This was an extremely sad moment for our country. I am both saddened and physically sickened to see that we as a country have chosen to do something like this. There will be some extremely terrible consequences for this choice, and as a country, we apparently deserve them. I can only hope that what Dems remain in Congress will show some backbone as Trump attempts to enact his various promises.

The saddest part of this for me is to know that the haters won the day. The haters on the right wing who will spend the next four years on Fox News and right wing radio gloating about how they were able to get away with obstructing President Obama and ultimately erasing his presidency. The haters on the left wing who will spend the rest of our lives smugly declaring that they wanted Bernie Sanders or nobody.

I am uncertain how to think about celebrating a Thanksgiving in a country that apparently values hatred, racism and misogyny, and proudly states it. Because there were millions of voters who could have shown up to stop this, and they chose not to do so. So this is who we are as a nation. We will have to live with that. I had believed that as a nation we were smarter than this. I was wrong on that count – we will once again need to learn this bitter lesson.

In terms of Fox News and its message of right wing triumphalism, this election sadly proves that Roger Ailes has once again succeeded. They managed to fool enough people enough of the time to once again put someone into a high office who could do a serious amount of damage. Not because he was working to bring the country together, but because he was using the Fox News message of anger and viciousness toward the rest of the country.

On Monday night, in a discussion with Charles Krauthammer, O’Reilly was both candid and frightening about his real feelings on this election. He made no bones about his absolute disgust for Hillary Clinton. He condemned her up and down, with his greatest anger apparently coming from her not appearing on his show when he wanted her to do so. (She said she would go on the show earlier this year and then called in – he didn’t want that, but it’s all he got and he resents it.) (And she’s submitted to appearing on his show in the past, but he’s forgetting that now.)

He condemned her as a liar, as a corrupt person, as part of a corrupt team with her husband, as someone who is imperious (that part isn’t completely off), as a baby killer and as someone operating a charity that O’Reilly thinks is corrupt, even though he doesn’t really know anything more about the charity than what far right wingers tell him about it. O’Reilly also condemned her based on right wing smears saying that she hadn’t accomplished anything in office as a Senator and other right wing smears saying that she was a bungler as Secretary of State. Given that hostility, it isn’t hard to understand why she has not been jumping up and down to appear on his show. Why would anyone volunteer to sit for an interview with someone who is bent on attacking you? (This is why Hannity is not believable for his feigned shock at the Obamas’ refusal to talk to him – why would or should they after he’s demonstrated so much visceral hatred for them?)

Contrast this with O’Reilly’s reaction to Donald Trump, as shown in Monday’s discussion. For Trump, he just thinks that some people don’t like some of Trump’s “past behavior” as a billionaire. And he thinks Trump’s okay because nobody has criminally prosecuted Trump over the years. He gives Trump a pass on his business record of repeated failures and bankruptcies, on his repeated nastiness towards women and non-Caucasians. O’Reilly even gives Trump a pass on his temperament problems, possibly because they aren’t far off from O’Reilly’s own temperament problems. Both men have a tendency to bully others, and both men respond to criticism by mounting vicious personal attacks on their critics rather than listening to what the other person is saying.

Given that presentation by O’Reilly, his preference is clear for his viewers. He gives Trump a pass and would like to see the man elected. He resents the Clintons and will be prepared to immediately attack a new President Clinton as early as she is named. For someone who is saying he is “above the fray”, this is a position that sounds a lot like he’s down in the muck of it. I’m honestly not sure which approach is nastier – Hannity’s outright open hatred of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (something borne of Hannity’s attempts to out-nasty Rush Limbaugh) or O’Reilly’s feigned intellectual disapproval of them. For all of O’Reilly’s attempts to present himself as a learned “elder statesman”, his condemnations are built from the same straw house of smears that fire Hannity’s vicious insults.

I suppose O’Reilly sees himself as a kind of Brit Hume, a role I strongly believe he will play up in about a year if he retires as expected from full-time broadcasting at the end of his current contract. It is likely that he will retreat from doing a nightly show to making weekly appearances to opine about politics, again playing the role of the “older scholar with wisdom to share”. For Fox News viewers, this approach may work. For everyone else, it’s a bit harder to stomach.

In reality, O’Reilly has evolved from an open bully and loudmouth (as seen in his earlier incarnations on Inside Edition and other shows) to the angry professor persona he has adopted over the past decade or so. Rather than just shouting people off his show every time, he has fought to be perceived as having some moral high ground – an odd position for someone defending vicious right wing smears and the nastiness of people like Donald Trump. Brit Hume was never that much of the gutter fighter (his infamous 90s smackdown by Bill Clinton notwithstanding) that O’Reilly has relished being. Hume tends to feign moral and intellectual imperiousness, albeit without portfolio. O’Reilly on the other hand is the man you’d see expounding over a few beers at the pub and quickly exploding in anger at anyone who challenged him. One has to wonder what comes next in the Fox News declension of talking heads. First they had the biased pseudo-intellectuals. Then they had the bullies pretending to be pseudo-intellectuals. Is the next step to just have older bullies without the intellectual pretension?

doors, Brenda won’t be convinced of that victory, as she’s not here to praise Clinton but to try to bury her. It’s interesting that she is attempting to repeat every smear of Hillary Clinton she can within a single short paragraph. We could go through each of her smears and show how they’ve been thoroughly debunked already – or we could just ask Brenda to do a little studying and see if she learns anything.

