Sean Hannity, the would-be Rush Limbaugh in waiting, the guy who couldn’t find enough conspiracy theories to peddle about President Obama, gloating? Who’d have thunk it?

Of course, he’s gloating a bit prematurely – since he doesn’t know what is actually in that report. Presumably, if the report shows things he doesn’t like, he’ll be back to challenging it.

But under his assumption that it’s a rosy story the Pence White House, he’s taking the George Zimmerman approach here – telling everyone to accept the report and move on, nothing to see here. I’m surprised that he didn’t predict that the “libtards” would be rioting in the streets.

Doug Schoen has no basis to be speaking about anything for Democratic campaigns, since he and Pat Caddell went public with their demand that President Obama not run for re-election in 2012. Schoen has been a reliable patsy at Fox News for over a decade, collecting a large paycheck to say things like this.

I note that it’s a little early for Schoen to be doing an end zone dance for the Pence White House and the 2020 election. In reality, this is an extremely unpopular presidency, and potentially the most incompetent one we’ve ever seen. (It’s possible that the W/Cheney White House was more inept, but that remains to be played out.) Most Americans are increasingly unhappy with the way that Pence has been governing and extremely unhappy with the constant tantrums from Pence’s spokesman. Most Americans are unhappy with having been lied to about the massive tax increase many of them received. Most Americans are unhappy with the childish tone the Republicans have been taking over the past decade. And the only reason that the Pence White House is even in existence is because 2-3 million Dems in the swing states failed to show up in 2016. If those Dems show up in 2020, as a few of them did in 2018, that’s it for Pence and his spokesman. Granted, if the Dems stay home again in the swing states, then Pence will get another 4 years to romp. But it’s not a guarantee that things will go Pence’s way.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize this incompetent White House, and they go far beyond whether anyone wants to impeach them. Although it’s touching to see the Right Wing showing such concern for any Democratic politician or voter wanting to see an impeachment. Time after time on Fox News, we keep hearing these GOP pundits intoning with a sigh about how it was such a mistake for them to impeach President Clinton and how they just want to make sure the Dems don’t make the same mistake today. Riiiiiiight. In reality, the Right Wing is DELIGHTED that they impeached President Clinton. They’d do it again today if they could. They’re overjoyed to have put that asterisk onto his presidency. They can always say (and they always do) that Clinton was impeached as part of any first sentence spoken about him. I’d buy their crocodile tears here a bit more if they weren’t so obviously full of something else.

This segment was typical of the gloating we’ll be seeing en masse at Fox News and Right Wing media outlets over the next few weeks. (And I note they are gloating without even knowing what is in the report, which is not a wise idea…)

Hemingway was indeed smirking through both of her lengthy commentaries (she was given the most time to speak and was not challenged on any of the numerous lies she told). Her intent was to repeat the usual Right Wing propaganda spins about the story, hoping that she might get the “last word” on it. From the beginning of the Pence White House’s occupation, we’ve had this Right Wing sneer running that really plays like the schoolyard taunt of “I’m rubber and you’re glue and everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” The problem with that sneer is not only that it’s childish (like everything else in the Pence White House) but also that it shows a complete inability to deal with facts and reality.

Hemingway once again complained about how long the probe has been going on, with no irony about the fact that the GOP spent far longer chasing President Clinton, President Obama and Hillary Clinton on baseless conspiracy theories, including wasting millions of dollars and years of the Congress’ time on the Benghazi attack. Hemingway bemoaned that the time spent on this investigation somehow ruined the first two years of the Pence White House, which is again ironic – she was delighted to champion any and every single possible charge against the Obama White House.

Hemingway repeatedly lied here about the basis for the Mueller Probe, saying that it was only about a “Russian narrative” of Trump being a Russian agent and implying that there was no reason for the surveillance or the indictments that have happened. She was hoping you won’t notice that actually there was a lot of fishy behavior by Trump associates that triggered the investigations and the warrants – not just the one dossier. Hemingway repeated the Right Wing lie that the investigation was just a “political operation…secretly bought by Hillary Clinton and the DNC”. One more time: The Steele Dossier was requested, initiated and funded by REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES – it only moved over to the Dems after Trump clinched the nomination.

