It’s interesting to me that Fox News and the Right want everyone to fall for the lie that somehow Trump has won some massive landslide and is massively popular – it’s obvious they are doing this to try to sell the notion that he has a “sweeping mandate” to do as much damage as Pence will attempt starting next month. The reality doesn’t seem to bother these guys.

I think my favorite Fox News lie of the week was Corey Lewandowski peddling the nonsense that “Donald Trump just won the biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan was re-elected in 1984!” I really have to wonder if these guys are aware that these lies are easily disproven with a five second check. For goodness sake, if Trump has the biggest victory since Reagan’s 1984 landslide (which is what they’re trying to call back to, of course), then what does that say about the victories of Obama in 2008 and 2012, and the re-election romp of Bill Clinton in 1996? Does Fox News really think people are so stupid as to not remember what happened only four years ago?

I frankly don’t see any evidence that Megyn Kelly has changed all that much from her angry old days on the daytime show. She’s still the same person who shouted Kirsten Powers off the air, and who regularly presents loud challenges to any principled non-Right guest while patiently listening to most Fox-friendly guests. She’s an intelligent person and she knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s catering to the Fox News viewership, and it’s paying off handsomely for her. (It looks like they’re about to give her a 20 million plus contract and put her in line to be O’Reilly’s successor after he retires from the full time gig in another year.)

She does not get to pretend to be an “impartial journalist” when her record shows her clearly for what she is – an angry Hard Right partisan who reinforces the stereotypes Fox News followers already have before they turn on the TV. She does not get to pretend to be an advocate for women’s rights when the only times she has espoused anything there has been for herself and not others. She does not get to play a victim card regarding Trump when she has worked overtime to effectively support his campaign and to support the mayhem he has brought us with the incoming Pence Administration.

I recognize that she will wind up as the new O’Reilly, and that she may well wind up as the highest paid anchor on cable television within the next couple of years. I recognize that this will cause many people (not necessarily here but definitely where I live and work) to try to normalize her behavior and to think she should be given some respect for being able to pull this off (ie make a lot of money while catering to the Hard Right). My response is the same one that Larry Bensky gave to an NPR interviewer 30 years ago when he was asked what he thought of people showing some respect to Oliver North for his years of service, etc: “So? I don’t.”

Sadly not surprising, and it’s only the beginning of what will be happening during the Pence presidency for the next four years. We already know that Trump encourages bullying, and that his supporters now feel emboldened to really push it as far as they can.

So, sadly, yes there will be violence. I feel sympathy for this professor but they’re clearly going to make an example of her. The best we can do is to keep our eyes open and note what these people are doing as they do it. Keep in mind that Fox News will work overtime to deny anything untoward is happening, even while encouraging it to go on. They are now running stories saying that the massive number of hate crimes committed after Trump’s squeaker in November are “fraudulent claims”, when all they’ve been able to come up with is a handful of those. (I frankly wouldn’t be surprised to see anywhere from 30-50 bogus claims in a large number like that, which is what Fox News is trying to hide behind, but that deliberately forgets the other 950 that are factually documented…)

This is going to be a fairly grim time. We need to document it and to stick together in opposing the viciousness and the bullying every time we see it happening. Do not be the last person to speak up lest you wind up like Martin Niemoller.

Steve, I would argue that the demographics of this country are rapidly changing to something that will not favor the gaming strategy Trump’s handlers adopted this year. He was able to narrowly get through this round, but only due to the failure of about a million Hillary voters to show up at the polls in the swing states. Had those voters not been discouraged from appearing, we would be having a very different discussion right now.

In 1980 and 1984, Ronald Reagan could easily sail into office and re-election just on the strength of white male voters. That constituency easily overwhelmed everyone else, and Reagan never needed to campaign to anyone outside of it. Blacks, Chicanos, etc were considered Minority voters because they were in the minority by a solid margin.

In recent years, we’ve been seeing that a greater and greater percentage of the voting public is not white or male. Which means that the Reagan strategy can no longer work on its own. If all the other voters show up, the white male vote (which is not unified) cannot prevail any longer.

