I now have the Kindle edition of the book. It’s a fun read. And it’s quite devastating.

The notion of Ailes trying to run the Romney campaign messaging shouldn’t be any surprise. News Hounds pegged that from Day One. The nice part about the archives here is that Ellen has preserved all this. If Ailes wishes to deny the reality and the facts, I wish him luck in that endeavor. Facts, as Ailes preferred President Reagan once said, are stubborn things.

This has been standard Fox News baiting over the past week. They’re clearly upset that Christie is getting all this bad press, and they’re panicking that they may have lost their 2016 frontrunner. (Let’s not even get into the fact that Romney’s people dismissed any thought of him in 2012 after looking at his record…)

So now they try to play each bit of the Christie story as somehow being an opening to attack President Obama or the Clintons. Christie makes a public statement about firing people and being embarrassed and sorry over what happened? Somehow this is a sign of integrity and virtue. Don’t pay attention to the fact that Christie’s operation was shutting down a public highway to execute political payback. Don’t pay attention to the fact that Christie is now using ignorance as an excuse to get himself around the more serious issues that could arise if it’s shown that he in fact did know about what his people were doing.

Then we get to this bit of political inside baseball about the Hillary Clinton campaign’s spreadsheet of who had backed them and who hadn’t – particularly in terms of who had promised support and reneged and who they had supported but who had then turned on them. Is that an “enemies list”? Or is that just typical politics – a list of who you think you can count on, and who has demonstrated themselves to be unreliable. It’s not a bad idea to keep in mind someone who you stumped for that suddenly backed the other horse. If that guy calls you for support again, you can reference that he wasn’t there for you. This is all a normal part of politics, frankly, and all candidates do it.

And I don’t recall hearing that the Clintons tried to shut down a highway because someone had backed President Obama in the primaries. I don’t recall the Clintons endangering citizens to act out a partisan or intraparty fight. That’s a pretty crucial difference.

An even sillier moment happened on Megyn Kelly’s show when she had her regular Obama attacker Mark Thiessen discuss this situation by flat out lying on the air. Thiessen actually stated that the George W. Bush administration had no list like this, and that they didn’t keep track of people who opposed them. That’s a pretty brazen rewriting of history, considering the entire Valerie Plame matter, and the firing of the attorneys by Gonzalez, just to name two of the more egregious instances. That Thiessen can say this on the air and not be challenged is just another example of how little balance there really is on Fox News.

I’ll probably differ with other people’s opinions here, but this one is a bit complicated to parse through. I’ve studied the case and trial of Wesley Cook (aka Mumia) over the past 20 years, ever since I first heard about it in the early 90s.

I would agree that the segment was despicable, just in terms of the smugness being presented by Pavlich and the nastiness being thrown around by Hannity. Sadly, Fernandez was not prepared to concisely rebut what Pavlich was really up to, and kept getting lost in the brambles of the Wesley Cook trial.

We should first keep in mind that Katie Pavlich has been down this road before in her quest to promote herself and get airtime or more from Fox News. Her crusade on the Fast & Furious situation was particularly embarrassing for her – she wrote a book that simply assumed the worst about an ATF situation she neither understood or had researched very carefully. And in 2012, Kathryn Eban at Fortune completely debunked Pavlich’s entire argument with a devastatingly detailed article that showed the internal politics that really drove the whole Fast & Furious “scandal”. Pavlich responded to this humiliation by trying to ignore that it had ever happened. Which essentially ended her credibility.

Pavlich’s current crusade is actually just piggybacking on the smears being thrown around by Christian Adams in this matter. (Adams was smearing Adegbile last November, and I bet Hannity gets him on as soon as he can to continue the fun.) But Pavlich, typically, takes the attacks to a whole new level.

Debo Adegbile was not a personal defender of Wesley Cook, nor did he argue that Wesley Cook should be set free. He did not argue anything regarding Cook’s innocence or guilt. His work involving the Cook appeals was part of what happened when the NAACP LDF got involved only 7 years ago – in 2007. Keep in mind that the LDF has regularly involved itself in Death Penalty cases throughout its history. They’ve made clear that they oppose the Death Penalty on principle, and that their research shows that the Death Penalty is applied in a racist manner – so their stand in this case is consistent with their practices. Their goal here was to make sure that Wesley Cook’s death sentence, which had been set aside in 2001, would not be reinstated in the midst of all the legal wrangling that went on up to 2013. They initially filed a “friend of the court” brief on his behalf, and then they represented Cook after he fired his latest set of attorneys. (Cook was represented by a whole parade of attorneys over the course of his appeals, starting in the early 1980s – The LDF were actually more than 25 years late to this particular party.) But their purpose wasn’t to free him or to declare him innocent – they just wanted to keep the prosecutors from reinstating the death sentence. Their approach here was to discuss the improprieties in the jury instructions in 1981. I won’t go farther into the details than that – but the short version is that the prosecutors finally stopped pressing the issue in the last couple of years, and have accepted that Wesley Cook will not be executed but instead spend the rest of his life in prison without parole.

