This is not hard to understand.

This group is of course going to love anything Trump does. And they were going to hate anything Obama did. Has nothing to do with whether one is right or wrong. Just that one is Trump and GOP and the other is Obama and Democrat. The former is always right and the latter is always wrong.

And again, we need to keep in mind – Mike Pence is the acting President, and will be so for the next four years. He’ll be handling the real work in the White House while Trump headlines rallies and public appearances.

There are a few more aspects to this matter that we should keep in mind:

O’Reilly’s position here is not only hypocritical but deeply offensive. He had no problem himself disrespecting Barack Obama and accusing his Administration of criminality all over the place, even though these assertions were repeatedly debunked. He had no problem having various angry Right Wingers on like Monica Crowley to say truly outrageous things about Obama every week of his presidency, including the notion that impeachable crimes were being committed in the White House every single day of the past 8 years. He further accused the Clintons of criminality and immorality and even of murder when it comes to women’s reproductive rights. He does not get to rewrite that history and get on his moral high horse because Joy Behar notes that Trump has serious temperament and stability issues, given his behavior over the past several decades. She’s not far off to note that Trump’s obsessive need to jump on Twitter and attack people can be a serious problem, or to note that he does not seem to comprehend the difference between internet rumors and truth. Those are valid concerns and O’Reilly does himself no favors by conveniently forgetting that he himself actually admitted this at various times during the campaign. What we’re seeing here is O’Reilly trying to bully his way out of his own contradictions, and that won’t work for anyone who’s been paying attention. It also won’t work for O’Reilly if he truly thinks anyone is going to buy the “elder statesman” act he now wants to assume.

O’Reilly is trying to help spread a false narrative about this election to somehow justify the Right Wing’s desperate need to show this as a “sweeping mandate” and a “landslide” for Trump. Factually, Trump lost the popular vote and only squeaked by in several swing states due to enough Clinton voters being demoralized enough or cocky enough to not show up. Trump benefited from the long-time GOP strategy of making elections as unpleasant as possible, to thus make it likelier that only their own true believers would show up, as they do in the midterms. Dems will absolutely need to work on this for 2018 and 2020 if they wish to stem the problems that Pence’s White House is going to inflict on the country. But this was not a “landslide” or a “sweeping mandate” by any means, and Pence and the others are knowingly lying when they say it was. So O’Reilly is trying to find a way to justify that statement to retroactively make it true – kind of like the GOP is about to do to Obama, where they will erase his presidency and then retroactively declare him a failure who didn’t accomplish anything.

O’Reilly’s tactic is to say that the popular vote margin for Clinton is really only in California, as he did a day or two after the election when he snapped at Austan Goolsbee that “that’s just California (sniff)”. This is now the Right Wing drumbeat – take Los Angeles and San Francisco out of the count and now Trump is ahead, see? All we have to do is ignore California because they hate us anyway.

Last night, O’Reilly took the bullying and hating to a new level with New York. Acknowledging that Trump lost New York by nearly an 80-20 margin, O’Reilly dismissed this with the notion that New York is really just a giant welfare state, and that New York City is really just the welfare capital of the world. This falls right in line with the hateful rhetoric he was spewing right after Obama was re-elected in 2012 that he only won because “people want free stuff”. So now we can ignore New York because they’re all just welfare cheats who want a handout, and we can ignore California because they’re a bunch of irrelevant know-nothings. Now that’s inclusiveness for you.

All of this meanness and bullying would already be risible, were it not for the Right Wing’s new demand that everyone just accept Trump as a wonderful guy who deserves a chance as President. I’m all for giving people a chance, but Trump ran a hate-filled, racist, misogynistic campaign about attacking his enemies. Pence’s career has been one of hatred re toward anyone with whom he disagrees. These are not people who are interested in working with anyone else. So I’ll keep my eyes open about what they do, but I have no illusions about what they intend and what they are already doing. And I will not be bullied out of remembering their conduct.