In 2012, the GOP tried a strategy in pushing Mitt Romney and fighting Barack Obama – they went extremely negative – in the hope that enough Obama voters would be discouraged and they could squeak their guy through. This famously backfired on the Right when Obama’s voters came out in force and firmly repudiated the game-playing. At the time, the GOP was told to take a real look at what happened and think about whether or not alienating entire sections of the population, like the Chicano population, was such a good idea. There was a real discussion that the GOP and the Right could well be out of the White House for the foreseeable future. But again, this assumed that all the other voters would show up.

In 2016, the Right took a fairly risky step in doubling down on their prior negative campaign. Rather than learn from the defeat they suffered, they decided to try it one more time and see if they could win with it against Hillary Clinton. Their thinking was that they’d already thrown so much negative smoke around her over the prior 25 years that they might well be able to squeak a candidate through, particularly in an angry political time in this country. I note that the Right has fomented that anger in a big way ever since Obama was elected in 2008, and that the GOP has compounded the anger by deliberately obstructing any efforts to help the economy or any of the working class voters who were badly hurt by the W Bush policies and the resulting Great Recession. It’s not an accident that GOP congressmen deliberately blocked Unemployment extensions for these people – the intent was to make the suffering as severe as possible and then to campaign that the Dems were not doing anything about it. And since the Dems failed to campaign in those same areas to refute the Right Wing lies, it’s not a surprise that enough people in those areas fell for the Trump promises to put him over the top in key counties.

We can argue about WHY the Hillary Clinton voters didn’t show up in sufficient numbers. Was it because a bunch of them thought she had it walking away and they didn’t think it was all that crucial for them to vote? I would say that this is partly true, but not in enough numbers to swing the election. Was it because a bunch of Dems fell for the Right Wing propaganda about the Clintons and assumed that there must be some criminality to justify all these endless allegations and fake news stories, like the myth that Clinton was fired from the Watergate commission, etc? I would again say that this is partly true, particularly when the FBI pulled out the old email skeleton within two weeks of the election – that certainly left many voters with a bad taste. But again, this by itself wouldn’t have resulted in the result we saw. Was it because Bernie Sanders voters refused to vote for Clinton? That one is easily refuted because we know that most of them DID vote for her, albeit reluctantly, after Sanders repeatedly exhorted his people to do so. Was it because of voter suppression in states like North Carolina, where the Right has repeatedly erected obstacles to non-white voters? I would say it contributed, but not enough by itself to turn the election. Was it because WikiLeaks, aided by Russian hackers, kept pouring anti-Clinton material into our media all the way up to the election to try to bury Clinton and generate chaos by getting Trump elected? Again, I’d say it contributed, particularly to the general nastiness of the campaign. But we have to be fair and acknowledge there was plenty of negative press about Trump as well, most of it generated by Trump himself and not by the multiple leaks.

So what was the X factor that actually combines the whole mess and mathematically allowed the Right to game this election? It’s simply that the Right and the GOP went as negative as they did, as early as they did. It’s a tried and true strategy, particularly for midterm elections, to depress turnout by Dems and liberals in general. It’s a proven statistic that Right Wing voters are more reliable in showing up at the voting both, and that any depression in the vote is likely to aid the Right Wing candidate. The Right usually benefits from this statistic during midterms – with notable exceptions like the beating they took in 2006 when enough of the American public was sufficiently angry with the W Bush antics to show up and actually cast ballots. Since 2006, what have we seen in the turnout? In 2008 and 2012, there was a larger turnout, due to the excitement over the Barack Obama candidacy and presidency. In 2010 and 2014, many Obama voters didn’t show up, since their candidate was not on the ballot those years. And in 2016, the Right gambled that those voters would stay home and not invest in Hillary Clinton. Had they lost that bet, Clinton would have easily swept Trump and cemented Obama’s legacy. And in fact, Clinton SHOULD have easily swept Trump. But the relentless negativity does take a toll, and if a candidate has not motivated enough people to find it urgent to show up, the other guy wins, even if it’s by a hair.

