This was a hideous display by Donald Trump of exactly the childish behavior his team has repeatedly said he would stop. It’s right in line with the mean tweets and the insults and all the other schoolyard playground antics he’s been using throughout his public life. It’s frankly sad to see a 70 year old man who cannot express himself in any more complicated way than “I know you are, but what am I?”

And this was an equally hideous display by the Right in their attempts to normalize Trump’s viciousness. The entire prime time lineup for Fox News found a way to somehow explain why it was okay for Trump to attack a CNN reporter – Fox News even tried to give Trump the moral high ground! Sean Spicer’s attempt to puff himself up into a morally affronted tone was ludicrous enough to be spit-take funny. I find it pitiable that Fox News is now attempting to forget their own history of repeatedly attacking President Obama at every possible turn at press events and their celebration of both politicians and press who found opportunities to scream at him and get it on video. I find it pitiable that Fox News, which repeatedly drummed through any story of innuendo about the Clintons and any story they could spin as a “scandal” for President Obama, is now somehow ashen-faced that anyone would ever discuss an intelligence dossier about Donald Trump’s documented nasty behavior. If it weren’t so obvious and desperate, and if it weren’t a story that was about the Pence Administration’s new spokesman being potentially compromised on many levels, it would be comic. But it’s not – this is dangerous material. It’s not just that the material shows Trump’s open hatred of the Obamas in a graphic manner – it’s that one can see the reasons why Trump did not want this material to get out into the public eye.

We have repeatedly been told that Trump was going to recognize the solemnity of the office he has gamed himself into taking, that he would “act Presidential”. I’m still waiting to see that happen. What I saw yesterday was the behavior of a five year old bully throwing a tantrum. And it’s not just that we will now have a President who openly throws tantrums at anyone he thinks has slighted him. It’s that there is a serious aftereffect when he does this as President. The President is a role model – someone that adults look up to as the leader of the country and kids normally look to as a model of behavior. The President represents the US to the world. And we’re about to endure four years of this office being defiled by a person who acts like a five-year old. That’s not just embarrassing – it’s frightening, and it should be. Because when Trump acts like this in public and the Right tries to normalize it, the spectacle emboldens all the angry local Right Wingers to act like this as well. This is why there have been so many hate crimes documented as committed by Right Wingers since the election – Trump’s actions are empowering these people to openly attack those with whom they disagree. We can sadly expect more schoolroom assaults, more swastikas on cars and homes, more vicious graffiti, more hate speech all the way around.

I have stated that I am willing to give our incoming acting President Mike Pence a chance to do some good things for the country – to see if Pence can come up with creative ways to streamline bureaucracy, to create more jobs, etc. But that assumes that Trump and Pence have any intention of actually doing that. If their only intent is to throw the entire Obama presidency in the trash and then sneer at the country, then we’re not dealing with adults. If these guys are going to act like children, then they should be treated as such. Respect is given to those who earn it. If Donald Trump cannot act like an adult, then perhaps he should not be giving press conferences and he should leave that work to those people who can actually do it.

I also note that Trump’s presser, when you remove the tantrum and the hyperbole, really didn’t add anything new to his policy discussion. If anything, he made clear that we can expect a fast series of vicious actions starting next Friday. It’s nice that he thinks that the ACA is somehow going to be replaced with a “beautiful” program. Right. The ACA is going to be scrapped, as fast as the Senate can get the reconciliation bill back to the House. I add that the GOP is preventing the Dems from even protecting the elements of the ACA that Trump said they would maintain, such as allowing people with existing conditions to get insurance and allowing parents to keep their kids on their policies up to age 26. The obvious intent of the GOP in Congress is to just trash the ACA as quickly as it can, to be followed by the Sessions Justice Dept dropping the Obama appeals about the funding mechanism. The 22 million who signed up for the ACA should be preparing to lose those policies in short order. The Right Wing solution to this is Health Savings Accounts – which means you pay for everything unless it’s a truly catastrophic situation, and for THAT you could get a small policy with a gigantic deductible. This falls right in line with the libertarian idea of IGMFU. Because that’s what the Right stands by. If these guys had wanted to generate a comprehensive health coverage plan, they would have done it in the nearly 20 years they had between the time they papered Hillary Clinton’s idea to death and the time that Obama finally got something through both houses. The GOP does not get to rewrite this history, and they do not get to rewrite the history of their viciousness and obstruction when it came to the writing of the ACA and their many, many attempts to repeal it. When this boom drops and that 22 million lose their coverage, it will be completely on the shoulders of the GOP and the Right. Make no mistake – this will cause misery for a lot of people, who will be sent back to the notion of either not going to the doctor, or just going to the ER if something really serious happens. If there is any silver lining in this cloud, it is that the ensuing pain may finally push this country to go with a Medicare for All solution in a few years, after Trump and Pence are out of office. But it will be at least another 4 years before that happens.