I really hope that after the election we will see a serious investigation into Giuliani and Kallstrom’s conduct here. Some real ethical lines were breached and potentially some legal ones as well. It’s one thing for Giuliani to hate Hillary Clinton and to say hateful things about her. It’s quite another for him to participate in an attempt to influence an election through the FBI, using smears and half-truths as his ammunition. This would not be the first time a prosecutor found himself on the receiving end of an investigation into corruption.

I wonder how she defends the behavior of the right wingers in the US Senate who have refused to even hold hearings for the current nominee for the Supreme Court. Is she okay with the GOP not even giving a hearing to someone who was nominated to the high court 9 months ago? Is she okay with the notion that the President does not have the ability to name people to the Supreme Court? How does she reconcile this conflict?

Eyes, I think we’re in agreement on what we’ve been seeing. The polls indeed show more GOP voters settling on Trump and not just walking away from the election. (Their hate for Hillary Clinton really is pure, isn’t it?)

I believe Tuesday evening will show Clinton prevailing in Nevada as well as Florida, NC and New Hampshire – almost completely due to the early voting efforts. In that event, the election will be over very quickly and the soul searching can begin.

Nate Silver is continuing to be extremely cautious about what his model indicates. It’s unfortunate to see him erupt like that at the Huffington Post, as he’s normally a lot more reserved than that – but it tells us that emotions are running high even among the statisticians. Silver’s model still has Clinton winning 2:1, and shows that the states we discussed are close enough that early voting could easily tip them one way or the other. Silver’s model also keeps him in a careful position where if the election tipped either way, the model would be correct. No matter what happens on Tuesday, he will still be able to stand up for the reliability of his system. The other poll aggregators are being a lot more aggressive, which probably feels better for them on an emotional level but can be extremely risky if things don’t go the way they are thinking. Just look at the prognosticators Fox News was touting a month or two ago who were confidently predicting a Trump sweep based on various custom systems they’d run over previous election situations. Silver is making sure he is never lumped into that group of “overly exuberant” analysts. It may be frustrating for those of us who would like a more definitive statement – but it’s the safe and cautious approach for which he is known.

This past week has been a surreal experience of watching Fox News and right wing radio becoming increasingly hysterical. It appears to me that they know the numbers are not likely to work for Trump and they are throwing caution to the wind.

The Guardian article on the FBI is revealing – I agree with Eyes about it. It’s clear that there are some very right wing FBI agents who are attempting to influence the course of this election by feeding smears to friendly outlets like Fox News. The fact that Bret Baier fell for this yesterday is yet another nail in the coffin of even Fox’s supposedly reliable news desk.

This morning, we saw the Fox website go with a headline from the right wing Washington Free Beacon about Iran supposedly being set to attack the USA and Europe. This was followed by right wing FBI “sources” insisting that they were “99 percent certain” that five foreign organizations had hacked into Clinton’s private server. (Meaning that they’d like us to forget that we’ve already learned that there’s NO INDICATION AT ALL that anyone ever hacked that server, while there have actually been hacks into government servers…)

Fox News and the rest of the right wing clearly want to have a continuing series of reports on these smears to fill the weekend news cycle before the election. Sadly for them, this will not be the case. Bill O’Reilly openly campaigned for this tonight with his statement about how he thinks Hillary Clinton has reached a “tipping point” of negative stories. O’Reilly failed to mention that not only is this untrue, but it was always the intention of right wing media to make such a situation happen. And it forgets that Donald Trump’s horrible behavior has created its own “tipping point” for his campaign.

I trust the caution of Nate Silver – he’s a numbers man and his averages have been shown to be correct over time. His predictions at this point are clearly showing Clinton favored to win, but noting that if Trump wins every single battleground state and also moves into states Clinton should be easily holding, he could statistically have a chance to win. But remember – Trump would have to win EVERY swing state and then keep going. Which would indicate a massive landslide for Trump that isn’t going to happen. The more likely result is that Clinton handily defeats him – including in Florida.

I agree with Eyes that it’s been very difficult to listen to the hysteria coming out of Fox News and AM radio this week – I’ve actually stopped listening to a lot of it as it’s really unpleasant. I will be very curious to see how they deal with the events of next Tuesday, and how things are handled next Wednesday.

Wimes popped up on Fox tonight in a soundbite either on Bret Baier’s presumably non-pundit news or on Brit Hume’s hour. She was positioned to make it look as though Clinton is not getting the African American vote. No mention that she is actually a Sanders supporter who resents Clinton for getting the nomination.