So now we get the reverse result of what most everyone expected, and the angry reactions we’ve been seeing are clearly a natural progression from people’s shock and dismay. It shouldn’t be a surprise that people have protested in the streets, or that there has been the usual call to get rid of the Electoral College.

But the lesson here should be clear to everyone. People absolutely MUST show up for these elections, or this is the result we can expect – the bullies win. Because the Clinton voters didn’t show up, we will now see the complete erasure of the Obama presidency, and potentially some extremely dangerous activity both domestically and militarily as the Right tries to flex its muscles while it can. We will now see the complete unravelling of both the immigration work Obama was doing, and of course his attempt to create a health care option that would cover as many people as possible, and also his attempt to protect the environment from craven exploitation. All of that is gone now, and some of the damage there may be irreparable – particularly the environmental issues, where Mike Pence will no doubt encourage drilling to begin wherever possible, and where the various agencies that were meant to check this activity will simply be dismantled while we watch.

There are still two positives we can pull from this scenario. One, as noted before, the demographics are not on the Right Wing’s side here. They have done NOTHING to reach out to non-white constituencies with anything other than condescension at best and outright meanness and bullying at most common. By 2020, the demographics will be even less friendly to the angry white male voter than they were in 2016, and it will simply be a matter of truly campaigning around the country to remind people that they need to show up and cast a ballot. Two, the damage that Mike Pence’s presidency generates will by itself provide significant motivation for people to show up and vote these people out of office – hopefully with a good showing in 2018 to make a statement first and then in 2020 to sweep these people out. Assuming that the Dems can field an interesting candidate (it won’t be anyone we’ve been seeing lately – it will be a fresh face, as Obama was) and can actually go to these various swing states and even Red states and point out the damage that the Right Wing has done (including blocking every effort the Dems have made to work for them), the Dems do have a chance to correct what has happened here.

It’s just that in the meantime, we will live through an Era of Meanness and The Year of the Bully. For myself, I hold out some hope for continued gridlock, as this will be the only way to stop at least the legislative damage these guys intend to do. I have no illusions about the Depts of Education, Energy, Interior or the EPA. Those are lost causes now. I have no illusions about the ACA and the fate of the people who signed up for it. They are unfortunately casualties of politics. I have no illusions about the fate of the undocumented immigrants in this country. We will see a large number of deportations and raids, on a scale we haven’t seen in over 30 years. We will see the DACA idea thrown out and those people encouraged to leave the country, and many frankly will. I have no illusions about the Dems suddenly growing a spine and actively working to protect any of these areas – we’ve learned from experience that they will regularly cave when it matters most. I have no illusions about what Mike Pence could do to the Supreme Court. I just hope that his damage is limited to the one appointment – the one that should have been filled by Merrick Garland. If Pence is allowed to appoint a successor to Ginsburg or Breyer and the Dems let it through, we’ll be looking at a very different country in short order. Once the numbers get to 6-3 in favor of the Far Right, the alarm bells that have always been rung about the Supreme Court will finally have a reason to toll.

Sadly, the Dems are unlikely to show any backbone here. Pence’s cabinet will almost certainly sail through their confirmations, particularly given that the GOP does not need a single Dem vote to support them. (It’s possible that Rand Paul may raise a little hay here or there, but he is more likely to be careful to do so when it won’t affect the outcome.)

This is going to be a fairly vicious exercise in the notion of “elections have consequences.” In this case, even with the squeaker Trump enjoyed, the Pence people will absolutely be ramming through a Far, Far Right Wing agenda whether the rest of the country wants it or not. These guys know they only have a limited time to do this work, so they’re going to maximize the opportunity.

The Dept of Education is almost certain to be eliminated within the next 2-3 years, as that has been a goal of the Right ever since it was created. Their hope has always been to kill it, and if they can do so while Jimmy Carter is still alive to see it destroyed, that just adds that extra bit of meanness and bullying we’ll be getting to enjoy for the next few years.

The Dept of Energy and the EPA are certain to be scaled back to something much smaller, and then likely folded into other departments. Commerce may also be folded down. Labor is likely to be scaled way back – essentially to be more of a call-in center if even that. Interior is likely to similarly be scaled back – essentially an approval stamp for drilling and pollutants.

