obama’s supporters – it’s a second backhand to make sure you got the message.

I also note that by pushing the Graham Cassidy bill, the Right Wing effectively destroyed the attempt by Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray to do something on a bipartisan basis. Because this bill is intended to be voted by Republicans for Republicans, without a single Dem vote needed. They don’t want to talk to the Dems about this, and they don’t want to hear the complaints. They just want to get rid of the ACA and not have to be held accountable for the result.

What Cassidy isn’t admitting is that this bill is essentially the “skinny repeal” only with an added bit of fun – it specifically pulls the Medicaid expansion money from the states that went with it and needed it the most, and gives that money to Red states that made a point of obstructing the ACA. So California will lose up to 40 billion dollars in Medicaid funds while Texas, which pointedly worked to sabotage the ACA, will receive up to 40 billion as a reward.

I have my doubts that this bill will pass, as Collins and Murkowski are likely to oppose it just as they did the other nonsensical bills the GOP flung around over the past few months. But even if the ACA is not outright repealed, we should remember that the conduct of the Pence White House is effectively killing it anyway. And that may be Pence’s long-term objective in any case. If he can’t get the law completely thrown out, he could just keep its situation uncertain, so that more and more insurers will abandon it or skyrocket their premiums. After another couple of years of the exchanges being wracked with these attacks, I could see the GOP voting in lockstep to finally put it out of its misery.

This was a fairly chilling exchange, and we should unpack a bit more of it to understand the depth of the hypocrisy and the viciousness.

First, we have the desperate attempt by Fox News to attack anyone who dares to call out the Pence White House for its bigoted, mean-spirited and childish behavior. Or anyone who understands the outrageous comments of Donald Trump at the UN for what they are. So they put together a soundbite collection and try to play that off as biased attacks, including the mashup of regular news anchors with pundits. Which is interesting because the Fox News personalities are engaging in serious projection here. In reality, it’s Fox News where the anchors themselves regularly read Right Wing talking points converted to what might appear to be news bulletins. At other networks, the anchors read the facts. At Fox News, the facts may or may not be reported, depending on whether it furthers the agenda of the Right. If it doesn’t, they’ll find some “alternative facts” that will further that agenda.

Then we have a refreshing acknowledgment by Fox News and the Right Wing. Suddenly, they want everyone to watch the entire horrifying address by Donald Trump, because if you don’t listen to EVERY WORD, you probably don’t know what you’re talking about and you have no credibility. Now, this is a position I agree with, on general principle. But the Right Wing doesn’t. Because I don’t recall them listening to EVERY WORD when they quoted Nancy Pelosi’s comment “We have to pass the bill for you to find out what’s in it” – where the context might easily explain the remark. And I don’t recall the Right listening to EVERY WORD when they decided that a 10 minute address by Joe Biden in 1992 could be boiled down to a single statement so they could declare that a nonexistent “Biden Rule” changed major policy. And I don’t recall the Right listening to EVERY WORD when they cherry picked comments by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or anyone else they despised. I wonder if now they’ll acknowledge that an entire political career does not consist of a single soundbite pulled at random.

Finally, it’s blatantly obvious that the intent by the Right Wingers on this show was to disrupt anything that Marie Harf had to say, hoping they could hold her off until the show went to a commercial…

Kimmel makes a few important points here. Along the way, he quickly disposes of the desperate Right Wing talking points raised against him today – that he’s uninformed, that he spoke out of turn, that he was rash, that he somehow doesn’t understand how wonderful this bill is, etc. And we should keep in mind that his comments last night and tonight have had a big impact – the Right Wing is frantic to get rid of the ACA and Kimmel has exposed the hypocrisy behind their behavior.

Let’s keep in mind what the Right Wing really wants here, and why they’re so desperate to push this bill here and now. Let’s deal with the latter part first – they’re desperate to do this right now because in 10 days they can no longer take this action under Reconciliation – meaning that they’ll suddenly need 60 votes. (That is, unless Mitch McConnell changes that rule like he changed the other one to ram the Gorsuch gargoyle onto the Supreme Court, as Trump has begged him to do.) If they can somehow get this thing over the finish line before September 30, they don’t need to bother with talking to a single Democrat – they can just ram this thing in and have Mike Pence get Trump to sign it.

