I greatly appreciated Stewart’s toasting of Kilmeade and Fox News last night. He both addressed the error and Fox News’ premature victory pounce with the appropriate responses to each.

I will actually agree with Warner on part of his point here: Smiley did not specifically address what Hannity was saying. Granted, Hannity was trying to pull him into a “gotcha” moment as he tried again at the very end, but Smiley in turn did not come back with any of the potential rebuttals he could have and should have provided. It honestly did not sound to me like Smiley really heard what Hannity had to say about Garner’s death.

Keep in mind that Hannity’s take on Garner’s death is actually just to twist it to attack New York cigarette taxation policy. Smiley is correct that Hannity really doesn’t care about Garner’s death other than to fake empathy while using it as a stalking horse to attack cigarette taxes. (And I also note that here Hannity is attacking the same police he regularly upholds with as high a moral horse as he can build out of cards.) Smiley could have noted that Hannity’s real concern here is not for Garner but instead for himself – he doesn’t want people to think he’s out to attack EVERY unarmed black man killed by the police. For Hannity, Garner is a convenient cause for the moment, and a quick way to try to rebut the proper charges of racism he continues to earn. Hannity’s quick semantic defense of the police behavior with Garner is what gives it away. I wish that Smiley could have pointed this out, but he chose to cut to the chase and just say that Hannity didn’t care in the manner that he should – which sadly allowed Hannity to play the race card in reverse.

All of this devolved into a pointless back and forth between the guys, with both shouting over each other. That could have been avoided had Smiley given Hannity a moment and then specifically asked him about his conduct with Eleanor Holmes Norton and with the local official in Ferguson. Hannity would likely have ended the interview immediately rather than deal with that.

Smiley did properly note that Hannity’s condescending “let me educate you” nonsense is the sort of thing he doesn’t do with everyone. He certainly doesn’t do it with Ed Klein when Klein spouts the foulest rumors about President Obama or Bill Clinton. He didn’t do it when Dick Morris spouted the most idiotic projections about the 2012 election and was roundly discredited afterward. He doesn’t do it with Ann Coulter or with Michelle Malkin or with Brent Bozell. He doesn’t do it with Jay Sekulow or with Bill Cunningham or with David Limbaugh. But he does do it with Tavis Smiley.

I actually believe I have heard him use the “let me educate you” line with other guests beside Smiley, Norton and the Ferguson official. He’s also used it on Juan Williams and on Tamara Holder, if I’m not mistaken. In other words, he’s comfortable to use that terminology on someone who is black or female, who he thinks he can bully into submission. As I said in my prior post, it’s a pleasure to see someone like Smiley give it back to Hannity – and it was obvious that Hannity didn’t know how to handle it, other than to hide behind his supposed concern over Garner’s death.

What really sent this segment into a rancid area was Hannity’s decision to race bait Smiley with the bit about Louis Farrakhan where Hannity dared to demand that Smiley “apologize to the American People” for having Farrakhan on. And Smiley once again correctly waved off the nonsensical statement.

I agree with Ellen that Smiley’s challenge to President Obama at the end is likely misplaced on Hannity’s show – particularly the cheap shot about going on the Colbert Report. That’s the kind of thing that Hannity will eat out on for the next two years – “See, even Tavis Smiley thought the President was out of line!”

Watters actually made the situation worse by lying and saying that he HAD NOT edited the quotes. And he made sure he was doing that as the last word on the segment before they cut away so that Beckel had no chance to rebut the obvious lie. It’s a childish move, but nothing I wouldn’t expect Watters to do.

Warner can’t possibly think that people tune in to someone like Rush Limbaugh to “be informed”. And he must realize the irony of discussing the attempt to “pander to the ignorant” in the same breath as mentioning Limbaugh. Limbaugh has made a fortune for himself by pandering to the ignorant – its his stock in trade. This doesn’t make him smart – it makes him a guy who’s figured out how to say outrageous things on the radio and how to get people to think he has expertise he doesn’t have. I suppose you could say that Limbaugh has a certain level of street smarts – in that he knows how to fleece most of the crowd. But an expert in history or science or politics? Not so much.

Warner is speaking a complete falsehood here. Rep. Holmes Norton was not “going around saying, hands up. Don’t shoot”. There were other people in Congress doing that, but she wasn’t one of them. She made that clear in one of the few times she got a sentence out without being interrupted, and she told Hannity that if he wanted to talk about that stuff, he should call one of those congresspeople in rather than her.

And once again, Warner has libeled Rep. Holmes Norton. I’m really not sure why he keeps doubling down on this.

By the way, as a sidenote, the right wing radio folk are now dredging up the Dillon Taylor canard from Utah, as a way of trying to pull a reverse race card. For those unaware, Taylor was an unarmed 20 year old white man shot by a black police officer in Utah. Right wing media has tried to draw a false comparison with what happened with Michael Brown in Ferguson, saying that they’re morally outraged that the media didn’t cover the Taylor shooting like the Brown shooting.