Yet another example of an early start to The Year of The Bully.

It’s a Merry Christmas to these guys because they’re dreaming of how they’ll be able to erase the entire Obama presidency in a couple of days in mid-January, and then kick the sand in everyone’s faces. Scut Farkus lives.

Ablow’s comments here are incoherent.

This really isn’t hard to understand as a story. Right Wingers, including Flynn’s wacky son, promulgated a vicious lie about a pizzeria that resulted in one of their followers bringing an assault rifle to the place with the intent of committing violent mayhem. There isn’t anything more to it than that. It’s the same kind of nonsense as Bill O’Reilly repeatedly referring to Dr. Tiller as “Tiller the Baby Killer” until one of his viewers murdered Tiller.

I really wish the Right would take responsibility for this kind of thing, but they never seem to want to do so.

In the current mode of Right Wing bullying and gloating, this kind of thing is becoming a greater concern. As more and more Right Wingers are feeling emboldened, and are exercising their long-festering hatred of everyone else, I am becoming increasingly concerned about the likelihood of more events like this occurring.

Fully agreed, Eyes. These guys are going to learn the wrong lesson from this. It’s becoming a teachable moment, but one that Trump will think means he can now bully China.

I have to hand it to Mike Huckabee – he has played the situation of the past two years brilliantly. He knew he wasn’t going to be President, but he positioned himself to support the most extreme person he could. He was never going to support Ted Cruz, who he openly detests, but he was happy to support Trump. And he doesn’t really want to spend his time doing the boring work of running one of these agencies for what wouldn’t be much of a salary.

But because he’s behaved himself very well in the eyes of the Right and Fox News, playing to the businessmen at Fox News and the most wild-eyed of the evangelical community, he’s poised to resume his Fox News weekend show in the new year. I’ve been waiting for them to announce the return of the Huckabee show as of January, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up as soon as they can close a deal with him. (The only thing that was holding this back was the notion that he might take a position in the Trump cabinet, but it’s evident he turned that idea down flat.) This makes sense for Huckabee, as he’s set to make a LOT more money when he resumes his contract. And it allows Huckabee to block Ted Cruz from coming to Fox News after he gets primaried out of office in a couple of years. So Huckabee both gets to personally profit from the Trump presidency and gets to prevent Cruz from getting access to the well where Huckabee has been drinking for the past near decade. This is a long-game version of the delightful moment during the campaign where Huckabee seized on the Kim Davis controversy and blocked Cruz from being able to poach on the territory. One gets the impression that Huckabee got a lot of satisfaction by denying Cruz that moment, and he’ll get a lot more satisfaction by denying Cruz the big payday here.

The intent of the Pence Administration should be clear, if their announced ideas haven’t already made it clear. These guys are not interested in having any of these agencies actually function – unless it’s for the purpose of tearing away at the social contract of our society.

Putting Ben Carson in charge of HUD is a recipe for making HUD a shadow of its former self. Rather than working to help in the areas of housing and urban development, Carson will of course take the position that these people don’t need help and that that the department should be cut way back and defunded as much as possible. I fully expect him to reduce the budget and the employees by at least half within the next year or two, since he sees them as the problem and not the solution.

Similarly, Betsy DeVos at Education will undoubtedly shrink that department as much as possible in prelude to getting rid of it outright. Her approach has already been to encourage charter schools, private schools and religious schools over the Right Wing’s hated enemy, the public school structure of this country. Under DeVos, we should expect to see the idea of school vouchers really pushed, with the effect of gutting what funding schools still get these days. Richer families will get a subsidy for the private schools where they wish to send their kids, and poorer families will be left with a choice of either staying with a miserably underfunded public school or taking their chances with unreliable charters or spending a LOT more money than they can afford to put their kids into private school, as the vouchers will never cover very much. This will essentially serve to give the rich yet another tax break, while leaving the rest of us with a broken, empty vessel of a public school system. Which will allow the Right to close this department and happily practice the libertarian philosophy of IGMFU under an official flag.

