The clip isn’t showing up on my page…

But the “Shout Down the Liberal” approach is one that Fox News is now really trying to push, particularly as inflicted by Bolling, Carlson and O’Reilly. I can’t really tell about Hannity as he’s been too toxic to watch for very long lately, and any time I’ve seen his show, he’s refused to have any non-Right guests.

During much of the W presidency and all of the Obama presidency, the Fox News approach with liberal voices was to let them say a couple of things and then take a condescending tone and cut them off. But you still usually saw Kirsten Powers get a point in when she could, particularly if it was really a right wing idea.

The current idea is to not even let the liberal voice get ten words in before a host like Bolling or Regan angrily shouts them down, saying “Hey! You’re not discussing what I asked you! This is NOT a discussion about (blank)! This is a discussion about (preferred right wing talking point)! Let’s go back to (right wing guest) and see if we can get back on topic, okay?” Having now seen this multiple times over the past week, I am forced to conclude this is the new M.O. at Fox News, and anyone who agrees to appear there really needs to be ready to be treated like that. My hat goes off to Acuff for standing up for himself. Any liberal going on Fox News for the next four years needs to be ready for the host to throw a tantrum like this, and to be able to immediately put the host back in their place.

I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a large variety of ways that the Right Wing will find to bully everyone else.

Trump just confirmed his belligerent approach to Cuba in a delightful tweet about an hour ago. His exact words:

“If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate the deal”

That pretty much tells the story. Again, I strongly recommend anyone thinking they can travel to Cuba that they reconsider and not do this. And this also gives us a strong indication where Trump stands on whether he’ll hang on to even a shred of the Obama presidency. The answer is a firm and angry “NO!”

I agree that it’s a pointless exercise to take the bakers to court for their bigoted behavior. On the other hand, refusing to do business with those bakers, and publicizing their bigotry is completely appropriate.

Hannity certainly feels emboldened, doesn’t he? In a sense, he’s right in line with the kids in the elementary schools who lashed out at non-white kids over the week that followed Trump’s squeaker, clearly modeling their behavior after what they saw their parents doing at home and saw Trump doing on TV.

The difference is that one would think Hannity is old enough to know better than to say things like this. But he clearly isn’t. And he’s clearly one of the more visible angry bullies we’re going to have to deal with over the next 4-8 years. As we’ve noted before, you’d think that these guys would be delighted to see Trump get away with this, and that they’d be doing cartwheels down the sidewalk. And we are seeing plenty of glee out of them, and plenty of gloating. But it’s coming from a place of such anger and such obvious hatred that it’s very difficult to watch unfold. Hannity clearly doesn’t just want to celebrate his guy making it to the White House. He wants to rub everyone’s noses in this disaster for as long as he can – a trademark bullying activity that we’re seeing become more and more commonplace on the Right. O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Kelly, Carlson, Bolling and plenty of others are all doing it. They’re openly shouting down anyone who dares to say anything even meekly of protest, and if they have any issues with the incoming mess, it’s that they don’t think that it’s Right Wing enough.

I really do think 2017 is lining up to be the Year of the Bully.

Eyes, there have actually been stories that he is considering giving Palin the Dept of the Interior, to make use of her vast knowledge of the environment. Education is a different story – it looks like Trump’s people intend to either phase it out or simply eliminate it – this would check off a major bucket list item for many Right Wingers who want to rub Jimmy Carter’s face in it. EPA is also likely to be slashed way down.

Given Trump’s affection for Fox News and the pundits therein, we’re likely to see a mass defection from the network into Trump’s White House. Another one we haven’t mentioned here yet is KT McFarland, who gained notoriety for trying to lobby a candidate on behalf of Roger Ailes some time ago. McFarland was gloating on Fox about the various extremists already being named, like Flynn and Pompeo, and then said, spectacularly, “The grown-ups are back in charge.” Riiiight. What she means is that the guys who embarrassed us in front of the world and were fired from their jobs are now free to cause more misery and more embarrassment before they get fired again. But the real kicker came at the end of the interview – when she acknowledged that she’s being considered for a position herself.