And the Dept of Health & Human Services will really just be recommending people set themselves up with Health Savings Accounts so they can pay the much higher deductibles that will be entailed with whatever plans the insurers offer after the ACA is ripped up next month.

There is a positive side to this, however. The amount of damage Pence’s group is going to do is tremendous and there will be a massive amount of suffering as a result. But these guys will not be able to avoid the consequences. In the same way that W Bush was not able to dodge the responsibility for the massive recession his mismanagement generated, Mike Pence’s presidency will not be able to dodge the responsibility for the mayhem we see over the next few years. If we are fortunate, the voters will be angry enough at these guys in 2018 that they’ll choose to limit their ability to do any further damage. I believe this is part of the reason why they are moving so aggressively in all these areas at once.

Ahhhh, the sound of angry gloating again! Yes, that sour scent of meanness and bullying again! Yes, that’s Christmas!

It’s fairly obvious to anyone watching what is happening here.

Fox News is happily playing the role of obedient lapdog to the incoming Pence Administration and Chris Wallace is demonstrating how this will work. It is completely consistent with how Fox News and the Right have dealt now with four successive presidents. When Bill Clinton was president, that meant that everything around the White House was suspect and needed to be challenged. When W got away with the Florida mess in 2000 and was selected by the Supreme Court, this meant that honor was restored and that anyone criticizing the White House was now a traitor. When Obama was elected in 2009, everything was once again suspect, since everybody knows Obama wasn’t even an American citizen or a Christian. When Trump squeaked in, this once again meant that day is night and night is day again. So it follows logically that whatever Donald Trump says is the truth and everyone in America agrees with him. At least everyone that the Right Wing thinks counts.

Three million more people voted for Clinton? Not to worry, those are just people who live in California or New York and their votes don’t count. Besides, millions of them are obviously undocumented aliens who are fraudulently voting, didn’t you know?

Pence doesn’t have a mandate? For shame, of course he does, thanks to that record-setting Electoral College landslide. It wasn’t a landslide? But Trump won so many counties, right? He only won most of them by a razor thin margin? For shame, don’t bother us with facts – we’re talking about the mandate Pence now has.

I really wouldn’t expect the Dems to mount anything other than a token opposition. They didn’t get their reputation for caving by accident. We can expect them to make a few peeps as the Pence cabinet is swept into place, and maybe a peep or two more about the Supreme Court, but they won’t actually stop anything. As we were told by the Dems when W was installing a bad cabinet in 2001: “The President has the right to appoint the Cabinet he wants”. Even if that Cabinet includes David Duke, apparently.

As The Year of the Bully begins in earnest, we can look forward to plenty of coverage just like this, while Pence happily goes to work dismantling everything he can of our social and governmental infrastructure. And Fox News and the Right will be standing shoulder to shoulder with Pence, approvingly cheering the carnage.

The last time I saw reporting this supine, it was in a George Orwell book. Because we are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia. We are allies with Eurasia. We have always been allies with Eurasia. All the books say so. Because we burned all the books that didn’t.

There was a time when some people had what I felt was an actually principled debate about the transformation of Christmas from a religious observance to a massive overcommercialized shopping extravaganza. At that time, the Christian activists were trying to get people to remember whose birth they were celebrating, as opposed to just having people spending themselves into the poorhouse. I think the increasing mayhem of Black Friday fed into this, and I honestly didn’t have a problem with the discussion. There is something to be said about having a simple holiday with one’s family and not having it totally overrun by the constant commercialism.

But somewhere along the way, the Right decided that they wanted to REALLY push the religious aspects – with the goal of grabbing the holiday for their own use and using it as a bludgeon to attack everyone else. I know plenty of non-Christians who celebrate Christmas with their family at the end of the year – the Right’s work here was to ostracize those people. They’re essentially saying “This is OUR holiday and you must observe OUR rules about it!” It’s frankly the same kind of instinct that pushed angry whites to vote for Trump this year – an attempt to look backward and grab onto whatever one can before giving in to the forward momentum of history.