This is a clear indication of where the Fox News mindset is right now. They know that Clinton is ahead in the early voting, and they are frantic to turn that advantage around. They are also frantic to suppress the non-white vote. When this is all over a week from now, I believe they’ll once again be in the position of trying to figure out how they alienated so many people. Behavior like this would be a good place for them to start their self-analysis.

The headline here shouldn’t be read if you are drinking a glass of water. The guaranteed reaction could cause quite a mess.

Am I the only person confused by Bill’s comment?

Megyn Kelly is definitely trying to position herself as the new face of Fox News once Bill O’Reilly retires from the nightly broadcasts, potentially as soon as the end of 2017. (I’m anticipating O’Reilly will become the next Brit Hume – highly paid to offer his “elder statesman” opinions maybe once a week on this or that program, but not required to put together a new show five nights a week.) Given that they’ve lost Greta and Hannity is way too divisive and immature, the only successor option Fox News has is Kelly. She clearly knows it – it’s why she’s really pushing them in her current negotiations.

It’s Kelly’s hope that she will be paid what O’Reilly is paid as the star anchor of the network. I don’t know that Murdoch will give her that – I think he’ll go down the middle on the rate, given that O’Reilly didn’t get that much until he’d already been hosting the show for a certain number of years. I think Kelly will take a compromise deal where she gets regular increases that would take her to parity with O’Reilly in another few years, at which point, he’ll be gone anyway. (And I’m betting he’ll demand a high rate just for his Brit Hume status. One also has to wonder what they had to offer Hume to come back to the nightly grind for 3 ½ months…)

Kelly won’t leave Fox News, as much as she’s trying to make it look like she would. And Murdoch doesn’t want to lose her, as much as his surrogates are trying to play a little hardball about the negotiations. Fox News wants and needs a strong female face, particularly now when they are facing major fallout from the behavior of Roger Ailes. Kelly, for her part, will not be hired as an anchor by another network, simply because she’s spent too much time at Fox News parroting their propaganda lines. If ABC tried to put her on the nightly news, they’d be seen as hiring a right wing-leaning anchor who wouldn’t be able to cover the news in an objective manner. The best Kelly could get from another network would be an opinion slot where she could be a Brit Hume somewhere else (as “the right wing voice”) or perhaps an occasional interview show. Neither of those options would provide Kelly with the celebrity status or salary she clearly wants – so she’ll stay at Fox News where she can have both.

The real question to me is what the rest of Fox News’ primetime lineup will resemble over the next year. Assuming O’Reilly steps down in late 2017, he’ll still hold court along with Kelly. Does Hannity stay through 2017, or does he jump to Trump’s new network to be the main star there? Who do they put in Greta’s former spot once Brit Hume goes back to his usual once-a-week opining? I’m guessing they could plug in Perino and Stirewalt, who are at least a more informed duo, and a more appealing option than many of the other Fox News personalities. It’s obvious that Eric Bolling thinks he’ll be the heir to O’Reilly but I strongly doubt it – he’s way too stiff and his nastiness comes across in a particularly risible manner. O’Reilly has always been able to play off his boorishness as being a loudmouthed bar patron and “just one of the folks” – and for many viewers, this is a familiar sight that they’re comfortable watching on TV. Kind of an Archie Bunker of the right. Bolling doesn’t have any of that “one of the folks” feeling to him – he’s just an angry, condescending right wing voice. He’ll always have a slot with his “Cashin’ In” show and he’ll be part of “The Five”, but I really doubt anyone at Fox News will give him the big spotlight any more than they’ll give it to Juan Williams, who’s really there to be a more liberal foil. My instincts say that when Hannity leaves and O’Reilly retires, we’ll see new faces come in from the world of right wing radio – maybe not as rabid as Hannity or as boorish as O’Reilly, but still reliably conservative.

As for Michael Moore, I’ve had some real issues with him over the past decade. Just too much with the grandstanding and the moralizing and the talking down to everyone. This is the same man who predicted a President Romney and a President Trump, and did so from the point of view of “I know how middle America thinks and you don’t.” I empathize with his thoughts about how many of the middle class in this country have really been screwed over. I think he’s right that many farmers and industrial workers are absolutely infuriated about how they don’t make the money they used to make and how everything is more expensive and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. But he’s wrong if he thinks all those people are nasty and hateful too. Michael Moore is an effective gadfly, no doubt about it. He gets people to think, which is a good thing. But he is not a moral authority, and he loses credibility every time he tries to present a legitimate point (such as that people really do need to vote) in terms of an absolute panic.

I would argue that Moore’s appearance on Kelly’s show is mutually beneficial. Moore gets to promote himself and his movie and show he isn’t afraid to go on Fox News. Kelly gets to show that she’s willing to interview a liberal voice and not just cut his mike. Both believe it will help their credibility. I don’t know that it does – to me, it’s simply a promotional plus for them.