Kelly just came through on her intention to be critical of Trump and company, and no surprise, it was from their right. After Conway made her relatively mild comments about not making a Clinton prosecution a priority, Fox News pounced for most of the day. And Kelly really worked this idea over, with her clear lean being toward a vigorous prosecution. Kelly made sure to ask extreme Clinton haters like Peter Schweizer, so that she could frame the discussion not as a political vendetta but somehow an issue of fairness and the law. Not an issue of gullible people accepting 25 years of lies and smears and now being whipped up into a frenzy by right wing media and Trump’s exploitation of them, but instead some feigned concern about whether the laws of the land apply to “the elite”, and some sudden concern that Trump shouldn’t be talking about this anyway and how he doesn’t have any real say in it anyway.

When Kelly asked someone in Congress about this, she didn’t ask about whether it was appropriate for Chaffetz to keep beating a broken drum like this or whether the Right has played on their base’s hatred of this family. No, she instead began shouting at a GOP congressman and played tape of him essentially promising his supporters that a Trump presidency would mean a prosecution. I think he got her point – if they back off the Clintons, Fox News will make them pay dearly for it.

It’s true that Kelly is positioning herself as a political gadfly to the Trump White House. But nobody should be fooled into thinking that she’s doing this on behalf of anyone but the Far Right. Which is truly staggering to behold. Here we have what will be the meanest, angriest most Far Right presidency potentially in our history – and Megan Kelly is arguing to push them even farther to the right. I didn’t think it was even possible to do that.

This whole situation is frankly a distraction. If anything, it only illustrates Trump’s continuing immaturity and pettiness. And it illustrates the Right Wing’s continuing hypocrisy. We shouldn’t give it any more attention than that.

There are much bigger issues and problems in play with Trump right now than what he thinks about Hamilton. Trump just settled his Trump U lawsuit – that’s big news. Trump has now named some seriously problematic appointees to key positions in the government. Over the past week and a half, there have been over 700 documented cases of hate speech and assaults from Trump supporters – far outweighing the handful of angry anti-Trump protesters who have gotten out of lines.

I appreciate the wish of Huffington Post writers to find a silver lining in here somewhere, but even these articles acknowledge some basic truths I believe we need to accept.

The Right is absolutely united about some things and they will vote as a block to accomplish them. Their highest priority at the start of 2017 is to erase the Obama presidency. They all agree that they want to undo all of Obama’s actions and scrap the ACA. As the article admits, they won’t need a single Dem vote to accomplish those things. So those will happen immediately.

As for the various treaties and agreements achieved by Obama’s team, those will be ripped up immediately, and Congress won’t have any part in it. That will completely be a Pence discussion in the White House, where all these various initiatives will simply be discarded. I particularly stress this to anyone thinking that a Far Right White House is going to continue the Obama move to ease relations with Cuba. I know people who were planning to travel to Cuba next year, and I don’t believe they will be doing so now. I think it’s more prudent to expect Trump and his group to follow through on as many of his promises as they can. Which means the TPP is dead, the Climate Change agreements are dead, the Iran treaty is gone and the Cuba embargo will be reinforced.

I keep seeing people grasping at straws for a sign that Trump might not be all that bad and that maybe he didn’t mean all that stuff he’s been saying. Maybe he’ll bend a little on climate change or maybe he’ll go easy on the Clinton investigation obsession. But the people around him aren’t saying those things. Except for the Clinton “Lock Her Up” meme, which some Trump surrogates are trying to walk back. And I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in that, based on Trump’s behavior and based on the Right’s outright hatred of the Clintons. Just last night, we saw Fox News and Breutbart repeatedly attack Trump surrogates for backing off this idea even a little. We already know that Trump acts on what those outlets tell him, and we know that they’ll keep up a drumbeat on this. So I wouldn’t think that this nonsense is over by any means.

I realize this will all sound pessimistic, but we’re going to need to get used to some really unfortunate conditions over the next four to eight years. This is going to be a mean, unpleasant time, governed by mean, bullying, unpleasant people. The best and smartest thing I believe we can do is to make sure that what these people do is documented, just as Ellen has done here for years. These guys are going to try to write the history of our time in a way that makes them feel good and portrays people like President Obama as failures. We need to be able to help keep the actual record straight, now more than ever.

I think we need to be prepared for Sessions to easily be confirmed. This will actually be a worse situation than we had with Ashcroft, which was already pretty bad – as Ashcroft was also a confirmed racist.

