Laura Ingraham’s viciousness is well-known. As is the viciousness of Toensing and DiGenova. I particularly enjoy how they’re trying to shoehorn in the notion that it was so wrong for the Obama White House to hold James Rosen accountable for his behavior, but it’s absolutely right for the Pence White House to jail reporters for not toeing the line.

When this miserable epoch of our history is finished, the enablers like Ingraham will not be able to walk back their behavior. They’ll have to own up to their hypocrisy and viciousness in the public square.

I don’t wish ill to anyone, and nobody wishes for a terrible illness to happen. But we should not forget that Krauthammer was a loud voice at Fox News railing against the Affordable Care Act and any effort to provide medical coverage to the uninsured, while he was himself enjoying wonderful care thanks to his position as a very well-paid pundit and panelist since 1990. He also advocated for the invasion of Iraq and started the whole nonsensical “controversy” about the Churchill bust that the Right Wing glommed onto as yet another reason to attack Barack Obama.

He is an extremely intelligent man. It’s just a shame that the last 30 years of his life was spent primarily advocating for various positions that cost other people their livelihoods and many times, their lives. He doesn’t get a pass from that.

He, like Ralph Peters, is understandably ashamed of the Republicans for their embrace of the bigotry of the Pence White House. But that isn’t because they’ve suddenly discovered their humanity – it’s simply because of their dislike for Trump and their distaste for the effect he’s had on propaganda outlets like Fox News.

D’Souza’s viciousness here should not be a surprise to anyone. It’s consistent with the mean-spirited way he’s behaved throughout his public life. The pardon by the Pence White House should also not be a surprise – it’s just another in a long parade of deliberate middle fingers jabbed in the face of this country by a cabal of angry Right Wingers who don’t care how they appear.

One more reminder that the 2-3 million Dems who refused to vote in 2016 did far more damage than they ever imagined. It really did make a difference whether they voted. Hope they’ve learned their lesson – midterms will be up in 5 months.

The only reason the Right Wing is trying to play this card is because they cannot answer for the open bigotry and hatred embodied in Roseanne Barr’s actions and statements. Since they cannot handle having an actual discussion about how Right Wing bigots in this country are obviously emboldened by the childish people in the White House these days, they’re resorting to what-aboutism to the nth degree.

There is a gigantic difference between what Samantha Bee did and what Roseanne Barr did, and it’s shameful of Right Wing bigots to try to muddy it up. Samantha Bee was discussing an outrageous situation being inflicted by the Pence White House at the border, where border crossers are now to be treated in a manner that is intended to make it viscerally unpleasant for them to come here. The whole point of separating the kids from the families is to get the word back to anyone else coming this way that maybe they don’t want to do this – maybe it’s so unpleasant and awful that they’d be better off going back to the violence they were fleeing. It’s the same idea that propelled the Right Wing into advocating that we set up a border processing station inside Mexico so that emigres would not be able to even enter the US and thus could be barred from any relief while waiting for their claims to be heard. It’s the same idea that prompted Right Wing pundits to champion attempted murderers Ramos & Compean for shooting a fleeing border suspect in the back 12 years ago. It’s born of hatred – hatred of the brown-skinned family that wants to come to the US whether the Right Wing wants them here or not. And for the first time, with the Pence White House in position, we have an American federal government that is openly practicing hatred toward immigrants and anyone else it can.

So Samantha Bee reacted to this situation with anger, and in her anger, she lashed out at the Tweeter-in-Chief’s daughter, asking her mother to mother if this is something she can stomach and demanding that Ivanka Trump who says she cares about this stuff DO SOMETHING about it. Unfortunately, by losing her temper and using a vulgar term (shouted from one white, privileged woman to another, so it’s not a matter of someone demeaning anyone’s race or gender or anything like that), Bee lost the moral high ground and was appropriately required to apologize for her behavior and acknowledge she’d crossed a line. And that’s really the end of it. It wasn’t hate speech. It was a mother losing her temper dealing with a group of people who have acted so hatefully and so smugly about their hatefulness that it doesn’t seem possible to reach them any other way. She shouldn’t have done it. But there we have it.