The vicious tone of this presser, and the corresponding vicious tone from the Right after it was inflicted, is a strong warning sign to anyone with decency that the USA is not likely to be a tolerable environment for several years. There’s a good reason that many people were looking up the notion of moving to Canada or another country until this mess is over. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to have to deal with childish tantrums from the White House every week, or with local blowhards who feel empowered by the Bully-in-Chief. It does get tiring with these people. I expect we’ll see a flow of decent people finding work and home in other parts over the next four years, and I don’t think those people are wrong to do so.

David is most likely correct. Shepard Smith is now glaringly alone among the Fox News personalities. Every single prime time anchor happily went along with the Trump bullying line – finding some way to twist themselves into a pretzel to justify Trump’s horrifying behavior. Smith was the only one to take a principled stand – and it doesn’t bode well for his future at the network. I would not be surprised to see him part ways with Fox News within the year.

Based on Sessions’ chilling testimony, we should expect an indictment of the Clintons and their Foundation sometime within the first year of the new presidency. Sessions was careful not to say that this wasn’t coming – he said that he would recuse himself from it. This is intended to try to insulate himself and Trump from the obvious criticism when they start engaging in this political theater. They will need this as a distraction when the Pence White House’s policies don’t completely fly with Congress. (For example, when they try to blame Congress for repealing the ACA with no alternative and throwing millions off the insurance rolls, or when they try to blame Congress for not going with their huge infrastructure idea, etc.)

Make no mistake – the Justice Dept under Jeff Sessions is going to create a fairly unhappy and hostile time for many Americans. The Dems cannot stop any of these appointments, so it’s just a matter of time now before these problems start.

This vicious and bullying response is exactly what we should be expecting from the Right Wing and from Fox News over the next month as President Obama leaves office. Hannity in particular is a reliable barometer of the hatred the Right has fostered toward the Obamas. Note that Hannity made sure to repeatedly include President Obama’s middle name while he castigated what he falsely presented as Obama’s record.

Only Austan Goolsbee was able to point out, very late in the show, that Hannity’s numbers depend on him including the drag from 2009, when the economy was still tanking from the incompetence of the W Bush presidency. Meaning that Hannity’s repeated attacks on the Obama presidency have always been rooted in trying to saddle Obama with the responsibility for the mess he was trying to clean up when he got into office. It’s similar to Hannity’s little trick in 2011 and 2012 of trying to make it look like Obama had caused gas prices to surge – done by cherry picking the start of his graph to happen in January 2009 and ignoring that gas prices had suddenly plummeted in the final quarter of 2008 after skyrocketing throughout the W Bush presidency.

But this dismissive and mean-spirited response to President Obama is what will be coming from the Right as the Pence White House sets to work. Two weeks from now, it is expected that very little will remain of the Obama presidency short of the presence of Sotomayor and Kagan on the Supreme Court. Hannity was practically salivating over the upcoming destruction of the ACA – and he was blatantly lying about the prospects of actually creating legislation that would provide health coverage for the millions using it. As we’ve repeatedly discussed here, the GOP has no plan to actually replace the ACA that they can agree on – they only agree that they want it gone immediately so they can announce its demise and thus retroactively spin the Obama presidency as a total failure.

It will be extremely important for websites like this to continue to point out the truth of what these people are doing, and how they are flat out lying about even our recent history. There won’t be anything concrete we will have left of the work Obama attempted to accomplish, but we will need to remember the effort – something that the Right will desperately try to pretend never happened. For people like Hannity, they’re going to party like it’s 2001 all over again, where the rules change once the GOP gets back into the White House. As of January 20th, anyone criticizing the Pence Administration will be accused of treason or worse, because as we all know, it’s unpatriotic to not embrace someone like Trump as the official spokesman for the United States…

Mr. Smith should find somewhere else to try his bullying tactics. They will not find purchase here.