Sessions’ priorities will have nothing to do with protecting the civil rights of anyone other than whites. His emphasis will be greatly increased and visible law enforcement presence wherever possible – including what they will say are operations to fight crime in places like Chicago. A lot of resources will be redirected to targeting and deporting as many undocumented immigrants as they can – look for them to set high goals here that they can point to every 100 days of how many people they’ve thrown out of the country.

And don’t think that Sessions has forgotten his animus against liberal organizations like Planned Parenthood, which are likely to be targeted as promised by the Right Wing for years.

And let’s not forget that Sessions is both motivated and enthusiastic about pursuing an aggressive criminal case against the Clintons, their charity and their associates, as threatened by Trump throughout the campaign. They weren’t all yelling “Lock Her Up!” for show. They meant it, and they intend to see how much political theater they can make out of this moment.

These guys are moving extremely quickly. He just named Jeff Sessions as AG, and Sessions is to the right of even Giuliani. In saner days, Sessions was considered too far Right Wing and too racist to be confirmed by the Senate in the 1980s.

What we’re seeing right now is them setting up the immediate repeal of the ACA on January 20. Medicare will take a little longer for them to adjust but they’ll do it within the first 100-200 days of 2017. The Dems do not have the votes to stop this behavior unless they are prepared to filibuster everything past roll call, and I do not believe they want to do that. Most likely, the Dems will roll over and allow Trump to do whatever he wants short of replacing Ginsburg with another Alito.

To my thinking, the appeal of hate speech purveyors like Limbaugh and Hannity is directly connected to the antidisestablishmentarianism of the Nixon years. When you unpack that term, it describes the pro-Nixon guys who were violently angry at the left wingers who protested Nixon and Vietnam. These people didn’t disappear after that. They continued their same prejudices and anger all the way through the Reagan 80s and the Clinton 90s all the way up to the present day. And they’re still angry at the world. If anything, they’re angry that the world of 2016 is one where they don’t truly hold the majority they had once upon a time.

I also note that the Right worked diligently to block President Obama from being able to help any of these people – even to the point of blocking an extension of Unemployment benefits.

I’m grateful to Lloyd for being so forthright and honest here. He’s being extremely helpful here – because he’s not mouthing the usual platitudes that Right Wingers normally say when they espouse the destruction of the social contract. He’s just out and out saying it: “I Got Mine, FU”.

So when 20+ million people lose their health coverage on January 20, and the GOP tries to blame the problems on Democrats somehow not helping the GOP find a replacement that nobody in the GOP can agree about, we can look back to Lloyd’s helpful comments from today. The problem isn’t that the Right Wing can’t get the help they need to properly get people coverage. It’s that the Right Wing simply doesn’t care if those people have coverage or not.

And again, this issue was never about health insurance in any case. If it was, the Right would have worked with the Democrats when the law was being crafted, and it would have worked with the Dems when they wanted to adjust it during Obama’s two terms. That was never their intention. Their intention was to obstruct it in every way they could, and then to kill it as soon as they could. The part that the GOP actually cared about was that it was a policy achievement by a Democrat, and particularly an achievement by a Democrat President who they all hate. So killing that achievement is meaningful. What does Lloyd care if millions of people suffer so he can smirk at Obama? What does Lloyd care if we put ourselves back in the scenario of the insurance companies gouging everyone and costs continuing to skyrocket with no way of addressing them?

When the Right Wing and Fox News start in with the crocodile tears in January and February as people realize what Trump and his supporters have done to them, we can present them the opinion of Lloyd. So I’m thankful to him for doing this service for us.

O’Reilly has been getting increasingly brazen since last Tuesday. He appears to think he has some kind of moral standing to lecture people, which is extremely odd given his unresolved temper problems and his history of self-promoting falsehoods.

It’s quite strange to see him acting morally affronted when being asked simple questions about how he stood by when he has known for years that people were being harassed by his boss, and when he actually participated in the harassment. He does not get to hide behind a children’s book when the reality comes out.