With Roseanne Barr, there’s a very, very different story. Barr has a long history of viciousness and abusiveness, going back to when her TV show was a hit back in the day. She’s long enjoyed using her position of power to attack other people in the meanest fashion available to her. She was notorious for demeaning her staff on “Roseanne” back in the 90s, to the point that the workplace was supposed to have been toxic at times. In more recent years, she’s tried to refashion herself as a “woman of the people”. She even had a show on KPFK in 2009 and tried to run a campaign as a Peace & Freedom candidate for President in 2012. But then she lurched far over to the Right Wing, followed by many other wingnuts. Her hatred of Hillary Clinton was so intense that she was willing to jump off the cliff for Trump and pretty much stated so publicly. And that doesn’t even get into the vicious comments she has regularly made about people of other ethnicities and religions from her own. Ever since we’ve had the fun of Twitter in our lives, Roseanne Barr has used it to insult and attack anyone she felt like demeaning that day. This has repeatedly included slurs against Muslims, against blacks, and pretty much anything she could get away with. Her latest salvo is the one that apparently has gotten her in hot water with ABC, and it is the reason her show has been cancelled. This wasn’t something where she just got upset that morning and unleashed an uncharacteristic comment in anger – as Bee did. This was part of a consistent pattern of hatred and bigotry. (Although it’s amusing to hear Barr try to blame the incident on Ambien…)

So the Right Wing can try to jump on their high horse, but they may find it difficult when that horse collapses under its own hypocritical weight. The Right Wing may well wish to think harder about whether they really want to shine this flashlight that brightly on their own bigotry.

This is not the first time Roseanne Barr has thrown racist insults around. She did something quite similar and equally offensive in her attack on Susan Rice in 2013. If anything, the new set of racist comments is just a continuation of something Barr has been doing for some time. The only part of the behavior that was disingenuous was her apology.

I note that the Right Wing did not always love Roseanne Barr. They were happy to excoriate her when she did her infamous Star Spangled Banner performance. But the moment she came out as a Trump supporter, all was forgiven from the Right.

Sadly, it’s increasingly likely that Hannity and the Pence White House will get away with this gambit. And this approach, as noted is nothing new to Hannity or to Fox News.

From the beginning, Fox News has been intended as a safe space for angry conservatives to hear what they want, and to poison real discussions about news with Right Wing talking points. So during the second Bill Clinton term, the approach was to play the Clinton White House as corrupt and beleaguered, to set up the narrative of the criminality of the Clintons and hopefully form the basis for a Right Wing version of their history playing them as crooks. (This was of course a response to the attention given to the real criminality of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses – the Right Wing hoped to throw the same mud onto the Clintons and thus tar everyone, which would also feed a basic narrative of “the government is totally corrupt.”)

The second that George W. Bush squeaked into office in the disputed 2000 Election (where the eventual recount showed that he actually lost the state of Florida by a tiny number of votes), Fox News changed its tune to uber-patriotism. Suddenly, the Right Wing was all about everyone standing with the President and any questioning or debating was to be seen as treasonous. When the Right Wing moves toward deregulation completely tanked the US economy and when the W White House was shown to be a hotbed of criminality, not a word was to be spoken about it on Fox News, other than to blame anything they could on the Democratic Party. Even as the real numbers for George W. Bush hit incredible lows near the end of his presidency, Fox News and Hannity celebrated him, acting as though they were in a bubble from reality.