Hemingway also lied about the indictments we’ve seen, playing the Right Wing card that these were all just for “process crimes” that happened because of trick questions. In reality, the individuals, including Michael Flynn, usually pled to lesser charges than the ones they could have faced. Any IDIOT with a minute of experience with prosecution would know this. And bigger fish like Paul Manafort were convicted of extremely serious crimes, which is why he will wind up in prison for years.

Hemingway finished with what sounds like the new Right Wing spin about Mueller, assuming that his report doesn’t take the Pence White House too much to task for their behavior – that being that this report is just a whitewash of “reckless actions” by the FBI leading up to the probe. Which is complete nonsense, but it helped Hemingway once again throw in the notion that there should now be prosecutions of Hillary Clinton and all of her staff, since Hemingway thinks that somehow Clinton was caught lying and wasn’t treated the same as the Pence folk. (In reality, all the wasted time on the Benghazi and email investigations of Hillary Clinton resulted in the conclusion that no crimes were committed – and the Clinton people were extremely forthcoming in discussing whatever was asked, as opposed to the stonewalling by the Pence White House).

Hemingway took an ominous tone, saying that “there needs to be a reckoning” for anyone who said anything other than that Donald Trump is a saint. (Tucker Carlson would repeat this an hour later, expressly demanding that Trump pardon Roger Stone and demanding that all the Dems he hates resign immediately along with Jeff Zucker at CNN. If I were Tucker Carlson, I’d be thinking a bit more about how all his sponsors have abandoned his program and how perhaps there’s someone he knows a lot better who should be thinking about resigning.) Hemingway tried to take a moral tone about how this was about needing “to speak truth to power” when it comes to FBI investigations. Hemingway ignored that people have been speaking truth to power throughout the attempted bullying by the Pence White House, and have been met by open derision by Trump and his sycophants. Jeff Mason of Reuters tried to respond to Hemingway’s nonsense by pointing out that the reckoning needs to be for the people in the Pence White House who have spent 2 years attacking the FBI and Robert Mueller, including Donald Trump himself. Hemingway wasn’t having it, though. She dismissed that concern because it’s just so complicated of an issue and it could take years for everyone to understand it. (Meaning: Hemingway is giving Trump and the Pence White House an excuse to once again not apologize for their childish behavior.)

One final thing stood out for me in Hemingway’s smug lies. She played a card about how the entire investigation was about “weaponizing policy differences”, that somehow these guys were indicted just because they were Right Wingers. This is the same nonsense that Right Wingers were peddling back in the 1980s about Iran/Contra, which they said was about “the criminalization of policy differences”. Except that it’s a lie in both cases – and it’s the same lie. The Right Wing just hopes that you won’t notice it. In reality, these were matters of people committing crimes and getting caught. Period. If any policy was involved, it was being pursued through criminal means. Michael Flynn wasn’t prosecuted for saying nasty things about President Obama. He was prosecuted because he was openly working for a foreign nation, and because he was caught playing footsie with foreign agents on the phone even before he could get to the White House in 2017. Hemingway’s false moral outrage about “policy differences” might better be directed at most of the pundits at Fox News, who have repeatedly tried to bully everyone else in the country into shutting up.

Brazile is not the first Dem to fall for the Fox News offer, and she won’t be the last. They do throw a lot of money at their potential new Colmes substitutes, and it can be attractive if the Dem in question needs the cash.

Dennis Kucinich infamously did this a few years ago, and mostly spent the time kowtowing and toadying to the Fox News hosts. James Carville briefly did it a few years ago and didn’t last very long as he just didn’t want to put up with the usual Fox News nonsense.

It’s pretty clear that Brazile is doing this as a desperate move to get her some publicity and some cash for the moment. It’s also clear that the Fox News execs want Brazile because they’re hoping to get a bunch of embarrassing comments from her about how the DNC supposedly is sabotaging Bernie Sanders. It’s sad to watch someone like Brazile falling for this, but people are only human in the end.