From what I’m seeing here, the issue is simply about whether Huma Abedin was printing classified emails. That’s all. This is nothing that Hillary Clinton would have specifically known was happening. And from everything the FBI inquiries showed, Abedin wasn’t being sent classified information.

The more general understanding is that Hillary Clinton preferred to read hard copies of emails when she could, and she forwarded many to Abedin to print out for her. Again, there is no indication that any of this was classified material – just procedural everyday material. The only reason this is coming up is because the FBI is appropriately looking into Anthony Weiner’s criminal behavior and found emails on a shared laptop that Abedin used for printing.

It’s pretty much impossible that Clinton would have ever sent anything classified over to Abedin to print out. That stuff would have been kept secure and isolated – Clinton really did take that issue quite seriously. So what the FBI is looking at now is just to confirm that the emails on the printing laptop don’t have anything other than the usual memoranda and procedural updates. (These weren’t emails Clinton was writing herself – they were threads she was being copied on)

The only reason Comey has made Congress aware of it is that he was afraid it would leak, and thus make it look like he was covering something up. The problem is that by taking this action, he has broken other FBI rules and may be in serious trouble himself. There are already people now calling for his resignation.

I think after Monday or Tuesday, this situation will not have nearly the impact the Dems are worried about, or that the right wing is desperately hoping it will have.

From this segment, you can see the panic sweat on both Hannity and Giuliani. They have a losing candidate who has repeatedly insulted large swathes of the American voting public, who has put himself into repeated and increasingly bizarre scandals, who has lost three debates in an embarrassing manner, and who clearly has no idea how he would go about being the executive administrator of this country. So their only hope now is a few procedural memos that Huma Abedin printed out? Seriously? That’s their entire campaign now? No wonder these guys are panicking. (By the way, if you want to see REAL panic, look at Jay Sekulow’s frantic attempt to demand a full-on criminal treatment of Clinton in Hannity’s following segment)

Let’s remember what Hannity and Giuliani (and Bill O’Reilly) desperately want people to forget. James Comey did NOT lay out a case to indict Hillary Clinton in his July announcement, and he did NOT say that Hillary Clinton had committed any criminal acts, even when Trey Gowdy desperately tried to “gotcha” him in a Congressional hearing. What he said was that he thought the email handling was careless but not criminal. He in fact said that there was no prosecutor that would ever consider bringing a criminal charge for this situation – even the whole right wing focus on the “intent doesn’t matter” idea doesn’t hold up. Comey specifically addressed that and pointed out that this would only apply if you could show that there was such obvious and outrageous negligence with classified material that the defendant would either have to have intentionally leaked it (like Petraeus) or simply been hugely and catastrophically incompetent (like Alberto Gonzales). So there isn’t a case for a criminal indictment and there never was.

The right wing would like everyone to believe that Clinton is a criminal or at least someone who “can’t be trusted”. They have spent nearly 25 YEARS spreading this narrative, starting with Rush Limbaugh’s repeated lies, continuing with Matt Drudge’s operation, and then echoed ad nauseam across right wing websites and message boards since the internet went big in the 90s. The right wing is delighted at the current turn of events because there is no specificity to them – they can just keep fanning the flames of “Hey, you don’t know that Hillary isn’t about to be indicted, heh heh heh…” even if they have no substance to discuss. Obviously, the Dems want the FBI to specify what they’re talking about, which would help blow this over in a hurry. (Once everyone hears that it’s Abedin’s printer, this will disappear while everyone fusses over Weiner’s situation) And just as obviously, the right wing wants to keep their insinuations percolating for the next week – in the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, they can chip away a little more at Clinton’s numbers and flip a couple of swing states. I tend to doubt this strategy will work. I think we’re simply too close to Election Day for this kind of silliness to have that much of an impact, and Trump is too repulsive of a candidate for this to suddenly motivate that many of Clinton’s supporters to not show up.

I’m frankly looking forward to November 9th, when at least we’ll be past the election. Between the unfortunate behavior of some Sanders supporters in the first part of this year and the constant hatred of the right wing throughout the process, this has been a truly unpleasant time.

I think Trump made history tonight.

Not just for all the petulant moments of interrupting Clinton and glaring at her while she was speaking. Not just for what increasingly sounded like a panicked attempt to assert himself while the floor fell away beneath him.

For the biggest jaw-dropper I’ve ever heard in a presidential debate. Not an insult, not even a jab. A petulant, egotistical refusal to accept the outcome of an election. I can understand a situation like 2000 where the numbers are so close, it’s pretty much obligatory to recheck them. But that’s not what we’re looking at here. This is looking like at least a 340-198 walkaway for Clinton. And after Trump’s failure tonight, that number may have just risen another 30 EC votes. In that scenario, Trump refusing to accept the outcome isn’t a sign for his concern for democracy. It’s part of a denial of reality, and a fairly nasty one at that.