Myron Ebell at EPA will similarly gut and reduce that department, to the point that it no longer can do anything but issue useless and ignored recommendations to the companies that will happily pollute and contribute to an acceleration of global warming.

Jeff Sessions at Justice will do very little to actually seek justice for the people of this country, but he will spend time pursuing his political opponents and those people that Pence wants punished for what the Right sees as their sins. Equal protection for all? Not under Sessions, who’s been noted for racism and who will have a blanket go-ahead to restore what the Right sees as Order to various communities around the country. That means a much more aggressive policing approach and an assumption that non-whites are aggressors. That means an assumption that a Middle Eastern immigrant is a terrorist until proven innocent. That means a studied refusal to recognize hate crimes and injustices against the LGBT community, among many others. And it means that more emphasis will be placed on deporting as many immigrants as possible, in the name of “securing” the country. I note that Bill O’Reilly is already advocating for an “illegal immigrant registry” – something that should chill anyone in that situation. What he’s saying is that a Sessions Justice Dept would demand that immigrants give their name, address, etc, and then hope that ICE doesn’t immediately deport them. O’Reilly has to know that the actual result of the deportations and mandated registries will be that most of these people will retreat to the shadows as fast as they can. Which means that they’ll be at the mercy of employers who will pay them even less than they already do, and they will have no recourse. Which is of course what the various agro companies really wanted in the first place – an employee pool of terrified people who don’t dare say anything about lousy working conditions and pay.

We could go on – hawks throughout the Defense Department, anti-Cuban activists in Treasury, etc, etc, etc.

What do all these people have in common, other than the fact that some of them have never really held a public office and have no idea what to do there? The fact that pretty much all of these people are fundamentally opposed to the existence of the departments they will be supervising. In other words, government agencies being run by those who hate those agencies and would rather that they did not exist. We really shouldn’t be surprised that this is who Mike Pence is appointing, and we shouldn’t be surprised when the result is to radically shrink those departments or end them entirely.

Truman may be correct in his predictions, although I’m hoping that not all of that will go that far. (I don’t think they’ll be able to touch Social Security, as much as they want to).

David hits the nail on the head – these guys have been acting like sore winners from the moment they squeaked in on November 8th. Wallace’s behavior here is exactly what we’ve been seeing, and will be seeing for the next several years – outright bullying and nastiness. Get ready for the Year of the Bully.

Ellen is correct to note that the overall point is that Clinton easily won the popular vote in a landslide over Trump. If the Right wants to talk about 62.5 million voters choosing Trump’s viciousness, that’s fine. The response is that 65 million chose Clinton, so how does Fox News wish to answer that. Squeaking by in multiple counties does not constitute a landslide for Trump or any mandate for him to do the damage he’s doing. It constitutes squeaking by and then running away with the football to scream “I won! I won! It wasn’t even close!”

Seriously, this is the kind of thing that used to get kids sent to bed without their supper.

Again, we really need to keep an eye on Pence more than Trump here. Pence is the one who will be making these decisions. Trump is a distraction – albeit a hugely offensive one. While everyone looks at him and has a conniption fit, Pence will be quietly rolling back the world.

I hear you David, but we should not have any doubts about whether these guys are going to behave with any decency or not.

Trump isn’t even the one who’s going to be running this Administration. It’s really going to be the presidency of Mike Pence, who will push everything all the way over to the Far Right. Even a cursory glance at the cabinet positions they’ve announced so far is testament to a truly dangerous White House. While Pence is busy tearing up much of what we have understood to be our country, Trump will be out on the rally trail, as they previewed some 6 months ago. Pence will do the actual work and Trump will be out there “making America Great again”.

I have no uncertainty or even dread over what these people are going to do – they’ve already made that clear. I do have a great sadness for the people of this country and for the people of the world, for what we are about to see occur.