The second that President Obama was elected, Fox News swung the pendulum hard in the opposite direction again. It was now absolutely necessary and patriotic to challenge this unworthy man at every opportunity, and to obstruct every single thing they could. Ridiculous conspiracy theories about his birth certificate were amplified, as were desperate hunts for any potential scandal or criminality. The scenario was actually even more hostile than during President Clinton’s terms, where the Right Wing had occasionally found a way to vote with everyone else to get things done as needed. With President Obama, there was to be no compromise at all – Republicans made it a point of pride to vote against everything, and to refuse to participate. The Fox News approach was to defend the Republicans as patriotic Americans and to portray President Obama as weak, inept, suspect and secretly corrupt. The result was a situation where the Right Wing grew even more distanced from reality, and even less able to hold a civil discussion with anyone outside their own circle.

With the campaign of Donald Trump and the rise of the Pence White House, Fox News found itself in a position where not only could they indulge their audience’s hatred of Democrats and non-whites, but where their propaganda would actually be used by the new Tweeter in Chief as the basis for Pence’s actions in the government. We are now in a situation where the vicious musings of Fox News hosts are being put into action by the Pence White House on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Never before in our history have we had synergy of this kind, and never before have we seen so many disastrous actions taken by the Right Wing. But they feel emboldened now, so they’re going for everything they can while they have their majorities.

From the beginning of the Mueller investigation, Fox News has worked overtime to discredit it, led by Hannity’s usually unhinged rants every weeknight. (This is in comparison to the endless investigations of President Obama’s White House, where each time we were told by a breathless Hannity that Joe Sestak, or Fast & Furious, or Lois Lerner or Benghazi was the thing that was going to lead to criminal prosecutions of everyone the Right Wing hated.) Hannity’s approach here was an amplification of the spin from Rush Limbaugh (who Hannity copies whenever he can) – to dismiss the investigation as bogus, to ridicule the facts, and to throw mud at everyone on the other side. This strategy had already worked to discourage millions of Americans from voting in 2016 (the “midterm” strategy of lowering turnout, which worked on gullible Democrats, who soured on the negative campaign and stayed home, just as the Right Wing hoped they would).

For the Mueller investigation, it’s clear that Limbaugh and therefore Hannity were concerned that the situation could result in another Watergate or Iran/Contra, where people could be forced out of office and/or prosecuted. The Right Wing response has been to circle the wagons and use the “midterm” strategy to confuse as many people as possible. The actual narrative of this matter isn’t complicated – we know that attempts were made to poison the well during the 2016 campaign, and the evidence makes clear that the Trump Campaign was happy to have this assistance and apparently participated when they could. The criminality here isn’t whether the election was actually impacted – it’s the fact that the Trump Campaign was participating in the effort. Knowing this, the Right Wing has responded with a blanket denial that the Republicans could have done anything wrong and a further spin of “I know you are, but what am I?”, which is probably fitting given the extreme childishness of the Pence White House. In addition to asserting that the Pence White House did nothing wrong and that there’s some massive conspiracy to attack poor Donald Trump, there’s the added fun of trying to blame the whole thing on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Fox News pundits have even taken the step of accusing the Democrats of being the ones to throw mud to obscure the facts, a neat reversal of reality.

The ultimate intention of Limbaugh, Hannity and Fox News is twofold. First, they want to prevent another Watergate-style collapse of a White House. As Geraldo Rivera has admitted, the idea is that if Hannity and Fox News were pulling these shenanigans in the early 70s, Nixon would never have been forced to resign. So their hope is to throw so much mud that the audience finally just tunes the whole thing out and there is no groundswell of public outrage at the criminality of the Pence White House. The second intention is a cruder one – revenge against the Democrats and particularly Hillary Clinton, for having had the temerity to run in 2016. The constant drumbeat of demands for investigations and prosecutions of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Campaign is not just for show. Fox News is advocating for the perp walk we’ve been expecting Pence to initiate on the Clintons. I’m frankly surprised we haven’t seen it happen yet. After Mueller indicts Kushner and Don Jr, I believe it will be a short period of time before Trump does exactly what Fox News and Hannity have been priming him and us for: pardons of the Trump Campaign people before they can say anything, and arrests of the Clintons, regardless of whether any charges have any basis in reality. Given the inability of the Right Wing to recognize much of reality these days, I would not be surprised to see Limbaugh and Hannity’s fans happily gloating when these things happen.