Of course, they leave out the fact that there is video evidence from Utah officer Bron Cruz’s body cam, which shows Taylor appearing to reach for a weapon while two different officers repeatedly told him to put his hands up. Taylor then shouts “No, fool!” and turns toward Cruz, pulling his hands out of his waistband. Cruz, thinking Taylor was pulling a weapon, fired immediately. Turns out Taylor was both quite drunk and disturbed, and didn’t actually have anything on him. But the officers thought he did, and were in fact on an alert lookout for a man matching Taylor’s description who DID have a gun.

The key with the Taylor shooting is, again, the video evidence, which shows Taylor’s belligerence and threatening manner. There isn’t a debate over what he was doing, since everyone can see it. This was also not a situation with a police officer chasing a guy, firing at him in multiple places. You could argue that Cruz should have tased Taylor – but the clear indication from the video evidence was that everyone thought Taylor was about to open fire, which would have meant the taser would be firing after Taylor had fired bullets. Michael Brown on the other hand had no weapons and could easily have been stopped with a taser or another non-lethal choice.

The point here: Beware of false right wing arguments intended to muddy up a discussion. Whether the situation be the Dillon Taylor incident or the nonsensical comparison to Roderick Scott, the right wing seems to have no shortage of bizarre equivalences they wish to present when they can’t make a coherent argument.

Ellen’s thought about not wishing harm on anyone is noble. Glenn Beck cannot say the same, unfortunately. Regardless of his personal issues, this is a man who publicly mused about his wish to strangle Michael Moore to death – and he did this years before he joined Fox News. It is unfortunate if he is suffering from an illness, but he showed no such compassion for others.

Mark, I’m not sure that your characterization of everyone here, or even 90% of everyone, is accurate. You initially made a comment about President Nixon being impeached for far less than things you believe that President Obama has done. Both sides of that statement are incorrect.

As you’ve acknowledged, Richard Nixon was not impeached, because he resigned in disgrace to avoid that situation. But you haven’t acknowledged that Richard Nixon was facing serious charges, not just of his complicity with the activities of the intelligence establishment and their intersection with CREEP but also his direct involvement in the cover-up of the activities around the Watergate break-in. Were he not facing serious charges, he would not have resigned. By your logic, one would think he shouldn’t have resigned, since you believe his actions weren’t that serious. History records that his actions really were that serious.

You’re correct to note that no President is “squeaky clean”. But there’s a difference between that generalization and a statement where you say that President Obama’s actions were far more serious than what happened in the Nixon Administration. That statement seriously undermines your argument that you are somehow “middle of the road” about this.

And we should note that the actions of the George W. Bush Administration were challenged for their legality multiple times – in far more serious matters than anything the right wing has attempted to smear the Obama Administration with over the past six years. To only recount two situations, there’s the Wilson/Plame matter, and there’s the illegal conduct of AG Alberto Gonzales and his outrageous firings – which led to Gonzales being forced to resign in disgrace.

We should note that multiple members of the Reagan Administration were prosecuted for criminal conduct – not because of policy differences but for pursuing their policies via criminal means. Just look up the documents rescued by the National Security Archive and you may find some very interesting material on this matter.

As for Bill Clinton, he committed perjury while being questioned in a “gotcha” situation. I agree he should have told the truth. But there’s a pretty big difference between that scenario and the serious criminal behavior seen in the Nixon, Reagan and Bush White Houses. It’s long been a right wing approach to find false equivalences between various Presidents, but it’s unfortunately never found much purchase for those of us keeping track of the actual history.

This was a particularly despicable Hannity segment. I don’t know any further description that it merits.

It’s fairly obvious that all the Fox News personalities have been told to work a Benghazi reference in wherever they can. Particularly on the eve of the latest opportunity for Trey Gowdy to play the prosecutor card – without any actual evidence, of course.

By the way, D’Souza’s comments at the end are particularly sleazy. It’s telling that Kelly gave him the last word, in which he was not challenged as he falsely claimed that Ward Churchill is in the mainstream of the American Left and that somehow his ideas are considered normal among left-leaning scholars. That’s nonsense. Churchill is, as he himself stated, an anarchist who believes in the rights of indigenous people over all other principles. That’s not mainstream thought anywhere, including on the left.

D’Sousa is fully aware that Churchill is an extremist, but he’s happy to tar everyone on the left with Churchill’s comments – and Churchill seems okay with letting D’Souza get away with it.

I found the entire Fox News approach yesterday to be awe-inspiring.

They started with a celebration of Dick Cheney’s no-holds barred attack on President Obama in the morning. They followed that up with a bunch of hysteria on the other programs, usually demanding that President Obama close our borders, publicly and tearfully announce how wrong he’s always been, and essentially resign from office. Then on Greta’s show, they decided to call on that great foreign policy sage, Mitt Romney!

So it wasn’t much of a surprise to see these guys waiting in the weeds to attack every single thing he said as soon as they could. I got the impression they were raring to go all the way through his remarks.