I agree that it will be necessary for those principled people who choose to stay in the US to be prepared to physically defend themselves. Be aware that having an attack dog may not actually protect you from harm – if anything, these guys could try to twist the situation to accuse you of assault rather than the other way around. But people need to be ready to deal with continual verbal and physical harassment. My point about that is that the far Right has been emboldened by the election. We see repeated examples of this now occurring virally. The worst was the kids in the schoolrooms taunting the other kids. But we also have had the various Trumpers verbally attacking servers in restaurants, coffee shops and stores. And we had the real winner on the Delta flight who screamed at the other passengers for several minutes before being banned for life from Delta. That’s just the beginning. I don’t think it will help anyone to just hope these guys go away. They won’t. Bullies never do, until they are humiliated themselves. Right now, they feel loud and proud – and that makes them extremely dangerous. My thought is that if one of them tries an assault, make sure you have some kind of witness or video record of it. If you can call the police, it’s best to handle it that way.

My point about people wanting to step outside the country until this madness is over is simply that there are a large number of principled people who don’t want the label of what will be happening here. In the same way that we had the Not In My Name group when the Bush/Cheney people chose to viciously attack various countries around the world 14 years ago. This will be more extreme and more violent, going in both directions. I can completely understand anyone not wanting to be in the middle of the situation, and wanting to be able to get some distance from it. In fact, I encourage getting as much distance away from these people as possible.

I suppose I’m simply used to the misogyny at Fox News. I’m more interested in the topic they were discussing on the 28th – note how they are continuing to bang the drum about prosecuting the Clintons. This continues to be discussed multiple times a day on different shows across their spectrum, both on Fox News and on Fox Business. This is not an accident and we should understand what it means.

Trump’s Gloat-a-Thon a couple of nights ago featured a chilling moment of the entire crowd screaming and chanting “LOCK HER UP!” while the new President-elect stood there grinning and enjoying the viciousness. Anyone who thinks that Jeff Sessions will not be working as a priority to indict the Clintons and everyone around them is fooling themselves, to be frank.

Never, never underestimate the hate these people have for Democrats, and for the Clintons in specific.

Trump has made clear that he has no interest in the nuts and bolts of actually doing the job as President. That work will be done by Mike Pence, per the agreement we heard about last summer. Trump’s self-assigned task will be in doing plenty of these victory lap tours and rallies to promote himself and “Make America Great Again”. The real work will be done by the Pence Administration.

There was an interesting article on CNN’s website this morning about concerns of the LGBT clergy community about what will happen to their rights under the incoming presidency. I was frankly surprised to see them wondering – these guys have made what will happen extremely clear. Pence’s entire career has been about hating and shunning them – of course he’s going to take actions to attack them. Did they think that Donald Trump would appoint a Supreme Court justice who would stick up for them for even a split second? Really?

Fox News is already changing up its approach on economic news. They spent an interesting amount of time on Friday trying to talk down any influence President Obama has had on the economy and trying to pre-emptively set up a discussion for the next few years in terms of Donald Trump getting full credit if the economy does well. Given that his behavior is guaranteed to do the opposite, I have to wonder how quickly Fox News will blame Obama for the recession after Trump provokes China into calling in its markers.

John, I truly hope you’re right. I just don’t see that situation happening, given what we are already seeing in the works.

Trump isn’t going to be calling the shots on a lot of this in any case. He can be counted on to provide is a lot of sideshow theatrics and chest-pounding and flat-out bullying, but he’s not going to spend a lot of time noodling on about policy. That work will be done by Mike Pence and the Far Right people surrounding him. Trump may demand certain things happen, but the real work will be done by the Pence team.

The other part of this is that the crowds who Trump wants to satisfy have been whipped up into a complete hatred of Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’ve been whipped into a frenzy of wanting to see the ACA trashed and Hillary Clinton thrown headfirst into the slammer. This group wants to see a massive cement wall built on the Mexican border and they want to see Mexico’s President forced to bow down to Trump and pay for it himself. I’m not sure how Trump can really accomplish the final idea, but Pence’s team can easily accomplish the first two goals apace. They’ll gut the ACA right away and do a few victory laps over that one. Jeff Sessions will then go through the steps of pursuing criminal cases against the Clintons. I’m sure we’ll hear a lot about deportations as well over the next year or two. And we’ll hear about the young Borks that Pence’s team will put on the Supreme Court.