His issues with Kelly at this point have nothing to do with morality. Those issues have to do with him feeling that she’s overstepping “her place” at Fox News by starting to openly challenge him there. But we should keep in mind that Kelly’s eventual victory there is not a win for anyone but her – she will prevail within another year, and O’Reilly will retreat, but I don’t know that this will signify any real change at the network, given what we’ve seen on the air. In the backstage areas, it will mean that we won’t likely see someone getting away with the piggish behavior that was indulged by both Ailes and O’Reilly. But on the air, the same vicious rhetoric will continue – as we have repeatedly noted from Kelly.

I don’t think anyone here has been fooled by Kelly’s attempts to present herself as a model of “being tough but fair to both sides” over the past year. That’s not her record, and Ellen has thankfully provided dozens of examples of Kelly tipping the scales decidedly to the right whenever she’s been able to do so. She knows where she’s working, who’s paying her salary, and who’s watching her show. Which is why I can’t imagine Kelly working as an anchor for any other network – she has no credibility to do so. Can anyone see ABC News wanting her to be their front page when she’s spent the past decade repeatedly and viciously doing the work of the Right Wing?

I do think that Kelly will attempt to act like a more objective host during this Presidency, and that even Fox News will make an attempt there, but we need to understand what that balance will be and why it will be attempted. Much of the GOP is leery of Trump in that he does not have a real value set and they know he was just waving their issues around as red meat to help stir up his and their base. They have concerns about his temperament, discipline and mostly about whether he’ll really come through on all the mean promises he made. They want him to deliver on ALL of them. Mass deportations, erasure of the Obama presidency, far right judges, prosecution of the Clintons, destruction of Medicare, you name it. So when he fails to do any of these things, Megyn Kelly will have one of his surrogates on to chide. And when he goes off message and insults fellow GOP members, or when he does something the GOP finds destabilizing, like insulting China, Megyn Kelly will take a position on how foolhardy that was.

But this “loyal opposition” will not be coming from the center by any means. It will be coming from another faction of the right.

There are multiple members of the Right who are concerned about Trump appointing people like Bannon – not because they find him abhorrent but because Bannon will cost them credibility and votes in the future. Never let these guys get away with the act that they are concerned with principles – this is about power, influence and mostly about money. And right now, the Trump team is not concerned with hiring decent people to be in his White House. They’re interested in settling scores – giving “lollipops” as one appalled GOP strategist put it this week and throwing punches. Someone the Trump people like, and who gave them good press and open support during the campaign? Likely getting a major position and a huge payday at the other end. Someone the Trump people don’t like, or who wasn’t bowing and scraping enough? Likely getting thrown out by security.

Let’s be very clear on this. Steve Bannon has no honor to defend. He’s a vicious huckster who has enriched himself by feeding the hatred of those who normally frequent the Breitbart websites. We really can’t forget the history of the Breitbart sites or of Breitbart himself. Andrew Breitbart was in life an extremely angry and nasty piece of work. He delighted in causing misery to others, in generating falsehoods about decent people and then assuming a false moral high ground he didn’t have. He left the world an angrier and poorer place than when he was born. Steve Bannon has carried the Breitbart flag since the man’s death and has now made the world an even angrier and poorer place than before.

Among the bizarre statements being made this past week has been Newt Gingrich happily chuckling about how Bannon’s vicious headlines at Breitbart are really just funny click bait that we’re supposed to think everyone can’t resist reading. I suppose that Gingrich enjoys reading what Bannon regularly inflicted at Breitbart but most other people wouldn’t.

Fox News is acting in an extremely triumphal and vicious fashion at this point – simply because an 8 year ploy of theirs has worked out well for them, for the moment. They’ve gotten away with the long con. They spent 8 years attacking Barack Obama and 20 years attacking the Clintons, and they are now rewarded with a situation where they have an obvious influence over the people taking power in the White House. But in typical fashion for Fox News, that theft is not enough to satisfy them. It’s simply not enough for them to seize the reins and enrich their friends. They need that refreshing moment that all bullies enjoy to top the whole thing off. A typical schoolyard bully, as Fox News has modeled itself upon, doesn’t just take the smaller kid’s lunch and homework. That’s fun for the bully, but it doesn’t really fill the bill. The real achievement for a schoolyard bully is to break the smaller kid’s arm and rub his face in the dirt – just to make sure the smaller kid KNOWS what is being done to him and who is doing it. The behavior we’re seeing from Fox News falls right in line with that approach – and sadly, we’ll be seeing a lot more of it over the next four years.