Kent seems to think that his trolling attempt here isn’t somehow obvious to anyone reading it. He also thinks he can bully other posters here. No matter. He’s wrong on both counts and hopefully he’ll learn something about that now.

But let’s openly acknowledge that Jeanine Pirro’s bigoted comments were not about “just asking questions”. They were bigotry, pure and simple. Pirro thinks she can get away with it because that’s been the m.o. at Fox News ever since the Pence White House squeaked through the swing states in 2016.

Nobody other than angry Right Wingers is “hyperventilating” about any of this, but it’s nice to know that trolling commenters like Kent are concerned about it. Unless of course, he’s not really concerned and is just making another attempt at trolling. Nobody is “afraid” of the bigoted comments being made by Pirro and her fans. People with some sense of principles are simply pointing out the bigotry.

And again, this isn’t going to end Pirro’s run at Fox News. Her most visible fan, the childish spokesman for the Pence White House, just tweeted out a mostly incoherent demand that Fox News put her back on the air post-haste.

If it were 10 or 20 years ago, I might see the possibility of allowing one Fox News anchor like Shepard Smith to be part of a debate panel for the nominees.

But I would never go along with having Fox News actually host anything like a presidential debate. They are not a legitimate news service and their intentions have been clear throughout their existence. Allowing them to pretend to be objective news anchors just helps angry Right Wingers perpetuate their myths about the channel and about the media in general.

And the problems with Fox News and its propaganda aims have only become more focused and unpleasant with the advent of the Pence White House. Fox News is fully committed to Pence, and is enjoying the fact that its edicts are regularly followed by Pence’s angry Twitter spokesman. The only thing a Democratic candidate would accomplish by doing anything on Fox News today would be to fall into various “gotcha!” traps and to provide soundbites that would no doubt be taken out of context for maximum embarrassment value. Even the Fox News hosts have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted. Smith is the only one with even a modicum of interest in actual journalism, and he’s tainted by the fact that he’s happily stayed at this network throughout all their multiple documented problems.

I agree that a broader audience will tune in to whichever channel hosts a general election presidential debate. But that broader audience would do a lot better if they are shown a debate on an actual news network and not Fox News. The Fox News execs should be told, flat out, “You have spent the past decade pushing vicious propaganda and smears and you are not legitimate. You have sown hatred and lies. You need to think about your behavior and do something to show the American people that you understand that what you’ve done is wrong. You are not an appropriate venue for any legitimate candidate.”

I note that Pence’s angry Twitter spokesman has stated that he doesn’t wish to have any debates on any network BUT Fox News, which I suppose likely means that there will not be any debates with him. On the other hand, Trump is a terrible debater so he’s frankly just sparing himself another embarrassment like the ones we saw in 2016.

And there was even a Fox News situation with Carlson in 2011, reported on right here, about Greta van Susteren calling him out on his behavior. (Of course she was only doing so because Carlson had the nerve to say misogynist things about Sarah Palin, but at least she noticed SOMETHING.)

Carlson probably has the most in common with Greg Gutfeld. Both men regularly say the most outrageous things they think they can get away with – in the hopes that they’ll get more attention.

No reaction from Fox News personalities to the Pence White House’s spokesman screaming that he won’t debate anywhere BUT on Fox News.

Fox News is not a legitimate journalist organization and there is no reason for anyone not in the Trump camp to want to appear there. Fox News has no interest in asking “tough questions” of Democratic candidates. They want to ask “gotcha questions”. And there’s a BIG difference. With the former, which can come from real journalists, there is a chance for a candidate to show how they deal with a real issue and a real challenge. With the latter, which is all Fox News has been doing for the past two decades, the only opportunity is for a Fox News pundit to ask nonsense questions like “When did you stop beating your children?”

Fox News, like the rest of Right Wing media, has spent the past three years in a non-stop bullying campaign, where they have tried to shove the rest of the country’s nose in the dung, gloating all the while. When this epoch of our history is finished, hopefully in less than 2 years, there will be no way for Right Wing media to walk back their conduct. People who engaged in this behavior, emboldened by Trump and his acolytes, will have to own their bigotry and accept the judgment of the rest of the country.