What’s interesting about all this nastiness is that I wonder how these guys would have reacted if CNN had done anything like this during the George W. Bush presidency. For example, when Bush announced he was going to invade Iraq, how would Fox News have reacted if Al Gore had pre-empted his announcement with a public statement that he didn’t think Bush knew what he was doing? How would Fox News have reacted if every single pundit on the other channels had spent that day personally and publicly attacking Bush for incompetence?

This is a typical right wing debating ploy. He’s bringing up an irrelevant discussion about semantics and avoiding the actual matter being discussed – whether it’s okay for people to sell these weapons after we’ve passed laws to protect the rest of us from those weapons.

If Carlson wishes to have a discussion about the history and usage of the term “assault weapon”, that’s fine – but it’s a separate discussion that can happen at another time. It is not a valid statement to try to insist that there is no such term. There in fact is such a term, as it has been referred to in Congress, and as it has been dealt with and enforced in laws around this country. But again, this is irrelevant to the actual matter under discussion.

Rhonda Toler, are you sure you’re actually in Egypt? Are you sure you’re not an American right winger living a little closer to the US who just wants to stir up some nonsensical trouble on a site with which you disagree?

You cite the right wing American Center for Security Policy – an anti-Muslim group that regularly gets called out for its bias and inaccurate statements. Your account of Gaddafi’s attempt to hang on to power leaves out several important details and conflates others. First, the whole thing was disputed as to whether it had even happened. The real reporting on it was done by al Jazeera, something you would have known had you actually been in the area. Further reporting was done by Asharq al-Awsat in London and al-Bayan in the UAE, all citing unnamed sources on the rebels’ interim council in Libya. Reuters did a report that said that Gaddafi was saying privately he would step down if he was paid a sum of money to leave.

Obviously, this was all rejected by the rebels, who didn’t want Gaddafi to have what they thought of as an “honourable exit” and they sure didn’t want him to leave with a large sum of the country’s money. Again, it’s disputed as to whether it in fact happened – it sounds like a trial balloon was floated and then popped. And from all these accounts, there is no indication that President Obama or his people were personally involved. This was an internal Libyan matter. Interesting that your only source is a right wing website that regularly attacks President Obama in ludicrous ways, depending on what’s upsetting Frank Gaffney that day.

As for Assad, your idea there comes from a 2013 Facebook post by Ahmad Ramadan. What makes this interesting is that Ynet reported in 2012 that the US wanted Assad to step down but Russia was saying that he did not need to do so. Your stated opinion here leaves out the Russian middleman in this entire situation, and attempts to ascribe something that nobody else is alleging that isn’t on the far right wing.

These are complicated international issues, as you would know were you actually on the ground in Libya, Syria or even Egypt. From what you’ve been presenting here, we must conclude that you are not actually in the Middle East, or are so biased by your own dislike of this president that you cannot objectively perceive the events happening around you. I strongly recommend that you take some time to actually read up on these events and try to learn a little more about them before making strident condemnations that make little sense when seen in the light of day.

Funny that neither O’Reilly nor Ingraham takes into account any of the really nasty racist displays that have happened in this country since President Obama began his first campaign for the office.

Is it possible that years of the right wing hectoring at President Obama might have been noticed by everyone else? Is it possible that people have noticed how the right wing has repeatedly tried to challenge the legitimacy of President Obama – over everything from his qualifications, his abilities and even whether his birth certificate is genuine? Is it possible that people have noticed how the right wing has spent 6 years attacking and blaming President Obama for everything from the latest overseas crisis to the sun coming up later? Is it possible that cases like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown have added to racial animosity, for obvious reasons?

And is it possible that the conduct of right wing pundits at Fox News and AM radio has added to the problem in a big way? Is it possible that Rush Limbaugh happily musing about riots after the Trayvon Martin verdict might have angered people along racial lines? For that matter, is it possible that some people might find Bill O’Reilly’s repeated attempts to lecture them perhaps a bit offensive?

There is definitely a Fox News meme that somehow President Obama is “bored” with being President and is suddenly “disengaged”. That meme is intended to show President Obama as a lazy person who isn’t up to doing the job – and of course, they’re happy to recommend that he quit.

The fact that there is no substance to this claim doesn’t seem to have any affect at Fox News.

Frankly, I don’t see any of these “documentaries” that air on Fox News as such. They’re propaganda pieces, with cleverly positioned sound bites and talking points designed to support the GOP/Fox News narrative attacking President Obama and the Dems at every opportunity.

Ten years ago, those same “documentaries” were being used to market George W. Bush in his second campaign and to attack John Kerry every way they could.

It should be no surprise that GOP candidates, particularly ones as closely tied to Fox News as Scott Brown, are using that propaganda directly for the purpose it was intended.

I’m sure that President Obama is heartened to see that Chris Stirewalt has such great advice for him on how to deliver a foreign policy address. I wonder how much of this advice he doled out to George W. Bush when he made similar announcements during his presidency. As I recall, Fox News really celebrated that “Mission Accomplished” photo op on the aircraft carrier. Did Stirewalt think this was a good idea – particularly after it was repeatedly shown that the photo op was, shall we say, premature?