The facts of the case are clear, even for people on the left. Cook was convicted of the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner on fairly solid evidence. Cook’s supporters have repeatedly thrown a lot of possible doubts about the case over the years, but none have been able to overcome the simple facts of the matter, which are available publicly – including the full transcript of Cook’s trial. (I’d agree that the trial was a ridiculous affair – but mostly due to Cook’s own conduct, where he attempted to represent himself and challenge the authority of the court to try him – which was a strategy that he had learned from MOVE, and which he had hoped would result in a mistrial for his case.) It was frankly disheartening to hear Fernandez going back to talking points about what Cook said in the hospital hallway – particularly after that entire line of questioning was demolished by Gary Bell when he schooled Amy Goodman on this issue back in 1999. I also note that Pavlich’s piggyback column includes a bit of a falsehood about Cook’s brother William, which carries over from Maureen Faulkner’s book. Up to 2001, William Cook refused to testify at all in the matter other than to say at the scene he “had nothing to do with this.” But in May 2001, William Cook signed an affidavit insisting that Wesley had not killed Faulkner. I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in that affidavit, as it’s full of some pretty bizarre conspiracy theory material, and it was clearly just the latest feint in Cook’s appeal strategy – but the fact is that William Cook did sign it, and that the death penalty was set aside later that year. This does not make him innocent – it just means that the appeals eventually were able to get him off of death row.

The issue at hand for the LDF wasn’t and isn’t whether people on death row are innocent. The issue to them is that they oppose the entire concept, particularly where they’ve shown that its application tends to have racist overtones. And this is what Debo Adegbile was arguing with the LDF when they agreed to deal with the Wesley Cook appeal.

Admittedly, this is a more complex line of reasoning than Sean Hannity or Katie Pavlich is able to perceive. Which is why Pavlich was happy to just sit back and make smug pronouncements about both Wesley Cook and Debo Adegbile.

Fernandez’s approach seemed to be to try to parse through individual details of the Cook trial, or to bring up other supporters of his. But that just allowed Hannity to shout that she was bringing up irrelevant material and cut her off. The correct approach would have been to note that Pavlich was wrong right off the bat in her statements: Adegbile didn’t “volunteer” to represent Cook, and he wasn’t trying to “get rid of the death sentence”. The LDF submitted briefs and represented Cook in terms of the improprieties in the jury instructions, and by the time they did so, the death penalty had been set aside some 6 years earlier. And it’s nice that Pavlich is aware that Cook was convicted of murder, but that really isn’t what this appeal was about. Fernandez could have then immediately gone on to point out that the LDF is known for death penalty defenses on principle, and to make the note that she did about Thurgood Marshall – thus putting the conversation on the footing it needed – to be about a civil rights attorney being appointed to a civil rights legal post. Fernandez could have noted Adegbile’s work in dealing with the Voting Rights Act last year, which was significant and of at least equal significance to his work with death row inmates. This would have put Pavlich on the defensive immediately, but if she’d countered with more about Wesley Cook and said the lines about how Cook never said he didn’t do it, Fernandez could have said that in 2001, Cook actually DID say that he did not kill Faulkner. She could then have challenged Pavlich on the fact that Pavlich hasn’t actually researched this case. Frankly, the best way to have handled this would be to bring printouts of the affidavits (which are available at the website for Daniel Faulkner) and present them to Hannity on the air, thus showing that Pavlich’s statements were false, and when Hannity asked “Where’d you get this?”, to answer “from Maureen Faulkner”, and then to ask Pavlich why she didn’t know about a key part of the case if she was that well versed in it. Most likely Hannity would have been forced to end the segment, but it would have been a much more effective way to handle Pavlich’s smugness and Hannity’s moral outrage.

It was inevitable that Bill O’Reilly would attack the NY Times piece. There’s no way he could stand having one of his favorite talking points completely refuted.

I particularly enjoyed the bits where he tried to play it as though Kirkpatrick is somehow afraid of him. Right. O’Reilly has never been able to distinguish between someone having no use for him, and someone suddenly being terrified of him.