I agree with other posters who noted that Kellyanne Conway looked both tired and unhappy while attempting to put the best face on the situation. Looked to me that Megyn Kelly was in a bit of “I told you so” while noting Trump’s belly flop tonight.

Let’s see what the numbers show in a week or two. It’s really starting to feel like Trump is staring down the barrel of the biggest public humiliation of his life. Not a surprise that he won’t be making that phone call on Election Night or any other time.

Joseph is correct here, although I would have preferred to see Al Gore actually pursue a full recount of Florida in 2000 as was his right. Sadly, he chose to just cherry pick a few counties he thought he would win. What was needed was a statewide recount, which later research proved would have shown he had actually won the state of Florida by the barest of margins. I guarantee the Bush people would have screamed bloody murder at this and we would have had a do-over in Florida that would have emphatically put Gore in the White House. But he chose to walk away instead. I agree with his approach of not being childish about it, but I wish he would have used the proper means that were open to him to stand up for the millions of people who were effectively disenfranchised in 2000.

That said, had Gore listened even a little to left wing Dems who were begging him to take some of the policy positions of Ralph Nader, he would not have found himself in such a tight margin in Florida.

As for the Tea Party nonsense, I agree that nearly all of it has been about obstructing President Obama and hiding behind some faux patriotism. It’s also been well-funded by the Koch Brothers and the like, an aspect that the right wing tries to muddy by throwing smears at George Soros.

I also agree that Clarke’s behavior this year has been acutely irresponsible for a Sheriff. The best thing he could do at this time would be to voluntarily step down and allow a non-partisan Sheriff take over. Or his citizens could recall him.

I fully expect Trump to throw a complete tantrum after he loses. I doubt he’ll concede in any public way, and I really doubt he’ll make the traditional phone call. Trump doesn’t handle losing well – and all the other parts of the end of a presidential campaign would be skipped by him while he announces his new media empire in the making. I expect him to make a series of comments about the election being rigged against him and that he’ll be filing a lawsuit about that but in the meantime, here’s Trump TV. It’s for that reason that I expect some Trumpsters to attempt to disrupt the inauguration in January.

On the other hand, it will be deeply satisfying to either see the Senate go ahead and confirm Merrick Garland in December or see Hillary Clinton make the first of what should be at least 2 SC appointments within her first week in the White House.

It is extremely odd to see Daniel suddenly introducing this kind of material and not understanding its nature. I had thought he was presenting himself as an experienced intellectual with scholastic background. Instead, he has repeated various unfortunate racial assumptions and even now refuses to support them with any actual research.

He now brings in an excerpt from a Russian-hacked email, out of a large trove dumped by WikiLeaks and which we have no way of knowing how it’s been edited or changed. We’ve already had various parts of these releases discredited as actually being misquotes of published articles, and we’ve had an official determination that these dumps are the result of Russian hackers trying to affect our election. This apparently does not concern Daniel, who previously was very concerned about his fear of foreigners affecting this country. But let’s assume for argument that the specific email he’s worried about is a genuine article. If it is, it’s actually a document of inclusion, not racism. The email describes a list of potential VP options, any of whom could be a good choice to hold the office. Identifying their background, ethnicity, etc is not racism – it is simply identifying who is being discussed as a candidate for high office. If the list were about ruling OUT a candidate due to their ethnicity, then THAT would be racism. Compare this to Trump and Daniel’s discussion of the reasons he is afraid of Muslim immigrants and how he wishes to keep them out of the US. One discussion is about bringing people in, the other is about keeping people out. One is about looking forward, the other is about the fear of an Other. I believe it’s easy to determine which approach is truly in racist territory.

Regarding the selectively edited videos purveyed by James O’keefe, there’s a reason why most people ignore them. O’Keefe has a long record of fraud and criminality. He is simply not a credible source, particularly since we have no idea what he’s removed from these tapes – such as the part where the participants are apparently asked to discuss how they would handle a hypothetical situation. But even if we look at the tapes per se, are we really meant to believe that someone showing up outside a Trump rally wearing a Planned Parenthood t-shirt is enough to send Trump supporters into a crazed violent attack? And are we meant to believe that the Chicago riot was solely due to a couple of agitators rather than what we already know was a situation of angry Chicago residents who don’t like Trump’s racism confronting a bunch of Trump supporters who do like Trump’s racism?

If this is truly what Daniel believes will be a solid scholastic support for his unfortunate racial assertions, I don’t know how he believes he would convince anyone, let alone the people who read and post at this site.

I think it’s pretty clear now that the Trump campaign is in a death spiral. There is very little chance they can make up their shortfall in the remaining 3 ½ weeks, and Trump has apparently committed himself to lashing out in every direction rather than even pretending to act “presidential.” As a result, Fox News and right wing radio are being presented with a quandary. They know their candidate is going to lose and someone they absolutely hate is going to become president – so how do they present that situation to their audience?