So it makes sense that the Right would enjoy seeing a “Merry Christmas” law to codify their anger and resentment toward everyone else in the country.

Eyes, I agree completely with your assessment, but I think it’s clear that these people simply don’t care. Limbaugh’s opinions are mirrored by Pence, and Trump has turned the policy decisions over to him. And Trump tends to rely on the advice of Limbaugh and Fox News pundits over actual information.

It’s this line of thinking that explains why the GOP will be unable to come up with any real replacement plan for the ACA. It’s why they never had a plan in the first place after they happily killed the Hillary Clinton idea in the early 90s. Most of them, particularly the “Tea Party” members of the House, have no interest whatsoever in a government health plan beyond the one they get as part of their Congress work. And enough of them follow the Libertarian mode Limbaugh is stating here: “IGMFU”.

I’m sure that insurers will now provide policies for people with pre-existing conditions (against Limbaugh’s better judgment of course), but those will come at a much higher price, which means those patients won’t be able to afford them. And you have to admire the ethic Limbaugh embodies on the notion of a chronic medical condition – insurers shouldn’t be told to cover you because it’s your fault that your sick. That’s a YP not an OP.

We can also look at the Tom Price version of things that will be offered – personal health savings accounts. Meaning that you put away money for a rainy healthcare day and then you use your money for your healthcare as bills come up. I love it. Hope it takes care of things like an unexpected complication that generates a few thousand dollars of tests and prescriptions…

As a side note, I’m really puzzled by this notion that’s now running around that “Trump’s really a Democrat and he’s really not going to do all that stuff because he hasn’t been a Republican that long and he does things differently anyway.” That’s flat-out nonsense. Trump is setting himself up as a FAR FAR Right Wing President and Pence is establishing the cabinet infrastructure and policy to make the Bush/Cheney White House look like pattycakes. Anyone counting on Trump to suddenly veer to the center is setting themselves up for an even rougher few years than we’re already getting. It’s one thing to know that these guys are going to do a lot of damage – and another to keep hoping for them not to do the damage and then be bitterly disappointed when they do it.

The hypocrisy here is staggering. O’Reilly is taking a time of the year when people regularly turn to thoughts of giving and family and generosity, and he’s using it for bullying, gloating and general schoolyard viciousness. Is that what the Right believes embodies the Spirit of Christmas?

It’s interesting to see the common thread running between the various people being presented as possible press secretaries, such as Guilfoyle here and Laura Ingraham a few weeks ago. They are openly Right Wing ideologues and angry ones at that. They are also regular personalities from Fox News, which is clearly a huge influence on Pence and Trump. We are also being told that the Right intends to rework how the press corps get to interact with the new group occupying the White House. And we’ve regularly been hearing increasingly nasty rhetoric coming from Fox News about how Trump should ban news organizations like CNN and the New York Times from the White House because of their supposed “collusion” with the Clinton campaign.

Put that together and you have a recipe for the Pence Administration to have the most restricted press exposure in recent memory, with only the right wing voices being given leave to speak, and with the Fox News line of the day becoming the White House line of the day. This was already an unsupportable situation under W Bush, and it looks like they’ve put it on steroids now. Kind of like the other extreme positions it looks like the Pence Administration will be taking on every issue that matters.

Am I the only one confused by Bruce Mayford’s comment? I’m assuming he’s referring to the people who happily tweeted angry comments in support of sending a strobe to an epileptic person. But it’s an odd way to phrase it. I’m sure he’s not in support of trying to generate a seizure.

Janet, you are correct to be concerned.

Mike Pence has in fact more power than any other VP in history, including Cheney. That was the deal in his accepting this position. Look at the Cabinet and at how many of them are his friends and cronies (not to mention Trump’s). Trump will make broad proclamations on Twitter and go to the rallies, but it’s Pence who will determine the policy on everything.

Buckle your seatbelt. This is going to be an extremely rough set of years coming up.

Bolton’s action here is absolutely consistent.