And what is it that they really want here? Do they want to reform Health Care? Do they want to make coverage more affordable? Do they want to help more Americans get the treatment they need? Of course not. This was NEVER about whether someone could be treated by a doctor, and the Right Wing couldn’t care less whether the average Joe can afford a hospital visit. As far as the Right Wing is concerned, that’s YOUR problem, not theirs. If you can’t afford treatment, then that’s a YP. The GOP has had decades to work out a way to stabilize premiums and make health care costs a more reasonable notion than the gouging we have seen in recent times. And they had all those times where they voted in vain to get rid of the ACA. People are surprised to hear that the GOP had no prepared plan for what to do to actually replace the ACA. That frankly surprises me. The point is, they never intended to replace it. They didn’t want it to exist in the first place. And more importantly, they didn’t want President Obama to get it through the Congressional Mill. But he did, and the ACA is law. And the Right Wing has been bent on getting rid of it by any means necessary from the moment it got across the finish line over 7 years ago.

It’s interesting to note, as has been stated on multiple programs over the past few days, that this bill actually doesn’t provide any real reform to the ACA. It doesn’t frankly do much of anything – other than take a mean-spirited swipe at any state that went along with the ACA and give a boon to the Right Wing governors who worked to sabotage the ACA by keeping their states out of the scenario. Oh, and it has that gratuitous kick in the teeth to Planned Parenthood too. But that’s not enough for the hardcore Right Wingers who want the bill and its architects hung from the nearest yardarm. Which is why Rand Paul is making a show of opposing it. Paul, like many Right Wingers, just wants the ACA scrapped – don’t worry about a replacement, just get rid of it and let everyone just take care of themselves like good Libertarians. As I’ve noted before, Paul’s idea was to separate the Repeal and Replace ideas, with the idea being that the ACA would be repealed in short order, but no replacement would be coming within our lifetimes. Because the real goal is just to get rid of the ACA and to punish those voters who dared to think that something could be accomplished here.

I also note that Graham and Cassidy deliberately cut off a bipartisan effort led by Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray to actually work to amend the ACA and finally provide the fixes people have talked about for years. And that would be fine, if the GOP actually wanted to do that. But they don’t. The Graham/Cassidy bill is intended to kill any bipartisan efforts and just ram a repeal through by GOP votes alone. Which would slake the Right Wing hatred of President Obama and give them that victory moment when another of the prior administration’s works get scrapped. And what’s really interesting here is that this bill still keeps a bunch of the ACA’s ideas intact – the main thing that happens is that the insurers no longer need to cover anyone and the Right Wing governors get rewards for their intransigence. And Donald Trump gets to tweet that there is no more ACA.

Carlson is trolling here. He knows very well that his take here doesn’t hold water. He just doesn’t care. He knows that his Fox News audience will eat up his comments and agree with them. Because what he’s saying is what they believe.

The truth is that Donald Trump never won anything by virtue of a “populist uprising” by any stretch of the imagination. The Right Wing would like their base to keep holding onto that idea, but the facts say something very different. In reality, Donald Trump only squeaked through the Electoral College (something he’d been attacking up to the moment that it became his ticket to the White House) because about three million Dem voters didn’t show up at the polls when it counted. And their failure to appear had nothing to do with a “populist uprising”. It was the result of a deliberate Right Wing strategy to make the 2016 campaign so negative, so angry and so dirty that many Dems would feel discouraged from even wanting to vote. And unlike 2012, this strategy worked in 2016. Trump still lost the popular vote by millions but he got the votes where he needed them and was able to eke out a close win – which was enough to put Mike Pence into the driver’s seat and allow the Right Wing to do what they’d wanted for 8 years – namely erase every single thing ever done by “that awful black man in the White House.”

Tucker Carlson’s constant, smug trolling of anyone who had the temerity to vote for Clinton or to stand up for any principles this year frankly speaks for itself. Carlson is trying to emulate Trump in the idea of constantly bullying his enemies and doubling down whenever the slightest hint of doubt crosses his mind. It will be interesting in a few years when the Pence gang is thankfully out of the White House to go back and look at Tucker Carlson’s behavior over these months and years. I don’t think it’s occurred to him that his comments are preserved for all posterity to see him for who he really is.