I agree that Perino is acting as the adult in the room while many others at Fox News are blindly stumping for Trump. (see Hannity, Sean; etc)

But for me, the most important quote here is her straightforward admission: “I don’t want the Republicans to lose. I believe that conservative values and the principles and our policies are so much better than liberal ones.”

This from a person who is featured on multiple Fox News shows, running the gamut from opinion to supposed news analysis. She is openly stating her bias – something Fox News has repeatedly denied over the two decades it has existed. When pushed, Fox News points to the notion that it’s got plenty of liberal voices, etc. Dana Perino is one of the more moderate voices to be found on the network. She’s not a Hannity or an O’Reilly. She doesn’t get into shouting matches with people, and she doesn’t get gleeful or falsely pious. She’s one of their rational faces, and she’s just stated that she’s openly Republican and will work to make sure that a Republican is elected. It’s not a surprised and it’s already evident, but to hear the words come out of her mouth that blatantly tells a lot about how much the wheels are coming off the wagons in that organization.

This entire line of discussion is flat-out sick. I agree that Fox News is again showing its desperation and panic over a candidate we’ve all known to be extremely deficient.

I agree with David that it’s a truly strange day when Newt Gingrich is the only one in the room making sense.

Trump’s campaign appears to be in freefall at the moment. He’s now tripling down on the angry rhetoric and securing the help of Ailes and the guy running Breitbart’s smears.

It’s still possible that he could pull out of this crash dive, but that will require him to suddenly become a master of debating. If he doesn’t, the debates will effectively attach the cement overshoes to his downward momentum.

Hannity is beginning to openly panic about Trump’s plummeting poll numbers. Between that disaster and the uncertainty he faces at Fox News without Ailes to protect him, it’s not a surprise to see him lashing out in all directions.

I suppose it wouldn’t be appropriate to use the Limbaugh phrase and note that Stelter appears to be living rent-free in Hannity’s head.

Paul’s contribution is interesting but sadly uninformed.

I don’t know that Trump and his supporters are personally responsible for CNN’s ratings, but it’s interesting that Paul would like to think they are. It’s a little troubling that Paul would like for Trump to take credit for trying to pollute someone else’s social postings on Twitter or anywhere else, but that’s for Paul to explain.

Very interesting that Paul thinks that Trump leads somehow in “all independent online polls”. What the heck does this mean? The aggregate of all polls clearly shows Trump slipping farther and farther behind. What specific polls are showing him as leading? I strongly doubt that Paul can produce anything here, but I’d be curious to see what he is talking about.

Finally, Paul’s comments about free speech are moving, but he’s got the discussion upside down and backwards. Forgetting that he’s lumping Progressives and Liberals into a single designation, I’ll just deal with his misunderstanding of radicals and free speech. Progressives have long been proponents of free speech, particularly when they were told to shut up about their opposition to war and cruelty, or when they were told that voicing a different opinion was somehow treason during the disastrous George W. Bush presidency.

But progressives have also long spoken out against Hate Speech, which is not the same thing as simply voicing an opinion. It’s a matter of advocating hatred and violence against someone else, something that Trump and his supporters have repeatedly done. Paul apparently doesn’t like being called out for this, but he has a simple solution he can exercise: Don’t say hateful and racist things, and he won’t be called out for saying them. He does have the right to say those hateful things, but everyone else has the right to call him on it when he does so.

When none of this stuff works, what else do they come up with? An ancient debunked canard about Clinton’s defense counsel days from 1975 which gets nowhere other than the same gullible people who believed it last time. (And this is why these games really start to feel like Whack-a-Mole after a while) A startling revelation that Cheryl Mills volunteered to interview some people for the Clinton Foundation Charity, including travelling on her own dime to do so. (All of which is legal and actually commendable) And some attempted hay that the FBI is looking at the conduct of the Clinton Foundation, which turns out to be based on the urging of right wing GOP congresspeople and advocates. Oh, and a nonsensical series of digs about Clinton’s supposed health problems. (Which is also interesting – is she this dynamic terror on wheels, or is she a frail old woman who can’t stand on her own two feet? I’m not sure that the right wing knows which meme to play here…) On the last, Eric Bolling actually tried to get Trump to make a salacious comment during one of Trump’s several interviews with Fox News this week alone, and for a change, Trump decided not to bite. Yet.