There are a lot more important things going on this week than Meryl Streep making a dignified statement about values and conduct and how far away from the norms the new Pence White House truly is. It’s unfortunate that the Trump response was to attempt to bully her, and that Fox News and the Right Wing media attempted to back up Trump in that effort. And shame on Fox News for that.

And for the record, yes, Donald Trump was mocking that reporter. Not the first time he’s done that kind of thing, and certainly won’t be the last. Just as Rush Limbaugh was properly criticized for mimicking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s symptoms ten years ago (and for which Limbaugh has yet to apologize).

We may be in the Year of the Bully, but it doesn’t mean that we have to accept it as a good thing. Bullying doesn’t always work out so well for the bully – just ask Scut Farkus.

Ellen, I have a strong feeling that Hannity’s new idea of his “Opening Monologue” is based on his belief that Trump is watching the first few minutes of his show. It is more than likely that all of these shows are being geared for Trump to watch the opening ten minutes each time around – for O’Reilly’s Talking Points, Hannity’s monologue, etc. Idea being that they put their big push of the day into the first position so that Trump and Pence see that right away and can either opine about it themselves or take action.

It is not an accident that O’Reilly put a victory lap about “Kate’s Law” on the front burner. He wants to be able to take credit for this one as one of his crowning achievements. (I note that O’Reilly has no credibility on these kinds of issues – last week, he was hosting and supporting a notorious Right Wing California State Senator who has been spreading vicious lies about California legalizing teen prostitution when that was blatantly false.)

I also note that O’Reilly is planning to give his “response” to President Obama’s farewell address this evening. Given how O’Reilly has already consigned Obama to the trash heap and has dismissed his entire presidency, we can expect some further viciousness and bullying tonight. I’d give a 90 percent chance that O’Reilly grudgingly acknowledges that Obama and his family are decent people before going into a litany of Right Wing attack points designed to portray the last 8 years as a mire of failure and scandal – exactly the way Fox News has been priming its viewers to feel.

Interesting to hear Fox News folk refer to someone ELSE as a bully.

The reality here is that Watters has made bullying his stock in trade for several years now. He’s frankly really taking chances these days when he continues to push it with people, particularly when he is on someone else’s private property. He’s risking arrest at the very least in many cases.

But clearly Watters thinks he can get away with it because, hey, he works for Bill O’Reilly and Fox News and he can do whatever he wants, right? Because this is The Year of the Bully!

Again, note the tone.

Fox News knows that the Pence Administration is taking its cues from them, so the network is feeling extra strident these days. They know that Trump doesn’t understand these issues and that the Pence group is hostile to most scientific research in the first place. Which means they’re free to try to bully anyone who doesn’t toe the line for them.

In the case of the actual EPA and the Energy Dept under Pence, we can expect to see the accumulated research tossed in the trash within the next month – which is why actual climate researchers have been frantically archiving everything they can of the materials from the past 8+ years. It’s a good thing they did this, as without their efforts, the Pence people would succeed in destroying a decade of knowledge. As it is, the Pence group will in fact succeed in essentially shutting down the EPA and the Dept of Energy in short order, not to mention multiple other Depts that actually used to provide services to everyday people.

This will be a truly unfortunate time for the people who live in places like Flint, Michigan. One can only hope they can hang on for another 2 to 4 years until saner people can get back to work in DC. And we have to hope that the maximum damage that Pence does to the Supreme Court will be limited to replacing Scalia with another young Far Right voice.

If our hopes are not met here, you could easily see a scenario where companies rampantly pollute without restraint (and without an EPA or Energy Dept or Interior Dept to handle them), where the workers of those companies are shamelessly exploited (and without a Dept of Labor that cares to hear what is happening), and where any lawsuits to challenge those companies are batted away by Right Wing judges and a Far Right Supreme Court that doesn’t want to know about it.

The only surprise here is that Hannity didn’t get in the academic phrase “Baby Talk, Baby Talk, It’s a Wonder You can Walk!”

Welcome to the Year of the Bully!