Bill O’Reilly is in a particularly ticklish position here. He clearly likes Trump and wants him to win, but can’t maintain that in the light of what’s clearly happening, particularly with Trump’s numbers going south. The fact that Fox News polling and right wing former pollster Scott Rasmussen are now agreeing that Clinton is far enough ahead to pretty much have this is definitely not a help for the pro-Trumpers out there. So the story now is how do they play the endgame? For O’Reilly, he’s likely to blame Trump’s downfall on salacious rumors, thus allowing him to pretend he has the moral high ground to tut-tut that the media should have focused more on Clinton’s liabilities and things like WikiLeaks.

I note with WikiLeaks that I have to wonder if Julian Assange hasn’t just completely played the American right for fools, and if he isn’t having a good laugh at their expense, given that there’s really no there there when you actually look at what his hackers got from the Russians. Assange has pushed the right wing into a completely hypocritical position – they HATED him several years ago when he and Manning were publishing materials the right didn’t want out there, but now they’re sympathetic to him if he can give them dirt on the Clintons. He repeatedly rings their bell with hints about great stuff he’s going to release, but teases the release with comments like “some of it is interesting, some of it is amusing.” Then he dumps a hacker trove of internal emails that pretty much show snarkiness inside a campaign – real shocker there. Given that there are thousands of almost completely irrelevant emails in this dump, the right wing is left scrambling through all this dreck looking for the needle in the haystack, and there really isn’t one that I’ve seen – something Assange admitted in his announcement a couple of weeks ago. So we have the spectacle of the right wing frantically trying to find that smoking needle in the midst of thousands of pounds of dross – I have to believe Assange is having a good time watching the attempted frenzy. This may be the ultimate rick roll ever done.

But while that’s happening, Fox News knows it must continue to beat the drum that this is a “real serious scandal” for Clinton, and that somehow the revelations about Trump’s boorishness and creepiness are somehow only coming out as a “wag the dog” maneuver rather than a nail into the coffin of the Trump campaign. The main audience of Fox News are right wingers who have repeatedly been told that the Clintons are evil career criminals who should be in jail – so that drumbeat would be comforting to them in a time when it’s obvious their candidate is going down in flames. Fox News and the right wing are also being careful about not repeating the crippling mistake they made in 2012, where they insisted that Mitt Romney was going to win, with some even opining he would win in a landslide and saying that the polls showing the truth were “skewed”. (I note that the 2012 right wing spin was so humiliatingly disproven that Scott Rasmussen was forced to leave polling in disgrace – he had previously been touted up to that election day as “the most accurate” of all the pollsters by using the questionable accounting tactic of only using the final few days of a race to measure that accuracy. Rasmussen had been notorious for keeping a right wing thumb on the scale up to that point to make it appear that the right wing candidate was going to win, and then taking the thumb off at the very end to show real numbers just before the polls opened. In 2012, Rasmussen and Gallup kept their thumbs on the scale all the way down, thinking it would help stimulate more right wingers to vote and discourage everyone else – this sadly backfired for them as we saw.)

So now we have Fox News openly admitting that Clinton is likely to win, and various right wing AM radio shouters are saying the same thing. This leaves two issues for the various pundits and anchors to handle. First, who do they blame for the defeat? Do they admit that it’s Trump himself, as Ben Shapiro is positioning himself to do since he never liked Trump in the first place? Do they follow the line that “the whole media is in the tank for Hillary” as Limbaugh has done? Do they blame “weak Republicans” for not sticking with Trump, like Hannity and Gingrich? Do they pretend they have some gravitas that sets them above the fray as O’Reilly is laughingly attempting here? Do they pretend to have objectivity, as Megyn Kelly is currently playing? (She was never a Trump fan for obvious reasons, and her open disdain for Trump’s mouthpieces on her show is becoming truly entertaining as we get down to the final days of the campaign)

I will be curious to see if Trump really does try to start up a “Trump TV” to compete with Fox and Newsmax and the other right wing outlets. If he does, the behavior of Hannity, Gingrich and Huckabee, among others, makes a lot of sense. I could easily see Hannity jumping over to a new Trump network with Gingrich and Roger Ailes and essentially continuing the propaganda they’ve been inflicting for the past 20 years. I could see Kelly positioning herself as the primary anchor of a less rabidly right wing Fox News in the post-Ailes, post-election period, particularly if Hannity jumps ship and O’Reilly retires in another year. Huckabee could go either way – if there are two networks of this ilk, he has his pick of the litter – one of them will give him a cushy weekend show like he had before on Fox News (and most likely will again in 2017). (I have to feel a little sorry for Ted Cruz, in that he clearly thought he was going to have that kind of cushy gig but will instead wind up with only Glenn Beck to turn to – assuming that Beck’s organization survives much longer.)