For a liar and a bully, which will make him right at home when he takes his new job in the State Dept. His point is what Fox News has been saying for the past 8 years. If Barack Obama says it, we must view it with distrust and suspicion, and wonder about his political bias. In fact, if any Dem says it, the information is suspect – but particularly Barack Obama. Now, if a Republican says the same thing, then it’s to be taken as patriotic gospel. If Donald Trump says not to worry about hacking in this election, then you shouldn’t be worried about it. And why are you still bringing it up, when Trump told you to stop it?

When it comes to health care and health insurance, Shrkeli is exactly the person Fox News and the Right Wing want at the till. Because this isn’t about actually taking care of sick patients or curing anyone. This is about making money. Shkreli was openly trying to get as much money for himself and his company out of this drug as he could – it wasn’t just a “small profit” he was after. He knew he had these patients at his mercy and he took every advantage he could. And that’s the philosophy of the Right Wing, particularly the Libertarian wing of it: IGMFU. If you can’t afford the price of the drug, then you shouldn’t have it, should you? If that means you will die of the disease you’re suffering, then that’s a YP not an MP. Not hard to figure this stuff out when you unpack it.

There’s an added bit of entertainment coming over the next month before the GOP dismantles the ACA on January 20th and Trump happily signs the bill. There’s been some discussion lately about “Repeal and Delay” since the Right has never been able to agree on a plan, mostly due to the fact that many of them never wanted any such program in the first place. The GOP will be hammered on this from the Far Right, including both Fox News and their favorite radio spokesman, Rush Limbaugh. And here’s what Limbaugh had to say on this matter, (something he’s threatening to really jump up and down about over the next few weeks – specifically to influence the GOP and Trump/Pence to do his bidding): “I’m thinking this whole idea of having something to replace it with is a smoke screen and this two-year, three-year delay…Just repeal it and turn loose the market on this! I don’t… For me, I don’t understand what this two- or three-year delay is….And there’s no real guidance from Trump on this yet, other than we’re gonna repeal it and replace it. But when do you replace it is the question – and with what? They do not have an alternative Obamacare health care bill. Now, my thinking is ‘Good! Why should the government be involved in this anyway?’” I think it’s safe to say that the Far Right will have their way on this, particularly with Mike Pence running the White House and Pence’s friend Tom Price running Health and Human Services. I have repeatedly said this since Trump squeaked through during the election and we are now seeing the Right Wing really starting to sharpen their knives. I don’t know that the Right is so concerned about millions of people losing their coverage when they can spin it that most of them could have qualified for other plans anyway. (Don’t worry that those plans would have bankrupted them)

By the way, at the same time they’re pulling these moves, they are already starting to move on the notion of gutting Medicare. And there is even a Right Wing House member who’s making hay with his new Social Security reform plan – the one that refuses to make even the tiny adjustment to SSI taxes to solve the math equation they have in about 20 years. The one that supposedly makes the program solvent for the next 75 years by strictly cutting benefits to most of the recipients – anywhere up to a third or half of their benefits. Sounds great, doesn’t it? And Trump will have perfect cover for this because he can say “Hey, we have to keep these programs solvent and we don’t want to increase all your taxes, you know.”

I really find it interesting that in the midst of the holiday season when we focus on giving and on compassion for others, the Far Right is focused on gloating, bullying and then potentially brutalizing large swathes of the American public. I suppose that can make for a Merry Christmas for some, but not anyone I would care to know so well.

Frankly, I don’t think the Right Wing really cares if Los Angeles or New York City suffers. If anything, they’d enjoy watching it happen. From the tone of their latest gloating and bullying, it sounds like they expect those cities to quickly fold and beg Trump for mercy. After which, they’re hoping Trump will drag it out longer to make sure they get the message that they are never to challenge the bully again if they don’t want another bloody nose. I don’t think they’re that far off in terms of the Dems caving, as they usually do when they’re pressured. I just don’t think they’ll cave as fast as the Right is hoping. Nonetheless, the Right will be sure to gloat about the cave as soon as it happens.