So what we have is Fox News and the right wing frantically trying to wave their arms and yell “Booga, Booga, Booga!!!” during a time when their chosen candidate is literally melting down in front of them. (And he’s even commenting on taking a vacation if he loses) Now, what’s a right wing ideologue like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh to do? Their candidate is saying all the outrageous things they’d love to say, throwing all the verbal insults and bombs they’d love to get away with, and including several that these guys have actually thrown around. But the American public isn’t responding with adoration. Instead, the public is revolted. I wonder why…

This was clearly supposed to be the Fox News/right wing Line of the Week. The intention was to really point this up and work it to emphasize Clinton as clueless or sinister, depending on which prejudice the viewer is supposed to have. And it was supposed to tie in with the other two attack lines of the week. The first being the Judicial Watch Attempted Email Headline #294, where we are supposed to believe that a right wing activist group has “suddenly” come across really sinister emails that turn out to be both ordinary and already dealt with. The second being the new lawsuit from two right wing parents of Benghazi victims. A lawsuit that just happens to have been timed to be unveiled about one week after the Dem Convention with the clear goal of puncturing any bounce Clinton might have been getting.

All three of those stories together were intended to be a constant whine of negativity about Clinton to drive her numbers down and discourage her supporters. (“Your candidate is about to be indicted again! Your candidate is an evil person who is being sued by the poor parents of her victims! Your candidate doesn’t even care about the victims in Orlando!”) And this was supposed to be the drumbeat of the week, hopefully to result in some strong downturns in her polling and thus some improvement for Trump to keep him close until the debates. This was also intended to keep her trustworthy numbers as low as possible and alienate Clinton from anyone thinking of her as a human being after the last couple of weeks.

And it all could have worked brilliantly. If Trump could have controlled himself and stayed on his message. If he could have resisted the impulse to go for the cheap below-the-belt shot. But he can’t. He simply can’t stop himself from the cheap shot.

So now all of right wing media has been stuck having to address and cover for Trump’s vicious joke. Which blows a hole through the great week they had planned for Clinton. These great Rovian ideas only work when your candidate isn’t determined to shoot himself in the big toe at least once a week.

If what Sherman is talking about is properly investigated, this is very serious business indeed. I submit a single name in case anyone thinks this is something that would just get swept under the rug: John McTiernan. Once he was a major Hollywood director of big action movies. And then the whole Pellicano case happened, and his conduct during that investigation landed him in prison for nearly a year.

Anyone who participated in these smear campaigns should be very concerned about following in McTiernan’s footsteps.

Hannity’s desperation is really starting to show now. There’s nothing going on at Fox News or in this campaign that he remotely likes. He wanted to see Ted Cruz get the nomination and he wanted to see Newt Gingrich get the VP slot. Instead, he’s forced to defend Trump on nonsensical grounds and he is stuck with a VP nominee he didn’t want. Add to that the continuing mayhem inside Fox News, where his greatest protector is now gone. Hannity has to know that he may be the most vulnerable prime time host they have, and he won’t have anywhere to turn once he loses his position at Fox News.

And there’s an added injustice for Hannity: Rush Limbaugh is apparently being retained for another 4 years by Clear Channel. Hannity was thinking Limbaugh would be retiring soon, thus giving Hannity the potential number one position for right wing radio shouters. Instead, Limbaugh will continue limping along (and continue losing radio stations and markets) for another few years, and Hannity will continue to stand by, hoping he can somehow inherit Limbaugh’s mantle in the end.

The fact that the polling has continued to slide badly for Trump hasn’t been lost on Hannity. Between the Ailes ouster and the potential four years of Hillary Clinton in the White House, he has to be wondering where he’ll be standing in another year. My thinking is that he tries to hang on as long as he can, particularly given that he really doesn’t have any standing after he leaves Fox News.

This was an interesting segment, in that it clearly showed panic setting in for Bolling. The best part was his demand that Dent admit to somehow violating the “Buckley Rule” of always voting for the more conservative candidate.

Dent was clearly taken aback by the level of aggression and panic emanating from Bolling, and it looked like he was struggling to answer at times while he recovered from his amazement.

If anything, it was interesting to hear Bolling act as though he had the right to tell someone else what their political priorities should be. Dent and others have clearly made up their minds that Donald Trump is not a candidate they can support. They don’t like him on principle, and they don’t trust him to be able to handle the job of President. Bolling doesn’t get to tell them that they are not allowed to have that reaction.

And yes, here goes Bolling again with his Supreme Court argument – what he’s leaving out is that there should NOT be a 4-4 split on the Court right now. There is a perfectly qualified appointee named Merrick Garland, who is waiting for the hearings that should have been conducted 5 months ago. Hearings that Bolling’s friends in the Senate have refused to conduct, in the hope that they can somehow game the system long enough for a Trump to get into office and nominate a real far right wing hard case. The fact that the GOP thinks they can get away with that last insult is something that I really hope comes into play in the fall campaign. I’d love to see those guys trying to justify their pettiness to the voters.