One final thought – I have kept a little bit of video of Newt Gingrich, recorded on August 18th during an appearance with Hannity. His exact words: “I’m going to go out on a limb tonight, and you can keep this tape and remind me about it after the election, okay? Donald Trump’s gonna win. Donald Trump’s gonna win, because in the end, the country’s not gonna reward big banks and big unions and big bureaucracies and big donors and big corruption by voting for a big liar. And in the end, the country’s gonna say ‘You know, whatever Trump’s weaknesses may be, he’s a sincere guy trying very hard to get this country back on the right track.” Now, if a bunch of Republicans are too stiff-necked, too proud, or in some cases too committed to the old order, after the election, I think they’re gonna be very sobered by their position because the fact is, I think he’s gonna win." Let’s see how that works out in 3 1/2 weeks…

I agree with David. Clinton had essentially an equal performance to the first debate. She had one moment where she was clearly irritated with Trump, and she had one moment where she interrupted him, but other than that, she played at as classy as one could given the opponent.

Trump, for his part, took every cheap shot he could at both Clinton and the moderators. When he wasn’t doing that, he was frankly incoherent on policy. He clearly followed the Hannity playbook of ignoring the questions he was asked and trying to pivot to personal attacks on Clinton followed by pithy statements about he was going to run a presidency that was going to be “so much better.”
People who are already in his corner, or who simply hate the Clintons, will love his performance tonight. I fully expect Limbaugh and the other hatemongers on AM radio to gleefully replay every last insult from Trump throughout the next two weeks as red meat for their listeners. But the polling is already coming in on the debate. CNN had it almost as high of a win for Clinton as the first one. YouGov had a tighter win for her.

And we should remember that going into this debate, Trump was already down to 22.4% at 538 on their most cautious outlook. He needed a massive win to be able to turn that around. Not just the attempted catchphrase of Tucker Carlson of being “an escape artist”. He needed a, forgive the expression, Huge win. He didn’t get one, and to my mind, he simply reconfirmed why he is temperamentally unsuited to this office.

Let’s see what happens with the polling over the next week and a half before the final debate. I fully expect Trump to come out completely unhinged in the final one. And let’s not forget that he thinks he has a sympathetic moderator in Chris Wallace…

This tells us that Trump has been spending his time exclusively watching Fox News and listening to right wing AM radio. Because this attack strategy has been repeatedly advocated, not just by Hannity but by multiple other Fox News anchors, and by pretty much every single angry right wing AM shouter. Their hope is to play the meme of “Trump’s words aren’t great, but Hillary Clinton’s ACTIONS are much worse!” Doors is correct to note that this sounds like a 3rd grader pointing at someone else in the class when they get in trouble, but I have to note that it’s a nonsensical comparison.

Let’s be honest about the Trump issues. We’re not just talking about how he said the wrong words or insulted someone here or there. We’re discussing a consistent pattern of nastiness and viciousness that he has demonstrated over the last several decades. From the time he made headlines for his Marla Maples affair to the present day, he has always been known for this kind of behavior. We just didn’t have to see an audio/video demonstration by him in the flesh before. He has been known for crude behavior toward women and crude statements to and about them for decades.

Let’s also remember that this bombshell tape isn’t from 1975 when he was a young guy who didn’t know better. It isn’t even from “a long time ago” and one has to wonder where Trump got the idea that such a concept would sell for this situation. This tape is from 2005 – Trump was nearly 60 years old when he did this. Are we meant to believe that after he turned 60, he suddenly found maturity that he has yet to demonstrate even a single time during this entire campaign? Seriously?

And it’s not just the insults and the childlike tantrums he’s been throwing around during the campaign. Yes, the comments have been embarrassing – even vulgar, as he’s again demonstrated in this tape. But he’s not just “saying words”. He’s been engaging in racist BEHAVIOR. Stirring up birther rumors isn’t just “sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me”. Announcing a plan to screen Muslims from the US, and repeatedly fanning racist flames about building a wall against Mexico and forcing them to pay for it is not just “saying words”. Encouraging violence at his rallies is not just “saying words”. If you scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater, that’s not just “saying words”. Hate Speech isn’t just “words” – it’s deliberate action, and Donald Trump does not get to hide behind the right wing notion that he has no accountability for repeatedly voicing hatred, racism and sexism.

The actual content of this video shows Trump enjoying his status as an entitled rich person who can get whatever he wants because he’s rich and a celebrity. Because he was in sympathetic company, he was happy to openly state that he enjoys what he sees as his status. The creepy part of the video isn’t just the casual sexism and objectification he enjoys – it’s the moment where he and Bush insist on having the actress give them each a hug. She has no idea that they’ve been making comments like this, including about her body, literally right before greeting her. It’s a skin-crawling moment, and Trump is clearly enjoying it in the video, as is Bush. It’s not just “words”, and Trump doesn’t get to dismiss the situation as something that small. On a larger scale, it’s the same meme of entitlement that he used to parlay his business failures (which weren’t self-financed) into a tax break of nearly a billion dollars that we know about, so that he wouldn’t even have to pay income taxes while raking in millions for himself each year.