What makes the Right’s prediction here irritating is that they have consistently acted like this for the past 60-80 years. It’s a state of constantly assuming that they can bully people at will and get away with it, that they can brutalize other countries and that nobody will lift a finger to stop them. I still remember a classic example of this from my high school History class. We had a guest speaker relating the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how the Kennedy Administration dealt with it. During the Crisis, as things were reaching a head, there was a typical meeting of the various hawks and doves to discuss what they should do next. This is roughly the transcript as it was described to us:
Foreign Policy Hawk: “Well, clearly, if the USSR doesn’t back down, we’ll need to launch missiles and take out the sites in Cuba to secure the region.”
Foreign Policy Dove: “And if we do that, how do you think they’ll respond to us?”
Hawk: “Well, they’ll probably take out our sites in Turkey, as they’ve been threatening.”
Dove: “And what do you think we’ll need to do in response to that?”
Hawk: “Well, at that point, we’ll really need to start launching missiles against targets inside the Russian border…”
Dove: “And after we start nuking them, how do you think they’re going to respond to that???”
Hawk: “Well, at that point, I think it’s clear that cooler heads will prevail…”

Just imagine if we had the Pence Administration running the military during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think we can all see the way that situation would have turned out…

And it strikes me how vicious Santorum’s comments here really are. He had no problem whatsoever telling this woman to get out of the country, and essentially saying that she’d gotten away with something by even being here in the first place. You could even make a slogan out of his cruelty – “You don’t belong in MY country.”

Eyes. that’s exactly right. And Pence is surrounding himself with the harshest and most draconian of Right Wingers. If Education, Energy and the EPA survive the Pence Administration, it will be nothing short of miraculous.

I previously addressed this in the Behar thread, so I’ll try to quickly reiterate here:

O’Reilly is desperately looking for a way to dismiss and sneer at the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote last month, and did so on the order of nearly 3 million votes. To admit this fact would be to admit that the Pence Administration does not really have that “sweeping mandate” and didn’t really have that “landslide victory” that the Right keeps trying to gloat about. In fact, they had a squeaker, earned from gaming the system and depressing as much of the vote as possible so that they could win enough counties in swing states to pull this off. Had a thousand more people shown up in several of those counties, the vote would have gone the other way and we’d be having a very different discussion. Dems really need to remember this for 2018, 2020 and the future, although we can appreciate that with changing demographics, this little maneuver will not help the Right in another few years. There simply won’t be enough angry white voters to overwhelm the other demographics, and they won’t be able to campaign on straight xenophobia any longer. This was their last gasp of that idea. (And if we think back a bit, the big Reagan landslide of 1984 is no longer possible for them – that was from a time when you really could win a landslide election with just angry white male votes…)

So O’Reilly needs to find a spin to explain away those millions of voters who did not vote for his preferred candidate. He’s already dismissed California with a sneer on several occasions. Partly he’s done this on the basis that he hates California on general principle and thinks he’s somehow morally superior to anyone living there. Partly he’s done this with his outrageous support of Right Wing lies that somehow millions of undocumented aliens were committing voter fraud across California. But he needed to get another cheap shot in. So now he turns to New York, which he presents as really just a bunch of welfare cheats and unworthy slackers who depend on government handouts. He even pushes this nonsense far enough to try to get some moral high ground by stating that he and “good Americans” are being forced to pay for all these cheats and slackers in New York, when clearly those people should just be told to get a job or something. And yes, this is totally consistent with his tantrum on Election Night 2012, when he screamed that Obama only won because of the slackers who want “free stuff”.

And by taking this rather vicious approach, O’Reilly can now get a two-fer. He can dismiss millions of Americans who disagree with Trump and with him, and he can act like it’s some kind of a moral crusade for himself. And voila! Now he can say that Trump has a “sweeping mandate” and a landslide! Nice, eh? It even justifies his triumphal monologue on November 9th where he thought he was putting Hillary in her place by angrily declaring “America has had enough of Hillary Clinton!” and after saying a series of increasingly nasty and mean-spirited cheap shots, then concluding, “But that’s enough about her!” as though he had any moral standing to be making such statements.