MSNBC has a long, long history of lurching to the right when it serves their purposes. The textbook example of this came when they cancelled Phil Donahue’s show in the advent of the W Bush attack and invasion of Iraq in 2003. The internal memo about how they were uncomfortable with Donahue being on the air while all the other networks were waving the flag was famously made public by Amy Goodman at the time.

I’m sure Greta will simply resume the kind of show she was doing on Fox News, albeit at a lower pay scale than she enjoyed at the fully Right Wing network. When she was at Fox News, the idea was that she lended a touch of class and an aura of scholastic knowledge, although she could also specialize in crime blotter sensationalism that Fox News always enjoyed broadcasting. So she was fairly valuable to Fox News as a theoretically more moderate face, particularly when contrasted with something like Hannity.

At MSNBC, she will be a token conservative voice, essentially running the same kind of show but under the umbrella of a more liberal outfit. I agree that the real value of her presence is that she may be able to lure Trump out to make an appearance on their network, and they may be able to get some access. But that depends on Trump and his whims. He’ll certainly have time to talk to her, given that Pence will be handling all the real work at the White House. But will he be interested in talking to Greta on a network he’s repeatedly condemned? Or will he talk to her and while doing so completely insult her new employers? I have a feeling he’ll take the latter path, saying “I do love talking to you, Greta, but it’s such a shame you have to work for these people.”

Both Van Susteren and Kelly have sadly put themselves in a position where they no longer have any credibility with most viewers. Kelly is popular as a Fox News voice, and to those less familiar with her, she would appear to be an independent voice. But the odor of bias and viciousness from Fox News never helps one of its anchors get a real job anywhere else. They’re usually better advised to write books, go on the speaking circuit and show up as an elder statesman on Fox. c.f. Brit Hume.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. A few thugs who don’t like Trump pull a few horrible acts of violence, for which they should be prosecuted and punished. And at the same time, over A THOUSAND vicious acts are perpetrated by Trump supporters against other people, particularly people of color and of either Chicano or Muslim lineage. Documented acts, including the desecration of churches and people’s private property with swastikas and graffiti saying nice things like “BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER AND NEITHER DID YOUR VOTE!” And somehow Michelle Malkin says that the problem lies with the communities that are the victims of these hate crimes? Seriously, how dare she?

Listen to Cavuto’s tone. He’s trying to both be condescending and bullying at the same time. He clearly doesn’t care what Garamendi has to say – he came to the discussion with a preset group of attack points, and each time Garamendi responds, he essentially moves on to the next arrow. He also repeatedly interrupts and talks over Garamendi to try to bully him off of his opinions. Garamendi was thankfully well prepared to discuss this, but sadly waited way too long to bring up one of the key points he had.

Garamendi could and should have opened with the statement that the ACA was designed to work with everyone participating – but the GOP flat-out refused to participate. Garamendi also let Cavuto get away with inserting a blatant lie about the GOP’s “alternatives” being ignored when the ACA was written. The GOP’s “alternative idea” was to refer the whole thing back to committee and try to paperwork the whole thing to death, just as they had with Hillarycare back in the 90s. They had no intention of coming up with a new plan, and they frankly have no intention of coming up with anything now.

The sad reality of what is about to happen is that these guys never cared about whether or not people had health coverage. The Right Wing idea is for people to just save up and put money in health savings accounts and perhaps have a “catastrophic” plan for absolute emergencies. Meaning that the whole burden pretty much falls on the individual and you’re on your own. Or in simpler GOP terms, IGMFU. The notion of a group plan that everyone participates in is completely foreign to these people.

And they were never going to go along with anything that came from Barack Obama in the first place. The saddest part of this is that he really did compromise the bill to try to bring them on board – and in his worst move there, he pulled out the public option, which would have actually brought millions more Americans on board.

Instead, we’ll have to look back on this experience as an example of what happens when centrist liberals attempt to appease the Far Right. The answer is that the Right Wing always folds its arms and says NOPE. And now we will have the result of watching these guys completely dismantle the whole ACA.

Within two weeks, it will be as if President Obama never happened. We will remember it, and we should, but the reality is that we’re essentially starting over from scratch, if not actually moving a few steps backward from 2008.