And then we get to this bizarre right wing idea that somehow the Clintons’ “actions” are worse than Trump’s decades of bad behavior. I note that the right does seem to be running out of material. If the best they can do is to, yet again, bring up the old and discredited Bill Clinton smears, they truly are in panic mode. Hillary Clinton will likely not dignify this with a back and forth, but we should be very clear that the right wingers are not discussing “actions” by Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton. They’re attempting to raise discredited accusations that were fully dealt with over 20 years ago. Broaddrick and Willey both had their accounts examined at the time, when they were barely relevant. Both women made inconsistent statements and repeatedly contradicted themselves. If the right wing has some new evidence that Bill Clinton is guilty of sexual assault or of being a “sexual predator”, let’s see this new evidence. Because they weren’t able to get any of this to stick when he was President. All they’ve been able to do is peddle the same nasty rumors they picked up from the likes of Rush Limbaush. They’ve repeated these lies and smears for over 20 years and the repetition does not make them true. What’s annoying is that the constant repetition over such a long period has confused a lot of people who only know that they always hear these stories. After people who aren’t really paying attention to this stuff keep hearing a story like that for years, they assume there must be something to it, rather than it just being the same rumors being thrown around for the umpteenth time. I imagine that Limbaugh and Hannity and their ilk are proud of the fact that they’ve confused so many people. They literally have repeated a lie so many times that they’ve gotten a lot of people to accept its basis – that somehow the Clintons and particularly Hillary are skilled liars and deceivers and probably criminals too. But the reality is that the right wing is just repeating lies and rumors and innuendos. None of which translates to “bad actions” by the Clintons.

It’s interesting that Hannity wants to yet again bring up Hillary Clinton being required by a judge to defend a rapist in court. He wants to yet again bring up her rueful comments about that in a later interview as though she was somehow proud of it. The reality is that she was mandated to take this case even when she asked to be relieved of it. This doesn’t make her a bad person or an evil person. It makes her an attorney who was assigned a case and didn’t have the luxury of refusing to do her job. (And Hannity never discusses that this particular case had a lot of complications he never mentions…)

I’m also wondering how Fox News thinks the anticlimactic WikiLeaks dump is somehow an equivalent story with Trump’s nastiness exploding in public. Assuming the WikiLeaks materials are accurate, all they show is Hillary Clinton discussing political reality behind closed doors. I don’t see anything in the “bombshells” Fox News thinks they have that actually shows Clinton saying anything particularly vexing. Maybe that she was frustrated with Sanders voters who were and are accusing her of everything under the sun because they didn’t want to deal with what actually happens in elections and politics. But, again assuming the leaked materials are correct, her discussion about politicians working out their agreements in private is not some strange horrifying conspiracy. It’s how bills get made and passed. There’s a political calculus that goes with this work. Both right wingers and liberals have worked together to keep the government functioning – at least up to the current situation where the right wing has steadfastly refused to do their jobs for years. And yes, there are times where opposing politicians will agree to do something together, knowing that the opposition will mount a token vote to say no. Idea being that everyone wants the bill to go through but the opposition must cast “No” votes to not get barbecued by their constituents back home. The opening of Cuba is just such an example. They all agree to let it go through, but a bunch of the congresspeople have to go through the motions of outwardly slagging the move or they’ll get primaried in the next election cycle. That’s not a craven action – it’s simply the reality of politics. If Hillary Clinton understands this, and obviously she and Bill Clinton are well versed in it, that makes her a more effective politician and would make her a better President. You would think that Donald Trump would understand this as someone who had a book written for him called “The Art of the Deal.” A truly well negotiated contract or bill requires everyone to give something – it’s not just the right wing saying “We get everything we want and everyone else loses”.

So I truly hope that Donald Trump does bring this nonsensical approach up tomorrow night. It would only provide an even simpler way for Hillary Clinton to summarize the major damage that he has done to his own campaign and his candidacy just by being himself. And I hope he follows the other right wing idea of ignoring questions from moderators and the public to just repeatedly pivot to more assertions that he’s going to “fix the economy”. All that will do is get him a reminder from the moderators that he needs to answer the questions that have been presented to him, which would result in yet another tantrum, which can’t help a situation where he’s tipping farther and farther upside down.

Judging from Hannity’s obvious desperation tonight after the spectacular audio/video today, panic is an understatement.

I found it interesting that both he and O’Reilly did all they could to minimize the damage to Trump today, and as much as they could to exaggerate the non-news of what releases were being floated by WikiLeaks about Hillary Clinton.

You know the right wing is panicking when you see Dinesh D’Souza being touted as a reputable guest and then you hear him refer to Hillary Clinton as “a crooked hag”.

One really wonders how they’re going to handle the major bad publicity that will roil through this weekend. Trump has already gone on a spiral that has seen his 538 numbers plummet to a notably perilous level. Not sure they can go a lot lower, but this definitely won’t help him. And I don’t expect him to show up as a penitent and contrite man on Sunday night. Which will only increase the panic at Fox News.