Donald Trump is now threatening not to have any debates on any network but Fox News. Sounds like we may not have any debates next year. Let’s see how it turns out.

Fox News is not a legitimate news service, and the names they’ve cited are not legitimate journalists. Bret Baier and Martha McCallum and Chris Wallace have all been exhaustively proven to be partisan promoters. Fox News should be thinking not about the debates but rather how it will deal with accounting for itself in the event that Dems show up for the 2020 election. Because they will not be able to walk back their shameful conduct over the past two decades and their openly outrageous conduct of the past three years.

Sean Hannity can try to claim 1st Amendment protection, but it won’t work in this case. He wasn’t interviewing Michael Cohen on the air, and frankly, he isn’t considered a journalist.

Hannity has bumbled into admitting multiple personal, non-Fox News conversations with a known felon, specifically concerning the matters for which he was convicted and for which conflicting testimony has been offered. It’s not only appropriate for him to be subpoenaed by prosecutors and Congress, it’s actually a legal obligation that they do it.

The only way Hannity can avoid actually saying anything now is to plead the 5th, and that might actually be more interesting. It’s possible of course that Hannity could just state under oath that he has no idea what he’s talking about – perhaps try the “Alex Jones” defense of saying he’s just an entertainer playing a part on TV when he says this stuff. That might be nearly as interesting as watching him plead the 5th.

Either way, he has put himself into this position.

Two things to note here:

1. Hannity’s interview has likely exposed him to being subpoenaed by the SDNY prosecutors, since he’s inadvertently confessed that he and Michael Cohen discussed the Stormy Daniels payoff – specifically who was writing checks and who knew what when. Since this was not something that would have been covered by any attorney/client privilege for Hannity and both he and Cohen were openly discussing the matter, this means that Hannity can be compelled under criminal penalty to answer questions about it. There are times when his smug attitude gets him into a LOT of trouble, and this one is a big one.

2. Regarding Otto Warmbier, there’s been a lot of people using that case for their own political purposes. Trump made a big deal out of it as part of his “I’m Tough on North Korea” stance, but it was clear then and now that he really didn’t care one whit about Warmbier or his family. At that time, the GOP hawks were trying to wave Warmbier around like a human flag, as a way of saying the Dems were too weak to handle the monsters in North Korea. Now we have the Dems trying to wave Warmbier around like a flag, since Trump has once again humiliated himself with an embarrassing public statement. Trump’s new statement just provides further proof of his character and attitude – Warmbier was useful to him as a propaganda tool in 2017, but not so much now.

3. The reality of what happened with Warmbier is discussed at length in the GQ article. The Right Wing certainly played with what were in the end just rumors that he had been physically tortured or beaten, but there is no evidence of anything like that. What we do know is that he was caught pulling a fairly typical college prank – trying to bring back a propaganda poster from a hotel display during his New Year’s trip at the end of 2015. It was a stupid move, but nothing that he thought would have consequences this severe. When the North Koreans caught him at it, they wildly overreacted and used him (much as the pundits in the US would later) as a tool for their own purposes. They repeatedly threatened and intimidated him into signing a bizarre confession and then convicted him in a kangaroo court and sentenced him to 15 years at hard labor. The evidence indicates Warmbier never made it to the hard labor – he instead suffered a catastrophic neurological injury very soon after his sentencing. This could have been caused by some kind of allergic reaction (not botulism) or it could even have been Warmbier attempting suicide – something the GQ article points out is not uncommon when foreigners have been given outrageous and vicious sentences like this. Based on the various bits of information, I would speculate he may have used sleeping pills, but there’s no way to ever know for sure. What is clear is that the North Koreans were now holding an effectively brain-dead prisoner, which would not be helpful for them once the word got out – so they clammed up about his status for over a year, which only fueled the Right Wing fire back in the US about it.