I’m frankly shocked that NBC was willing to put her on the payroll. Even more so than I was shocked that MSNBC was willing to pay Greta Van Susteren to do a conservative POV show for them. But I do remember saying about a year ago that the only show that Megyn Kelly could get at a legitimate network would be as the “conservative anchor” – meaning the person who comes on the air and spouts right wing talking points just like they do at that genuinely, full-on right wing organization, Fox News.

Given Kelly’s conduct at Fox News over the years, I have every confidence that she will simply continue the same kind of combative right wing coverage she’s been doing at Fox News, only on a presumably impartial network. I’m sure she’ll be more openly critical of Trump once she’s out from under the Fox News umbrella. Critical, that is, from the right.

The motive by NBC for both of these hires is that they want to move more conservative, given that we are now living in a world where Mike Pence is running the country and Donald Trump is working to bully as many people here and abroad as he can. It makes sense that NBC would want to cultivate their own right wing voices – MSNBC has an infamous history of this. You may recall the embarrassing internal memo revealed by Amy Goodman regarding the firing of Phil Donahue during the Iraq War under W Bush. For Kelly, I’m sure she thinks is her shot at respectability. I’m also sure that NBC is not paying her anywhere near what Fox News did – she’s being brought in to do something similar to what she did at Fox News ten years ago.

On a professional level, I admire her ambition and her willingness to do a lot of hard work to succeed in a difficult business. But on a moral and ethical level, she simply has no credibility whatsoever. And it’s truly disheartening to see once-admired news outlets cozying up to media personalities who have greatly profited from the viciousness and vacancy of the Fox News empire.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. Sean Hannity went all the way to London so he could interview Julian Assange in person. He went to the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has been holed up for years to avoid his rape charges from Sweden, and had a cozy chat like this one? This pushes the concept of taking a victory lap into the stratosphere.

I really wonder how Hannity will react when Assange turns on Trump in the next year or so and releases something juicy about Pence’s White House follies. Keep in mind that Assange’s track record shows it’s only a matter of time before he does this. He’s not in the business of supporting any authority. He tends to hate all of them, and he takes pride in finding new and inventive ways to embarrass them. Something tells me Hannity won’t want anyone to remember this tape exists at that time.

And the Year of the Bully gets underway! (Granted this was Bolling’s parting shot for 2016, but it still applies.)

Bolling’s position is consistent with the Fox News viewer base, and with the attitude of the Right in this country. What do they want Obama and the Dems to do? That’s easy: Shut Up. Go Away. Deal With Being A Failure. Watch As We Destroy Everything You Built. Keep Your Head Down And Do As You Are Told Or We’ll Break Your Other Arm.

And yes, the only sane response to this behavior is to stand up to bullies and tell them NO.

I’m willing to wait and see if the Pence White House can actually make government more efficient and stimulate the economy and get more people back to work, particularly in the Rust Belt. If Pence can accomplish that, then he’ll have done a service for everyone. And perhaps it’s healthy in the long run to have something completely shake up the government as we know it, as a way of getting rid of deadwood and getting people to pay attention rather than living on autopilot. So I stand apart from the way the Right Wing behaved in 2009 with the impending Obama inauguration – what with Rush Limbaugh and others screaming “I HOPE HE FAILS!” and then trying to retroactively declare that failure to be the case. I don’t hope for these guys to fail – I hope for them to do right by the country, including the majority of the population that did not vote for them but is now stuck with them for the next four years. It doesn’t mean that I trust them by any means, but I’m willing to see if they can actually get something productive accomplished, and if it’s a good thing, why would anyone object to that?

That being said, we’re hearing more and more about what the true objectives are of this bunch. Just this morning, I read an article confirming exactly what I’ve understood to be the focus of January 20th past the inauguration – the signing by Trump of a series of Executive Orders to effectively erase the Obama presidency in every way possible. There’s also a strong push to have the ACA Repeal on Trump’s desk for signing on the 20th as well, although the GOP is now facing some pressure to think about what it will mean to throw away the insurance policies for 20 million people. (Of course, that assumes that the Far Right really cares about those insurance policies. As Rush Limbaugh has demonstrated – they don’t. For example, Congressman Bill Huizenga of Michigan made a point of forcing his son to wait overnight in a splint before going to seek medical attention for an injured arm, a wild choice that could have cost his son’s life.)