Far right-wingers actually do believe that Bill Clinton committed rape. They believe this because they’ve been told that for years by sources like Rush Limbaugh. They also believe the Clintons are guilty of fraud, larceny, mob tactics and murder. It doesn’t matter that none of this is true. It doesn’t matter than this stuff has been repeatedly debunked and discredited. All that matters is that they believe it, because they genuinely hate the Clintons and they’d believe anything anyone said that presented them in a sinister light. And as we’ve noted, if Limbaugh repeats a lie fifty times over 20 years, it doesn’t matter that we repeatedly point out that it’s a lie. The sheer repetition begins to give the lie the weight of truth. Since these guys already believe this nonsense anyway, the repetition makes them think that it’s some kind of confirmation.

Take the story that Hillary Clinton was fired from the legal staff of the House Oversight Committee on Watergate, investigating the malfeasances of the Nixon Administration. This is a right-wing trope we’ve heard for years, and it’s based on contradictory claims made by Jerry Zeifman, who was the Chief Counsel. The problem is that Zeifman’s statements not only contradict themselves but have been debunked by other people on the same committee. They note that Zeifman did not fire Clinton, that she didn’t do anything along the lines of the criminality he has alleged, and that even if he’d wanted to fire her, he couldn’t have done so. Further, it’s noted that Zeifman has stated issues with pretty much everyone else he worked with on that committee and people being asked about his reliability tend to say that he doesn’t have it. (Basically, his book and accounts of what happened add up to sour grapes by him more than anything else.) But this story gets repeated ad nauseum by right wingers all over the place, as recently as yesterday by Rush Limbaugh. And in the last few months, we’re even starting to see left wing supporters of Bernie Sanders citing this as an example of her supposed untrustworthiness, etc.

And that’s the problem – the lies get to the point that even left-wingers think they’re true. Which points to the importance of a site like this – to keep calling them out on this stuff. I swear that it’s like playing “Whack-a-Mole”, but if we don’t keep doing it, these lies will continue to be resurrected.

For better or for worse, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination by winning a lot more votes than Bernie Sanders. The votes were not rigged, and neither were the voters. Clinton simply got more people to vote for her. For Priebus to make the smarmy accusation that she’s somehow “illegitimate” is so offensive that it doesn’t even merit the laugh test.

One can argue that some of the comments in the leaked emails aren’t friendly to Sanders. Some of the comments are themselves offensive. But there’s nothing to indicate that the DNC sanctioned nastiness or impropriety. If anything, various emails show DNC staffers scolding people who were making inappropriate comments.

Having read a series of what were considered the “Most Damaging” emails, what see is not a concerted effort to “rig the system” against Sanders but rather a frustration with his supporters’ repeated attempts to disrupt primary events and caucuses. Schultz’s angriest statements came after the awful behavior by Sanders supporters in Nevada when they threw things and made threats after a parliamentary gambit of theirs failed. Granted, the DNC must remain neutral (and in many emails, the staffers say exactly that), but there’s nothing inherently wrong in politicians knowing the way the polling reads for the remaining states after April.

At this point, Fox News and the right wing are doing everything they can to blow this stuff way out of proportion, since they’re hoping they can make it sound stranger than the dark circus they inflicted last week in Cleveland.

I believe the “convention fight” narrative will be quelled by Sanders’ prime-time speech. By Wednesday, I believe the story will wind up being the differences seen between the Trump convention and the Dems gathering in Philadelphia. Past Sanders, there will be addresses by President Obama and Tim Kaine, as well, I think, as Bill Clinton.

Even on Fox News last night, even Brit Hume admitted that this latest email story isn’t much of one. Bill O’Reilly is of course trying to fan its flames, but he has no credibility on such matters in any case. I expect that Limbaugh and Hannity will also try to blow it up, but they’re expected to do so.

The long term of this campaign suggests that Trump will continue to embarrass himself in public, and that Clinton will maintain her slow but steady approach.

I’m actually curious about the attention Michael Moore is trying to get for himself now. He was a big Sanders supporter and is now trying to sell his story about how he thinks Trump is going to win the election. But at the end of his op-ed, he says “in my next column, I’ll talk about how we can prevent it”. In other interviews, he’s said he thinks Clinton will need to use satire to fight Trump. My instincts say that Moore just wants to see an outrageous campaign year – even farther over the top than what we’ve already been seeing. I agree with him that people need to pay attention and not assume anything. But Trump is by no means guaranteed to win this election. Moore’s assumption is that a lot of Clinton’s voters stay home. If people get the word out, that won’t be the case.