4. The Right Wing talking point from 2016 through to Warmbier’s release and death in 2017 was that President Obama was “too weak” to deal with the North Koreans and that they would never have done this to Otto Warmbier if a strong Republican was in the White House. The evidence we have shows this to be complete nonsense. No matter who the president was, the North Koreans would have behaved in the same way – they would have used Warmbier as a propaganda tool with the thought of trading him later on for some concession by the US. He would have been threatened in the same way and been sentenced to the same outrageous hard labor sentence. And under the same circumstances, if my reading of the facts is correct, the same fate would have occurred for him. The situation was effectively over the moment the brain injury happened – and no matter who the president was, the North Koreans would have fumbled the following year while trying to figure out how to explain what had happened. The only difference we would have seen is that Fox News would have adjusted their narrative to eliminate the attack on President Obama, and would have instead taken the tack that this was just more evidence of the inhumanity of the North Koreans. In the same way that Fox News is now desperately trying to explain away Trump’s discarding of the Warmbier narrative now that he doesn’t really need it anymore.

In the end, the Warmbier story is a sad one, and one that shows us a lot about people’s willingness to believe propaganda – and about the craven behavior of politicians to create propaganda as a way to manipulate those people.

Now that we’ve had an evening to digest everything from yesterday, a few things are clear.

1. Fox News and Right Wing media were desperately trying to spin attention toward the Vietnam Summit, as they were hoping that the Pence White House would secure an incredible diplomatic breakthrough there. Instead, Trump stomped out, and it became obvious that nothing had been achieved there other than Trump completely embarrassing himself on the world stage yet again.

2. Mark Meadows’ tokening move was blatantly racist. His frantic attempt to hide behind “some of my family members are people of color” was shameful. That doesn’t change that he used a staffer as a prop for his nonsensical “gotcha” attempt at Cohen. Meadows has made racist comments before, one of which really making the rounds yesterday – his vicious public statement in 2012 that a proper election result would send President Obama “back to Kenya or wherever he comes from”. If Meadows does not wish to be called out for his bigotry, he might consider not engaging in it.

3. Cohen could not discuss a lot of the really serious stuff in public yesterday, because it’s under investigation at the moment and classified. He said in public what he could, which was bad enough for the Pence White House.

4. Watching the angry House GOP members scream at Cohen was interesting – we were seeing them literally eating their own. It wasn’t that long ago that they were celebrating him and defending him. Now they’re all turning on him in public so they can defend the Pence White House and its childish spokesman. This doesn’t make Cohen any better of a person, but it does speak volumes about who these people are.

5. Ellen makes a crucial point – if Cohen is not to be believed based on his past perjuries, then why should anyone listen to the Pence White House or its spokesman? When it comes to lying, Cohen is an amateur by comparison – and a bunch of his lies were at the direction of the Pence White House.

6. In a single hearing, Elijah Cummings has made clear what a sham the GOP made out of these committees over the past few years.

Richard brings up a valid point about Juan Williams. I agree that it’s painful to watch him repeatedly play the Alan Colmes part on “The Five” and frankly every Fox News show where he appears, but he signed up for this.

After his latest bigoted comments in 2010 were appropriately called out, Roger Ailes made a point of giving Williams 2 million dollars over three years to go all the way with Fox News. (Williams had previously been back and forth between Fox News and NPR – until his bigoted comments offended enough people at NPR that he could no longer host or work there.)

Williams agreed to take on the Bob Beckel/Alan Colmes role of “docile liberal who doesn’t really push back”, although like Beckel, Williams would occasionally toss off bigoted remarks himself. The main point of “The Five” these days appears to be for Gutfeld and Watters to strut their stufff. They smugly declare how much fun they’re having with the Pence White House in power, and then angrily decry anything Williams tries to say and cut him off before he can get too far.

It’s hard for me to generate sympathy for Williams – it’s not like he didn’t know the package he was buying here. The saddest part of this for Williams is that he really can’t go back. NPR won’t take him back and I can’t think of any other outlet that would want him, given his record. Like Greta van Susteren and the others, he’s not a reputable person at this point. (Frankly, I’ve only seen a few people transition out of Fox News and they were usually not given the prominence or the money that Williams has received.) To my mind, Williams made his bed.

Besides the fact that Carlson is viciously projecting here, it’s clear that the Right Wing approach to dealing with this problem is to pretend it doesn’t exist.