To answer Richard, I don’t think these guys are actually planning to do anything as vile as that. But I do think they’re hoping that ISIS or some other radical group tries something like that. It would give them all the justification they want to go “full Cheney” and demand that all Americans support the Pence Administration in whatever chicanery it wishes to inflict. I’d also like us to remember that when W took the country to war against Iraq in 2003, there were tens of thousands of people regularly in the streets protesting it. And the Right simply didn’t care – they went on killing people in Iraq regardless of the protests. If anything, they learned the lessons from Vietnam to make sure that there were as few objective witnesses as possible to the carnage. No photos of the caskets coming back home. Embedded reporters to make sure they were bonded to the units they were covering. Aggressive action against independent and international journalists, retroactively justified by saying “they should have known they were in a war zone”. If the Right learned anything from this, in spite of the fun WikiLeaks has had, it’s that they can get away with the Big Lie and do it repeatedly.

At the same time, I also believe the Right will come to regret their momentary infatuation with Julian Assange. He was useful to them for getting uncomfortable gossip documents about Clinton’s campaign. They even celebrated him for doing so. I wonder how Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly will respond when WikiLeaks starts spreading emails from the various Pence Administration cronies….

Let’s unpack this.

Morris is saying that xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, racism and the other general hatreds fomented by the Right are fine and dandy, so long as we wrap them up in the comforting flag of America First. Check.

And he’s saying that dissenting speech is not a good thing. Hmmm. So what does Morris say about the Right Wingers who spent 8 years viciously attacking Barack Obama, calling him every racist name they could, calling him a socialist, calling him a secret Muslim, and saying that he wasn’t even born in the USA, as Trump happily fomented himself? Was all of that the kind of free speech that Morris approves of?

I would greatly appreciate having five minutes to discuss this with Morris, to see if he understands the sheer mountain of hypocrisy he is purveying.

Schoen hasn’t had any credibility since he and Caddell wrote the notorious op-ed in 2012 demanding that Barack Obama leave the presidential race and not seek re-election. He and Caddell are paid a LOT of money by Fox News to play Dems on TV while undermining pretty much anything that the Democrats actually stand for. So what he says is not important and not worth discussing.

As for the bigger meat of this story, there is absolutely going to be a “Blame Obama First” routine going on at Fox News for the next 4 years. They will justify this nonsense by saying that Obama blamed everything on W for 8 years and so they are okay to say everything now must be Obama’s fault. They’ll of course be ignoring that Obama came into office during a terrible recession that was caused by the tremendous mismanagement and incompetence of the W regime. They’ll be ignoring that W’s foreign policy had destroyed any credibility the Americans had before his people began torturing and renditioning people at will throughout the 2000s, and before the Right led the country into two different futile and unfunded wars. The country that Obama leaves to the Pence Administration today is one that is not in a recession and is fairly secure around the world, as well as one that has not destroyed its own environment or labor force and has tried to cobble together a health insurance system that can cover as many people as it can.

Within the first 6 months of 2017, we can expect to see the Pence Administration undo nearly all of that, mostly within the first 5 weeks. This will be a much more aggressive White House around the world, which will quickly lead to trade difficulties and I’m sure to a series of military confrontations with groups like ISIS. The generals Pence is bringing in are likely to go big with the bombing idea as a way of “making a point”, which will of course just drive more locals into the arms of these groups, but who worries about that? And this will be a craven White House at home, given that we will now have Education, Interior, Labor and the EPA supervised by people who object to the existence of those departments in the first place. I would not be surprised to see all four of those departments radically reduced, particularly the first and the last, which I believe the Right would like simply ended as soon as possible. And we already know that the ACA is gone and that the various international treaties (Climate Change, Iran, Cuba rapproachement) will be ripped up on January 20th.

So there will be serious consequences and a LOT of unhappy and angry people. There will be stresses that stymie the economy, as well as other problems. All of this will be blamed on Obama by Fox News, who will say it’s his fault for leaving them such terrible problems that now must be fixed. The funny part of this is that they will have already have succeeded in erasing his presidency. The constant blame they’ll throw at him afterwards will just be the extra kicks the bully usually gives to his victim after beating him up on the playground. Just to make sure the other kids pay attention.