It would be the ultimate irony to see these guys all knocked off their perch. To have seen them make their fortunes by instigating smear campaigns and alleging coverups, and to then see them undone by those same issues in their own office.

I think what we’re seeing is Hannity really starting to lose it, based on a series of disappointments he’s enduring right now.

1. The GOP Convention was a bust by all accounts. There were no major celebrity faces or political stars to even provide good TV for independent voters.

2. The plagiarism debacle ruined any attempt that Trump made to generate good momentum early in the week.

3. The Ted Cruz misfire ruined the rest of the week and sent Trump into a tailspin. (I’m actually in agreement with some of the right wing when it comes to Cruz’s grandstanding – if he didn’t want to get on this train, he should have just stayed away, like the Bushes and Kasich did. Cruz’s appearance was clearly intended to set up his 2020 run. I think he should be more concerned about whether he gets primaried in 2018.)

4. Trump himself blew his big speech, winding up spending over an hour literally shouting at the audience. And then Trump added injury to insult by going totally off the rails yesterday in a press conference that will be known for Trump’s assertion that the National Enquirer is somehow to be considered a reliable source of news.

5. Trump picked Mike Pence rather than Newt Gingrich, someone that Hannity was openly campaigning for with all he had. Given that Kasich was offered essentially the presidency to be VP, Hannity has to know that this is what would happen with any VP Trump picks. (Trump evidently has no intention of doing the boring job of actually governing – he’d rather do all the public appearances and let the VP handle the policy back in the office.) Had Gingrich been the pick, this would essentially make Gingrich the President, with Hannity constantly in his ear. What’s not to like about that for Hannity? Except that now it won’t happen and Hannity has to get himself enthusiastic about a candidate he was hoping would go away, ie Pence.

6. Roger Ailes being thrown out of Fox News has to be a huge blow to Hannity. Ailes plucked Hannity from obscurity 20 years ago. Were it not for Ailes, Hannity would still be an unknown angry right wing radio shouter like so many others across the AM dial. Ailes made Hannity a celebrity on the right. (Hannity’s continuing desperation to maintain that status can be heard in his joint radio ads with Limbaugh…) Losing Ailes means that Hannity is losing his biggest supporter in that building – and his biggest protector.

Add all that up and you have a fairly unhappy guy trying to put on a happy face for the viewers. Add in one pointed Jon Stewart monologue and you have a full on meltdown.

Hannity had a complete meltdown over this on his radio show today. He had no answer to Stewart’s comments. All he could do was repeat his lies about the Obama presidency and shout profanity. Interesting to hear him become that unhinged.

I believe Hannity and the right wing are becoming increasingly restive after seeing what a mess the GOP convention became. Not to mention their unease at what is happening at Fox News now. If Hannity had not conducted himself in such a despicable manner over the past 20 years, I might even feel pity for him.

Last night, Bill O’Reilly asked his guests whether there was “too much hate” for Clinton on display. The enthusiastic answer was “Of course not!” and O’Reilly happily agreed.

I need to correct that. Montel did not actually serve as a SEAL – he played one on JAG. He did enlist as a Marine and then transferred to the Navy and became an officer. Served for 12 years and was honorably discharged, including submarine duty. But I was incorrect to say he had been a SEAL.

Not only will Kucinich and other supposedly liberal voices (like Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen) be tasked with attacking Hillary Clinton and the Dems, but other Fox News hosts are already salivating about how they intend to attack. Just yesterday, Sean Hannity was openly relishing his opportunity to attack and smear the Dems next week.

I do have to say about this speech that I wasn’t that impressed by it, regardless of the plagiarism. I realize this was a huge challenge for Melania Trump and that it had to be seriously intimidating for anyone to get up and speak publicly for a large audience. I also realize that English is not her first language and she therefore had a double challenge in making this speech. I applaud her courage in getting up to do so, and her wish to support her family. But the actual delivery of the speech to me was essentially an act of reading from the teleprompters, which made it very difficult for me to watch.

I agree with Bemused that Manafort’s desperation play this morning was spectacular. You have to admire the gall of this man. By his reasoning, the only reason anyone noticed the plagiarism here is “Because Hillary”. We knew this would be a pre-school campaign, but is this all they have for an answer? “I know you are, but what am I?”

I also note for Eyes that Trump is actually saying he intends to model his speech after Nixon’s 1968 speech. For all those who think Trump would “not be as bad as you think”, let’s revisit the goodness of the Nixon presidency, shall we? Is there ANYONE who thinks that would be a good idea?