We do have some cause for hope, however. There are plenty of people with their eyes and ears open who can see what the Pence White House is planning, and if it creates major problems around the country, all the Fox News spin in the world won’t be able to make people in the real world forget what is actually happening to them. The Obama Presidency may have ended without a legacy, and we will almost certainly be subject to 2-4 years worth of gloating and bullying about that, but history doesn’t end when these things happen. If anything, the vicious behavior of the Right has a good chance to inspire more Dems and liberals to show up to vote next time.

Fox News is well aware of what the playbook is for Price and the new HHS, Pence-style. Just ask Amy Sandler how helpful Pence was in Indiana for same-sex couples when the hospitals wanted to discriminate against them. Or to be more precise, how helpful Pence was for the hospitals in aiding their discriminatory efforts.

The battle plan for the GOP has already been set – they will be repeating their budget reconciliation move from last summer so they can effectively repeal as much of the ACA as possible without needing a single Dem vote. This bill will be rushed through the new Congress so Trump can happily sign it on the 20th after he gets done with the stack of EO’s that erase all of Obama’s EO’s. There will still be some rudimentary framework of the ACA left in, including the language about telling insurers they can’t bar people for pre-existing conditions. But there will no longer be any funding for the program – particularly after Tom Price and Jeff Sessions publicly drop the appeal that Lynch’s Justice Department has been pursuing about the insurance reimbursements. With that appeal gone, the federal government will no longer be able to provide funds to make any of this work for the insurers, who will quickly exit stage right. I’m sure there will be discussion about how the ACA hasn’t completely been repealed yet and that the GOP is working on various plan ideas – but I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that new plan. These guys had nearly TWENTY YEARS to show a plan after they killed the Hillarycare idea in the early 90s. They’re nowhere closer to coming up with one now – simply because most of them don’t want one anyway.

We need to be prepared for the health care environment to revert back to what it was in early January 2009 – because that is the true goal here. The aim of the Pence group has nothing to do with the patients or even, frankly, the doctors. It has everything to do with smacking Obama and his supporters down as brutally as possible – to punish him for having the temerity to get this through Congress in the first place and to punish the supporters for having the temerity to vote for him twice.

It’s good to hear that Obama and the Dems are looking at how they can try to salvage the ACA and somehow block the behavior of the GOP in the full-on wrecking crew scenario we’re about to see. But the reality is that, as we noted, the GOP doesn’t need a single Dem vote to do any of this. The Dems can jump up and down all they want – it will accomplish nothing. What they frankly do need to do is to remind those millions of people why their health coverage is being taken away. The Dems will need to repeatedly be clear about how the GOP has just dumped all these patients back in the emergency room, and they’re going to need to campaign hard on it in 2018 and 2020.

Knowing Pence and his friends, and knowing Trump’s own personality, the GOP is going to wildly overreach in the frenzy of trying to undo all things Obama and somehow institute a Far Right government against the wishes of most Americans. The Dems need to be able to constantly speak up about these actions, and they will need to speak loudly enough to counter the spin we’ll be getting about it every hour from outlets like Fox News.

Bemused is correct!

According to the Right Wing Daily Signal, there have been resolutions like this that have gone through a US abstention, during pretty much every presidency since the 60s. LBJ allowed 7 such resolutions through. There were at least 15 resolutions brought during Nixon’s terms, but I’m not sure how many we abstained on or even voted for. Under Reagan, there were actually 21 resolutions. These included one we voted for in 1981 after Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear plant. And another in 1987 where the Reagan Admin abstained on a resolution condemning Israel for killing Palestinian students and including Jerusalem as part of the occupied territories. But you won’t hear Rush Limbaugh screaming about Reagan doing something awful there, will you?

As it turns out, President Obama has actually been the ONLY president not to let such a resolution go through the Security Council – up to last week, where he let the very first one for his watch. Interesting that the moment he does it, he’s condemned.

Kennedy is absolutely not a reliable source by any means. I must remind everyone that the peak of her career was her disastrous interview with Martin Landau at the opening of the Mission Impossible movie – the interview where Landau quickly realized that she had never watched the original series and had no idea what she was talking about.