Given the likelihood of the Republicans keeping the Congress this fall, the Pence White House will almost certainly be able to survive the Mueller investigation without any casualties other than people like Flynn, who will be pardoned at some point in the process. I also expect Trump to pardon himself before leaving office, to make sure that no indictment can ever be raised in the future.

The only way to address all of this is for the Democratic voters to actually show up this November, as well as in 2018. Had they done so in 2016, we would not now be in this situation.

Carlson once again demonstrated here that he had no interest in actually having a real discussion about the issue. Like Laura Ingraham, like nearly all of the Fox News cohort, Carlson came in with a preset hypothesis – that somehow this college course was reverse racism. He then tried to inflict a false premise on Burstein, who unfortunately did not immediately flip that premise when it was first presented.

What Burstein needed to do immediately was to call Carlson out for an openly nonsensical premise, and to flip the question back at him – does Carlson seriously believe there is no such thing as racism toward non-Whites? Particularly in the USA of the Pence White House, where a massive number of hate crimes against non-Whites were documented as part of the opening salvo of bullying from the Right Wing as they viciously attacked the rest of the country a year ago? And if Carlson ducked that question, Burstein could just repeat it for him.

I honestly do not understand why any principled person would agree to go on any prime time Fox News show at this point. The hosts don’t want to hear anything other than an easy yes to one of their “Gotcha” jabs.

I’m not buying that Fox News has changed its stripes on the gun control issue or anything else. Greg Gutfeld was on the air last week saying blatant lies about a thwarted school shooting and trying to make it sound like having more armed people on school campuses was some secret solution that the evil Left doesn’t want viewers to know about.

I’m not sure why Vitter did this – it may be for him to act as though he’s somehow just as tough on GOP candidates as he is vicious toward the Democratic Party, in the same way that Laura Ingraham has played that game. Based on Vitter’s terrible record, I’m not fooled.

Fox News is still firmly in the tank for the GOP candidates running this year – their hope is to see the GOP expand their control over Congress thanks to the gerrymandering from the 2010 Census, and to then see another round of Tax Transfers and then the expected slashes to Social Security and Medicare. As for gun control, multiple Fox News hosts have made their preference clear – their solution to gun violence is More Guns in the schools.

Eyes is correct to note the nonsensical opinions of the Right Wingers frantically trying to plug their ears and shout above the cries of the parents who lost their kids in just the latest school attack. Sure, let’s have a single gate to enter any school. That’s a great idea! Wait a second – what happens if there’s a fire or another disaster? Does that mean all the kids are now trapped in the fire, kinda like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company employees back in the day? Because it didn’t work out so good for those employees…

North has no moral ground from which to speak here. He is not “a Marine”. He is a DISGRACED Marine. He is also a CONVICTED FELON. He was prosecuted and convicted for graft and for obstruction, including the destruction of documents. The only reason he didn’t serve the real jail time he deserved was due to a technicality stemming from him having admitted his crimes on television during the Iran/Contra Hearings. So he doesn’t get to talk about this kind of thing without being confronted with the truth.

If the NRA is stupid enough to select this felon as their spokesman, then there’s really nothing to say to them.

To be clear, her actual harassment suit is continuing in arbitration. I’m assuming Fox News didn’t settle hers yet as they were waiting for the outcome of the wilder accusations she made in the spying case. The fact that she wound up representing herself indicates that her usual volatility undid her case – this isn’t unusual for her. This is the same person who had no problem urging her radio listeners in 2013 to punch voters in the face if they found out they’d voted for President Obama. Just because she was badly treated by Fox News, and I have no doubt she was, doesn’t undo the terrible behavior she indulged in while she was there.

Her lawsuit contains a bunch of things I believe would have been impossible to prove in court – which is why her attorneys abandoned the case. This doesn’t mean that Fox News didn’t engage in these behaviors – just that it would been way too steep of a hill for anyone to climb before a judge. My belief is that Fox News will now settle her harassment suit – for a lot less than the others they just did.