I am forced to agree with Ellen – the Right Wing is now going back to a strategy they were using during the W years – demonize anyone who doesn’t snap into line.

Just as they did with W, they are presenting free speech in protest as anarchy and/or treason.

Ellen is also correct to note that the Right has no moral standing to make such pronouncements after spending years cheerleading “Tea Party” Obama haters and even featuring them as supposedly learned commentators on their airwaves.

The first message being sent is “We won, you lost, shut up or else”. The second message, which was sent a bit more explicitly by Conway yesterday, was creepily similar to the old Ari Fleischer line when she “warned” Harry Reid to “be very careful” about criticizing Trump’s racism and sexism. For those who don’t remember the Fleischer line it was that Americans needed to “watch what they do, watch what they say”. These are becoming extremely chilling times.

If you look at this weekend’s announcement of Trump’s first appointments, it’s clear that Bannon actually has a senior position over that of Priebus – meaning that Breitbart.com will be determining what this White House will prioritize. Meaning that we don’t just have a White House run by Fox News but by even farther right personalities.

EOF is correct that there will be some very harsh consequences for many Americans, and they’re coming up even faster than I had thought. Trump and company clearly want to execute as much of their Obama erasure as quickly as they can.

Fox News had Tom Cotton on yesterday to gloat about how they will essentially rip up the Iran treaty and how the GOP majorities in Congress will be working for two weeks ahead of the 20th to already get things going, including confirming Trump’s first far Right judge to the Supreme Court. (He didn’t mention it, but this also includes rushing through the ACA repeal/defund so that Trump can sign it in a flourish on Inauguration Day, along with the EOs that will wipe out Obama’s EOs.

Here’s one really chipper part of the mess – there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of children of undocumented immigrants who came out of the shadows to register for Obama’s Dream Act program. The whole point of that program was to bring people into the light so they could be an active part of our communities and not have to hide. Trump’s approach means that the personal information they provided will now be used against those people. I expect that nearly all of them will be forced to immediately move and cancel their cell phones, etc. If they don’t, they’re literally asking for their families to face significant prosecution.

Eyes, there’s one other factor to the vote that I think we shouldn’t forget.

The blue collar Dems in the Rust Belt have been waiting throughout President Obama’s terms for some kind of relief after they took a major hit in 2008. And the Obama White House tried to do so, but was repeatedly blocked by the intransigence of the GOP in Congress, as they were equally bent on making sure that Obama did NOT succeed in making the conditions better. This turning of the screws has to have been a factor in a portion of Dem voters in the Rust Belt thinking that they had nothing to lose in trying the other side.

I also think we need to remember that Trump did not sweep all the votes in these areas – he came in just enough ahead of Clinton to be able to claim the EC votes. Meaning that not all those Rust Belt workers fell for this. And unless Trump can make something happen for them quickly, I tend to doubt he’ll be able to hang onto them.

John, I wouldn’t be too sure about the right wing not finding a way to blame Dems for their problems. Remember that they’ve spent the last 8 years trying to blame the Bush Recession on the Dems who finally got majorities in 2006. Count on Fox News to fan these kinds of flames as hard as they can for the next four to eight years, depending on how Pence does as President.

I’m getting a strong feeling from the various personalities on the Right, including the people who are about to be given tremendous power in Trump’s White House, that they are in the mood for revenge and punishment. You’d think these guys would be happy that they pulled out the squeaker and that their depress-the-vote negative campaign gambit worked. But no, they’re really angry. And the oddest part is that they’re swinging at some of their own people first. Republicans who didn’t get on board Trump’s little ride are now being hung out to dry on Fox News and on AM Radio. Some of them are likely to be primaried from the hard right in 2-4 years.

But if the Far Right is angry at fellow GOP members who didn’t step in line fast enough, they’re positively furious at the Dems and their supporters. They are clearly bent on tearing up every last piece of the Obama presidency and leaving it on the highway. With this attitude, it shouldn’t surprise us that they are warming up to take actions that are likely to cause discomfort for millions of Americans.