I don’t think the Trump base understands that many of these various actions will actually hurt them in the long term – they just want the visceral satisfaction of knowing they killed the ACA or that they were able to see the Clintons frog-marched the way these guys know everyone wanted to see Karl Rove and Dick Cheney paraded.

This is not a surprise, unfortunately. Trump was very clear about the hateful work he intended to encourage during the campaign. And he was clear that his Vice President would actually be the one calling the shots – namely Mike Pence, as we’ve now seen.

So there’s an underlying floor of Far-Right travelers with Pence who will be filling most of the Cabinet and doing the grim work the GOP has threatened for 8 years. This includes Price, Sessions, Pompeo, McFarland and others, even including Gorka. And then you have the REALLY wild picks from Trump himself, like Bannon and Sarah Palin. Make no mistake, this is going to be a full rogue’s gallery of angry right wingers, many of whom are seriously compromised. I honestly don’t see how they can get out of the first year of a Trump Administration without a major graft scandal coming out.

But the bigger flourishes and the Trump tweeting stories will obscure the nastier stuff that’s actually happening behind the scenes. Keep in mind that they’re putting people into these positions who are actually opposed to the very purpose of those agencies. Sessions as AG won’t be trying to protect anyone’s civil rights, unless you’re in his ethnic group – expect aggressive Justice Dept attacks on all other groups. And expect a fairly vigorous investigation and prosecution of political enemies like the Clintons. Price in his position isn’t going to be looking out for the health of most Americans. He’s there to make sure the ACA is completely gutted as quickly as possible. The Congress will effectively repeal and defund everything it can by the 20th of January, and Price will make sure that whatever is left is inactive after that. Price is apparently also quite interested in attacking both Medicare and Medicaid – which could turn into a major problem in the coming years.

And that’s not even getting into the fairly dangerous posture Trump and Pence’s people are planning to take as far as Iran, Cuba, China and the rest of the world. We already know that Pence’s people intend to walk away from the Cubans and the Iranians in a huff, and that this group will abandon any efforts to work with anyone else in the world on Climate Change. And we know that they intend to erase every single thing that Barack Obama did in office aside from appointing two Supreme Court justices. It’s what they do next that’s troubling.

Hannity is simply reflecting what he correctly sees as the new trend of the country: Unabashed bullying. Meanness. Viciousness.

We need to be prepared for this kind of behavior, and a lot more of it. Hannity certainly won’t be stopping this anytime soon. He intends to get away with as much of it as he can, for as long as he can – just as the new Trump Administration will be doing the same on a national level.

So it makes perfect sense that he would go on the attack against everybody else in the entire media system. Doesn’t matter whether that makes any sense. He just hates them and he thinks he has the cover of Trump’s squeaker to get away with this stuff. For now, he does. In a couple of years, if Trump’s presidency is mired in scandal, corruption and an even angrier electorate? Probably not so much.

But I find it chilling that he’s using language like “colluding” to discuss how the media called Trump out on his repeated hateful statements and his falsehoods. Saying that journalism somehow translates to “colluding with Hillary Clinton” is a REALLY scary piece of business. Hannity is trying to get away with saying that if you don’t fully support someone like Trump, you are somehow conspiring with an enemy. Hannity has also described Dems and Clinton supporters as “evil”. It’s frankly troubling to see Hannity not only getting away with the bullying and the meanness, but now taking his attacks to that level. And this is only the beginning.

Conway’s threat about the upcoming Clinton prosecution is not an idle one. It’s actually quite revealing. Trump’s “magnanimous” posture was always intended to give him cover so that he could claim to not be retaliating via the Justice Dept when Sessions predictably decides he has plenty of smoke from which to cobble together a case.