Carlson is clearly becoming panicked over the public’s distaste for the behavior of the Right Wing and the very bullying and sneering he champions. So he’s doubling down. He has no facts to support himself, but he does have his emotional belief that he wants to see the Pence White House get away with as much destruction of President Obama’s work as possible before they’re voted out of office.

I wish that Davis had simply called Carlson out for using a false premise and for refusing to engage in a manner that would make any sense. Davis could also have pointed out that Carlson could not just behave in his usually smug and rude manner and then blame it on Davis’ commercial – if he wanted to take a higher moral ground, then that would require Carlson to have acted in a respectful manner. Carlson, of course, never had any intention of acting in a respectful manner. He just wanted a quick “gotcha” so he could post something up and say that he “destroyed” Davis when in fact the full tape shows that he did nothing more than throw a couple of cheap shots and then frantically run for cover.

I have to wonder if the continuing tightening of the noose around the Pence White House as more and more unfortunate material comes out from the various scandals and investigations is taking a personal toll on Carlson. He honestly seems to be in a desperate state.

It’s a low-end website stream that is trying to establish itself as a conservative “news” channel on cable to compete with Fox News. Some accounts have said that they’re trying to be a “kinder, gentler” version of Fox News – but as I noted below, their actual content is a lot more extreme and a lot nastier. They don’t have the major money behind them that Murdoch did when he set up Fox News, so there’s no way they can pay the massive, over-inflated salaries that are regularly dished out to Fox News personalities.

If O’Reilly winds up doing this, he would be working for a greatly reduced salary, just so he could pretend to have a major prime-time show again. Similar to Larry King doing his new “Larry King Now” as a major step down from his glory days at CNN. Except that Larry King never abased himself to my knowledge in the manner that Bill O’Reilly regularly has.

The intention here is to provoke an angry response from the rest of the Middle East if they can get one. So they make this vicious and offensive comments, hoping they’ll trigger violence somewhere, which then gives them the excuse to attack Iran and start running Bolton’s bombing campaign.

A couple of notes:

1. Yes, this scenario is obviously intended to set up the Bolton bombing campaign – presumably before the midterms.

2. I cannot bet my “tax cut” because I did not receive one. Like tens of millions of Americans, I actually got a tax INCREASE, which has lowered my paycheck by over 200 dollars per week. (I’m now finding out that they’ve messed with the withholding rates so that people think they’re getting a windfall of extra money each week, but that only means that people will owe even MORE when tax time comes next March.) This Tax Transfer and the attendant monkeying around these guys have done has really been pernicious. We can only hope that this can be fixed in 2021.

O’Reilly’s desperate for attention, isn’t he? Ever since he was forced off the air in disgrace, he’s been frantic to have people listen to his rants. Childish outbursts like this aren’t anything new for him – the difference now is that he no longer has a nightly prime-time platform to perform them. And frankly, nobody but the Far Right cares what he has to say any longer. I’m amused that O’Reilly thinks that infantile threats would “scare” a veteran journalist – and I’d be further amused to see Acosta sue him, but I doubt Acosta would allow O’Reilly to glean any further notice from this nonsense. If anything, it’s simpler to just ignore O’Reilly as one would the blowhard at the end of the bar who always has an uninformed and loud opinion about everything.

This is the sort of moment people should keep in mind (along with the famous “WE’LL DO IT LIVE!!!” video) when O’Reilly renews his bid for “Elder Statesman” status in another year or so. Keep in mind that this was O’Reilly’s final ambition, and something he’d hinted at for some time in 2015 and 2016 – that he could get a paid position at a major network (Fox News would be his only option) as a once or twice weekly bloviator, where’d be able to just opine from on high about whatever the President or the Congress is or should be doing today. In his mind, that would indicate he’d achieved a level of personal and professional respect – kind of like the Cronkites and the Murrows of yesteryear. Instead, all he’s got to show for 20 years of hate speech on Fox News is the millions he has left after all the bad-behavior settlements. And his weekly bloviating is now limited to Glenn Beck’s low-end radio show and an occasional interview with Newsmax. And he still has his website, which no longer has much traffic after losing the cache of being attached to a Fox News program.