That said, the playbook being used here is consistent with the warmup to The Year of the Bully. The Right Wing viciousness towards President Obama has been turned all the way up – if they could actually physically throw the Obamas out of the White House, they would do so. And yes, they will lie about the state of the White House when the Pence people move in to occupy it.

I find it interesting that the new normal on Fox News is to demand that President Obama and his people literally “SHUT UP!” while Pence gets ready to inflict his damage onto the country. Last night, Marc Thiessen literally said that while denigrating John Kerry’s still upcoming remarks about Israel and the UN. He opined happily that the Obama people should just be quiet and leave and that “nobody cares” what the current administration thinks. This is consistent with the vicious tone taken a month ago by John Sununu, when he happily dismissed the entire Obama presidency as a failure, and one that nobody cares about.

What Fox News and the Right are happily awaiting on January 21 is the opportunity to begin trumpeting this spin. They just need to wait for Trump to be inaugurated and sign all the Executive Orders on the 20th along with the reconciliation bill that destroys the ACA. (Between that and the immediate dropping of the appeal of the nonsensical right wing lawsuit over the insurance reimbursements, the ACA will be effectively obliterated by sundown on the 20th.) On January 21, the Right Wing gets to start a yearlong victory lap wherein they will refer to Barack Obama as the worst president of the modern era, and potentially in the entire history of the country.

Get ready for a pile of wildly jingoistic coverage where you will be told to get behind the Pence Administration or be considered a traitor or supporter of “radical Islamic terrorism”. Get ready for a series of dramatic and vicious cuts in the areas of government that actually help people (Education, Energy, EPA, Interior, Justice) and a series of dramatic and vicious actions designed more for theater than for actual effective governance (massive deportations and ICE raids around the country, blocking of federal money from “sanctuary cities” and the states that contain them, extremely aggressive “stop and frisk” expansions in minority communities by the Sessions Justice Dept, open persecution of Planned Parenthood and targeting of abortion providers in general, cancellation of both the Iran treaty and the Cuban diplomatic approach, deliberate opening of oil drilling in ANWAR and expansion of offshore rigs, radical expansion of the Dept of Defense, and of course the political theater of the upcoming prosecution of Bill and Hillary Clinton on anything Sessions can imply about them and their charity.

Eyes is correct that the tone of the Right in this country has morphed into something truly disturbing and dangerous. A friend of mine in Los Angeles is openly Right Wing and normally disdainful of government, even of Trump. But with the result of the election, he has now become increasingly unhinged and angry about anything that Obama or the California government does. His anger is not that he doesn’t like Trump. It’s that he wants Trump to succeed in everything he’s threatened and thinks Trump will just get bogged down and not do anything but appoint Supreme Court justices. He openly wants Trump to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg as soon as possible and says that’s going to make for a wonderful period of the Supreme Court as they completely undo all of the decisions he hates from the past 50 years, including Roe v Wade and every other decision with which he disagrees. Attempting to have a discussion with him has become impossible, as he suddenly lurches into red-faced spitting rage, to the point that I have become concerned he could actually have a coronary while expounding about this stuff. He truly hates anything that isn’t Hard Right and will now begin screaming almost incoherently at anything Obama does. The whole thing with Israel last Friday sent him into an even wilder rage than I have seen previously. The irony is that he keeps repeating how petty, little and angry he thinks Obama is – I don’t think he can actually see what he’s doing or saying in any objective sense.

As we get into The Year of the Bully, this kind of behavior is going to spread. My father already told me about going to a Thanksgiving dinner where he was physically stopped at the door by a guest who wanted to make sure there were “no damn liberals” coming into the house. There will be more of this – much more.

I commend Duca for standing up for herself and for not letting Carlson get away with the viciousness he openly displayed here. In the end, the only way Carlson was able to get his way was by cutting off Duca’s microphone.

But this wasn’t “incredibly unprofessional” behavior by Carlson. It was par for the course of how Fox News is going to operate for the next four years. The Year of the Bully is upon us – expect a wave of this viciousness to blanket the media. Any non-Right person daring to go on Fox News’ airwaves better be prepared for something as nasty as this or worse. And be prepared for it in your hometown as well – I’m already seeing Right Wing friends who are emboldened enough by this election that they’re really letting their Bully Flag fly.

The only way to deal with bullies like this is to stand up to them, and Duca handled herself quite well here.