I honestly think these guys don’t care if there is collateral damage – they just want it done. They don’t care if their destruction of the ACA results in people losing their coverage – they just want to be able to say that Barack Obama was a failure and that they are the ones who will take care of things now. If their constituents complain, they’ll be told that the ACA was unworkable and was a huge Democrat boondoggle that was costing everyone too much money. They’ll be told that the GOP is working on a replacement program but is dealing with so much Democrat obstruction that they will need to vote more GOP legislators in on the next round in 2 years. This is a typically Rovian move, and we should keep these tricks in mind before they come our way unexpectedly.

The harsh nature of the Right’s fury is what really concerns me here. If you look at O’Reilly’s face in that clip, there’s no mistaking the bald, red-faced anger at hand. He’s going to use this opportunity to rub every liberal’s nose in the mess, and he clearly wants to tell them to like it while he does it. It’s that kind of attitude from O’Reilly and Hannity that is scary to watch on Fox News. But it’s REALLY scary to see that attitude coming from people like Gingrich and Giuliani and Clarke, all of whom will be in positions with an ability to harm a LOT of people. Gingrich has already gone back to his usually nasty mode in his attacks on fellow GOP members. Just wait until he gets on the notion of punishing Dems. Giuliani may be the scariest one here, as he’s playing the card of being genial while saying some incredibly angry things – mainly about finding a way to charge, indict and arrest the Clintons.

There were articles today on CNN about how these guys really won’t be able to repeal the ACA and how they really won’t be able to indict the Clintons, and I actually burst out laughing at the second article. Because the articles assumed these guys would do what makes sense to a CNN op-ed writer. Which is hysterical on its face. These guys are going for the rich satisfaction of revenge, not anything that would actually help anyone. And unless the Dems show some backbone, the Right will get away with it. Again.

The one silver lining I’m finding here is that I believe we’ll see a series of scandals in this White House that will easily dwarf anything we saw in W’s two terms. And that mess would be enough to potentially bring some of these guys down – it’s just that we’ll have to endure at least 4 years of this craziness before we can do much about it.

I guess the thought that stays with me is that these guys have the majority to get their actions through the mill, and this is something they’ve tried to do over 50 times. If they can’t get the repeal through now, it would speak to an incredible incompetence on their part. And if they leave the ACA functioning for two years and cite procedures, it would be a slap in the face that Fox News among others would never let them forget. Just thinking tactically, regardless of my thoughts on their lack of ethics, they’d be crazy not to take advantage of this opportunity. I’m not saying that I want them to do this, just that they’ve repeatedly said that they would and it would be a hallmark of Trump’s first 100 days to sign the bill that killed Obamacare.

On the other matter, I agree with Ellen that it could turn into a PR nightmare to mount a criminal case against the Clintons. And such a case would have no real traction in court. But I’m seeing real anger in these guys now. They wouldn’t be making noises about how foolish it would be for Obama to pardon her (as though she even needed a pardon in the first place) if they didn’t have a reason. I hope I’m wrong about it.

And I hope I’m wrong about what will happen with
the ACA. I just think these people are going to press the advantage they got from gaming the system and do as many of these things as they can while they have the momentum. It is always much easier to tear down than to build up and I can’t imagine them waiting the years they will need to generate their own plan before they tear down Obama’s. That would require compromise and these people are not known for that.

Sean Hannity and Rudy Giuliani confirmed what I’ve been thinking within the first five minutes of Hannity’s show tonight. Giuliani confirmed that Trump will immediately repeal what he estimates is 50 Obama EOs when he takes office. Giuliani confirmed that the Iran deal will be null since Congress refused to approve it.

Giuliani confirmed that the ACA will be repealed, but Hannity included the phrase “and replace”, which makes no sense given that they have no plan for replacement. Meaning that it will be repealed and trashed.

Giuliani also essentially confirmed that there will be an aggressive pursuit by his Justice Dept of indictments against the Clintons, their aides and the Clinton Foundation. Which will be useful as political theater if Trump is having issues with Congress in April or May and they need a distraction. It will also give Hannity tape he can use forever.

And that was after Bill O’Reilly smugly and angrily told non-Trump voters “If you don’t like it, Canada and Mexico can take you, or maybe they won’t.”

Expect further attacks from Fox News over the next two months, and then a triumphant shout on January 20.