I realize O’Reilly must be frantic at his current situation, but it’s a bed he made for himself. When his epitaph is written, history will dismiss his antics as it does all the others of his ilk.

This obvious sop to the Pence White House was intended to rehab Cavuto in the eyes of our Tweeter-in-Chief. And it’s just another example of Fox News continuing to gloat about erasing the work of President Obama from history.

It should not have been a surprise to anyone that Pence was going to walk away from the nuclear agreement with Iran – Fox News put that on the Tweeter’s promise list in 2016. If anything, the only surprise here is that the Tweeter didn’t announce this abrogation of our commitments in January 2017. But there’s that Reality Show audience to consider, I suppose. I was honestly taken aback by anyone giving any speculation about what the Pence White House would do here – this was an agreement worked out by President Obama’s team, so there was never ANY chance it would continue. I’ll acknowledge that the delay here was likely due to some hardliners in the Pence White House hoping that they could provoke Iran into leaving the deal first so they could shift the blame for the collapse. When Iran refused to be provoked by these children, Pence’s men went to work drumming up false materials to justify this action to their base.

Obviously, the world doesn’t see the US actions here or at any time during the Pence Administration to be leadership of any kind. On the contrary, the US is now seen as a dangerous laughingstock, with angry children at the helm of the ship. With an action like this, the US has frankly earned a rebuke from the world community – I would argue that it would make sense for the UN to censure this country and for the rest of the world to simply shun the US until we get these people out of the White House and elect someone who knows what they’re doing. Under the current regime, nothing the US says on the international stage can be trusted – our given word is worthless and we’re seen as not only a dishonest broker but a dangerously immature one. Particularly with someone like John Bolton at the control of the levers of foreign policy. The resounding image of the US on the world stage in the current era is the bizarre one from last year of Donald Trump viciously shoving the prime minister of Montenegro out of his way so he could put himself up front for a photo op with other presidents and prime ministers. If anything, the “Montenegro Shove” has become a viral summary for how the US no longer commands respect.

I should also note that the accelerated announcement by the Tweeter only happened as a rebuke to John Kerry, who was exposed for trying to conduct his own negotiations to keep Europe in the agreement after Pence pulls us out of it. It is unfortunate that Kerry has been doing this – I understand why he’s doing it (he’s more concerned about the safety of our nation and the world community in general), but he holds no position where he can be conducting these kinds of discussions. It is simply not appropriate for him to be doing this on his own – unless something comes out that suddenly shows he was asked to do so by the State Dept, which I highly doubt. This wasn’t outright treason, as was committed by Tom Cotton and multiple Right Wing Senators when the deal was originally negotiated, when Cotton sent that infamous letter to Iran to try to derail the deal. But it was inappropriate, and Kerry should not have done it at this time.

As for the next steps with Iran, there will be no negotiations, since Pence and the Tweeter have just demonstrated, once again, that they can’t be trusted with anything. It’s been clear for some time that John Bolton’s hope is to activate a military option and simply attack Iran as soon as possible. I don’t believe this will involve troops on the ground – Bolton is too cowardly for that, and the Pence White House won’t want to play games in that area. It will work better for their base and for their hope to rally the whole country round the flag if they simply find a pretext to drop a bunch of bombs, possibly including nukes, on much of Iran – essentially annihilating a nation that the Right Wing hates and giving Pence a major scalp he can use for the 2020 campaign, unless they get some bombing in before the midterms. (Some of this depends on how quickly the Korean discussions fall apart, given that the Tweeter is incapable of getting through much there, and given that Bolton has loudly advocated for launching a pre-emptive bombing strike against North Korea for some time.)