Between Sessions, Giuliani and the general hatred of the Clintons and the Obama Administration by House GOP members, I don’t see how this situation doesn’t lead to indictments by next summer – just in time to be political theater when Trump is struggling to get some things through Congress.

The issue over the show prosecution has never been whether they would do it – they very much want to. The issue was whether Trump would look petty doing it.

Since Clinton has had the temerity to go along with any recounts, it’s clear that Trump is predictably following schoolyard bully rules. If you challenge the bully after he takes your lunch money and your homework, he really has to give you that bloody nose in front of everyone. And that is exactly what will happen here. Expecting Trump to follow any other course would be like expecting the sun to rise in the west.

BTW I would not be surprised to hear about Palin, Bolling and Ingraham being appointed within the next three weeks. And that doesn’t get into what payback Huckabee is hoping to receive, if he doesn’t just go back to Fox News with a big raise for his weekend show. Having Giuliani and Gingrich in this cabinet is already a given. It’s the OTHER guys in the horror show that will make this situation a tad more interesting…

The Dems are frankly running very scared right now, which they shouldn’t be. They actually won the popular vote and only got squeaked by in the EC because enough Obama voters chose not to show up at the polls. (And are undoubtedly kicking themselves thoroughly now)

The GOP is going to press the “mandate” they think they have right now to push through as much radical stuff as they can during the first 100-200 days of Trump in the White House. The Dems will make some noises about opposing this stuff but they don’t have the votes to stop it unless they intend to be just as obstructive as the GOP was with Obama. And it’s a lose-lose for the Dems on that front. If they obstruct everything (which I don’t recommend), then the GOP gets to say “See! The Dems are doing it too! No moral high ground for them!” If they don’t obstruct everything, the GOP will do a LOT of damage, including the aforementioned tax code changes that could really punch the middle class in another year.

When it comes to the SC, Fox News had a laughing panel of conservative WSJ voices on yesterday. This included our old friend James Taranto, who distinguished himself a few years back by openly calling President Obama “a pathetic little man” on the air. The panel sneered at Chuck Schumer saying that the Dems would oppose any SC nominee who isn’t “mainstream”, noting that Schumer has to say something to appease his base but that he’ll cave so he can try to protect his Senate seats for the 2018 campaigns. They’re correct on that point, but the sneering made it extremely difficult to stomach. The panel also made it clear that Fox News and the Right already know they’re going to get a Far-Right 45-year old judge from Trump’s list to replace Scalia right off the bat. And they know that Trump will only be using that list of Far-Right judges for any SC appointment. What the Right is actually more interested in seeing is whether Kennedy or another justice comes off. Kennedy is 80 years old, and could easily retire within Trump’s first term. If he does so, the court swings solidly to the Far-Right and Roberts becomes the regular swing vote. At that point, decisions like Roe become a lot harder to sustain. And if Ginsburg or Breyer retires, there would no longer be any swing votes – it would be 6 Far-Right to 3 Liberals. Not even a chance then. And we’d be looking at 5 of those Far-Right justices being fairly young, so that this fun would continue for another 20-30 years.

The nastiest part of the panel was the open threat that if the Dems choose to filibuster an SC nominee, Donald Trump would go to their swing state and hold rallies and campaign against those Dem Senators. Funny to hear that, given that Hannity and others on Fox News regularly derided Obama as the “campaigner in chief”. Guess it’s now a good thing to do if it’s Donald Trump on the case.

I heard from one close relative that he attended a Thanksgiving dinner in the Los Angeles area on Thursday, and was shocked to be confronted at the door by one of the party guests, possibly the host. He was specifically asked to which party he belongs. He told the man that he was a registered GOP voter, which is the truth. The party’s host/guest then angrily responded “Good! Because we weren’t going to let any liberals in here anyway!” It would appear the bullying trend is going wider than we could have anticipated.