It’s frankly shameful how the Right Wing thinks it’s okay to attack the Southern Poverty Law Center rather than acknowledge the truth. And making nonsensical absolute statements like Carlson is knowingly doing here doesn’t disprove the facts.

The reality is that there are still plenty of bigots and plenty of bigotry in this country, and the ascension of the Pence White House has given many of them license to come out and let their inner hater fly. By gaslighting the entire situation, angry Right Wing pundits like Carlson are working to allow the bigots and the would-be bullies to get away with as much violence as possible – because who are you going to believe – Tucker Carlson or your own lying eyes?

Seriously?

Here we go with Whack-A-Mole part 385.

I’m really thinking that the Right Wing is starting to panic about next year’s election and they’re hoping to use this to drum up their base. Because this is complete nonsense.

The Mississippi law, which should be struck down like all the ones before it, is not intended to save lives. It is intended to force any pregnant woman to carry the fetus all the way to term. It’s intended to punish women who are sexually active, and it’s intended to doubly punish women who have been sexually attacked. The Right’s wish to force women to give birth to fetuses where their nervous systems are outside their bodies is medieval.

The only other reason I can think for these guys to want to push this garbage is that they’re correctly thinking that the current Supreme Court is almost certainly going to strip most of Roe v Wade within the next year by allowing the various states to limit and ban procedures within their borders. Meaning that this will no longer be a right for women across many Red States.

It’s frankly sickening to see these people trying to push this attack, and even more sickening to see them trying to take a moral high ground while they do it.

While it’s fun to listen to this, the whole thing goes off the rails the second Bregman made it personal. He basically stooped to Carlson’s level, and that doesn’t accomplish anything in the end.

The lawsuit is a frivolous nonsense suit. it’s being bankrolled by wealthy, angry Right Wingers who want to attack Bezos and the Washington Post.

The best case scenario I can see for Wood is that the suit is immediately tossed out of court and the wealthy backers are required to pay the Post’s attorneys fees. That and hopefully a warning to Wood that he’s risking sanctions if he files any more of these nonsense suits to waste the court’s time.

If the case isn’t immediately tossed, things get worse for the plaintiffs. Because a lawsuit against journalists immediately sets up a massive countersuit under anti-SLAPP laws. And I’d recommend that the countersuit be for the exact same amount of money – $250 million, as a way to teach these people a lesson about trying this game.

The Post is not going to settle a suit like this, because doing so would just encourage more of these biased attorneys to come out of the woodwork and try to get their own payout. Given Bezos’ resources, the more likely scenario is that they’ll countersue, hang tough, and make clear to the Sandmanns that they will not be intimidated out of doing their work.

It’s not too late for the Sandmanns to drop the suit and issue a humble public apology to Nathan Phillips and the Native American community. I’d recommend they get going on it. There’s no money in these hills.

The whack-a-mole is quickly becoming ridiculous. These deplorables just keep repeating lie after lie and figure that nobody will call them on it.

BTW – I would note that Fox News and Right Wing pundits are responsible for more than just the Colorado clinic attack. There have been plenty of other instances of violence, of women being threatened while trying to go into various clinics. And let’s not forget about disgraced former host Bill O’Reilly’s campaign for the death of George Tiller.

I’m beginning to get the impression that Fox News is becoming panicked about 2020. They seem to be trying to play up this nonsense about pro-choice laws to see if they can distract their viewers from the reality of things like how the “Tax Cut” didn’t help them and in fact raised taxes for many of them.

I’m sure Nauert will be back on Fox News, with a substantial raise, in little time. She’s done exactly what they wanted her to do – they see her as a good soldier and they will reward her accordingly. If anything, they will now treat her as a veteran White House staffer.

I agree with Bemused regarding the trolls at Fox News.

I actually meant the Trump supporters throughout the country who’ve been throwing vicious bigotry at everyone else for the past couple of years. I mean the guy at your local pub who thinks it’s now okay to say all the racist garbage he’s been keeping to himself for decades. The Facebook friend who suddenly has started spouting viciousness at anyone who questions the Pence White House. When this epoch is finished, these guys are in a real quandary.