This entire situation is extremely unfortunate, and potentially extremely dangerous for the entire world. And it’s yet another example of the lesson we must hope that 2-3 million American Dems have learned by now – that their refusal to show up in the 2016 Election has had terrible consequences for the world.

I’m not sure what Stein is up to, although I wouldn’t put it past her to pull a Kucinich and take the money from Fox News if she’s offered it. (Dennis Kucinich had already lost his credibility before he took that payout, but going with Fox News just cemented his lack of principles.)

At the same time, I wouldn’t besmirch Ralph Nader, who ran an honorable campaign in 2000, in between two other campaigns he ran in 1996 and 2004. Had Al Gore listened to Nader and just taken a couple of his issues, he could have earned the votes of thousands of Nader voters who likely made the difference in Florida in 2000. But Gore refused to listen, and the Dems that year acted in a shameful manner – including the moment where Nader was threatened with arrest if he entered a debate venue even though he had a ticket in hand. We can contrast that situation with what happened with Bernie Sanders in 2016, where the Dems included Sanders in the entire process, had him in dozens of debates, had him at the convention, and adopted multiple issues of his both in the platform and even in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. So I would argue that the Dems learned their lesson from 2000. It’s unfortunate that in 2016 there was a small number of extremists who would not accept that situation and made a lot of unhappy and inaccurate noises about a “rigged” primary. Thankfully, they didn’t affect the result of the final election – that was taken care of by the 2-3 million Dems in the swing states who refused to show up, and that wasn’t because they were all Bernie supporters.

But Nader didn’t go for a payout in 2000 or 2004 and we shouldn’t be entertaining notions that he did or that he even would. Ralph Nader spent his career as a professional gadfly – he’s made some money over the years, but he’s no Carl Icahn by any means. I think he’s happy just sitting on his moral high ground. Jill Stein on the other hand appears to have become a professional crank, which is truly unfortunate for both her and the Green Party.

The frantic scrambling of the Right Wing today has been instructive. The new spin they’re trying to fling is that hey, it’s okay that Trump paid his attorney to make the Stormy Daniels interview go away, because it’s just a private matter and not a campaign finance thing. Riiiiiight.

So we’re supposed to forget that the attorney and Trump have been repeatedly lying about the situation for months. We’re supposed to believe that Trump had no idea where his money was going when he gave it to his attorney. We’re supposed to believe that even though the payoff was delivered in the middle of an election campaign, it somehow had nothing to do with it.

Seriously, how stupid does the Right Wing think the rest of the country is?

This is a spectacular oops by Giuliani, and that’s saying something. One has to wonder how panicked the Pence White House already was before Giuliani opened his mouth this evening – this kind of unforced error tends to ratchet up the tension to 11.

Giuliani clearly was thinking he was going to come across as the “seasoned expert” who would have handled everything so much better and thrown Hillary Clinton in jail already – and instead he’s once again grandstanded himself into a corner.

It’s pretty obvious what the Right Wing is doing – they’re giving the Pence White House a rationale for an action our Tweeter has long planned to inflict. In two weeks or so, it looks fairly certain that the Pence White House will be pulling us out of the Iran nuclear agreement, something that Europe and Iran will continue to honor in our absence and until the next President does the right thing and re-ups, if everyone else will allow it by that point.

The real reason the Pence White House is pulling out has nothing to do with it being a good or bad deal. They simply want to erase every single vestige of President Obama’s terms in office, and they want to validate the treasonous behavior of Tom Cotton in his infamous letter when he tried to derail the deal. And taking this action and continuing to make vicious comments about Iran is a step toward provoking that country into hopefully giving Pence some kind of justification for destabilizing the situation.

I find it interesting how the Right Wing is working overtime to find some sinister storyline in the deal – just today, Glenn Beck got himself worked up about the money that Iran was allowed to claim, with Beck demanding to know where the money came from and why it was in cash. At no point did Beck recall that the money was actually Iran’s in the first place, and the cash payment was also necessary – but then, he’s never been one to understand finer details…