Fox News has already attacked this piece. The Saturday afternoon anchor was quick to have on a GOP Congressman who described the NY Times article as “misleading”. This Congressman then reverted to the standard Fox talking points that the annex wasn’t provided with proper security, that the attack was carefully planned by al Qaeda, and that the GOP House is continuing to amass more and more evidence about this. Except that he forgot to note that every one of their hearings has been promoted by Fox News as “the big bombshell”, and every time it’s wound up being either a bureaucrat’s sour grapes, or it’s been someone Sunday Morning Quarterbacking about how the situation could have been handled better.

It’s interesting that these guys attack Jackson but ignore the sinister racism directly available in Phil Robertson’s comments. And it’s more than a little sad.

Naomi, I agree with you that Fox News definitely serves to promulgate GOP propaganda. And I agree that you should take everyone’s reporting with some skepticism. But you’re reaching a bit when you try to label “most, if not all” other outlets as propaganda machines.

I have given you specific examples where Fox News has demonstrated its bias and its intentions. Please provide examples of where CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and local news stations functioned specifically and deliberately as propaganda machines.

I’ll even give you one – in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times ran coverage by Judith Miller that promoted US intervention. This coverage has since been completely debunked, but it definitely served to enhance George W. Bush’s fraudulent case for war against Iraq. I’m not sure that this is the propaganda you’re thinking of, but it certainly had a disastrous effect. I have a feeling you’re thinking that the media propagandizes in the other direction, and the history simply doesn’t bear out that idea. There are plenty of right wing pundits who would like to convince people of this, but their opinion simply isn’t buttressed by reality.

It was obviously a gotcha, and President Obama wasn’t about to play that game. Unless there are clips of all the reporters slipping a “Merry Christmas” into their questions, and I strongly doubt that there are.

Henry’s trick is usually to try to get Jay Carney to play on Fox News’ turf by phrasing his questions in a manner that presupposes Fox News’ assumptions. Or he just gets confrontational to get that bit of footage on the prime time pundit shows.

There’s a reason that most Fox News contributors don’t work elsewhere afterward. Actual journalism professionals don’t look kindly on this kind of behavior.

Frankly, what Robertson said was a form of hate speech. He doesn’t get to just say things like that and then try to hide behind his bible. He said something that was deeply offensive to a large number of people, whether or not Fox News wishes to acknowledge it.

This isn’t a matter of his 1st Amendment rights. Nor was it when any other television or radio personality has been similarly suspended.

It’s simply that Fox News is trying to thread a very fine needle here. They’re trying to get away with supporting some obviously offensive comments by hiding behind the Constitution. It’s not because they support his right to speech – it’s because they support what he said. They’re clearly hoping viewers won’t be able to tell the difference.

O’Reilly realized he was in serious trouble fairly quickly here. He also hadn’t vetted his source to know what he was dealing with. Mikey Weinstein has spent nearly a decade battling Evangelicals in the military who try to lord it over everyone else, including people of multiple other denominations. Weinstein and his sons are Jewish, and they certainly had an issue with Evangelical military people telling them they wouldn’t be saved if they didn’t accept the Evangelical version of faith. To O’Reilly, this is an anathema. Which is frankly quite silly. Weinstein presented his opposition to O’Reilly’s overheated rhetoric right away by saying that the MRFF doesn’t have stormtroopers to enforce their beliefs. That’s a specific image for Weinstein, for obvious reasons, and it was a direct counter to O’Reilly’s ridiculous assertion that Weinstein himself was behind the entire action, rather than the advocate for the servicemen and women who asked him to get behind them. O’Reilly’s response was to be extremely nasty and condescending.

O’Reilly then asked a series of loaded questions, to which Weinstein redirected the discussion to what was at issue. In this case, O’Reilly was actually behaving more like Laura Ingraham, in that he was trying to set up a discussion to go in a specific direction. O’Reilly already knew his conclusion – that Weinstein was inflaming a minor discussion in order to get in the way of oppressed Christian servicemen who just wanted a nice Christmas display. But that’s not what happened, and O’Reilly’s lack of research notwithstanding, the situation was a lot more complicated. Frankly, if O’Reilly had spent less time bloviating himself and more time listening (and not cutting his guest’s microphone), he might have learned something – about tolerance and respect, two ideas one would think his devout faith should have taught him long ago.

This kind of think, frankly, happens all the time. People change their stripes, depending on all sorts of conditions. Looks to me like Siegel is enjoying a generous paycheck from Fox News, as is Dennis Kucinich, and as is Juan Williams, for assisting in their efforts to write a right wing version of current history.

But I’ve watched multiple cases of people going from the left to the right and vice versa. David Brock was a notorious right wing muckraker in the early 90s. He was the one who described Anita Hill in fairly unpleasant terms in public. But he changed his politics and went to the left to start Media Matters. (And he started that with an apology tour with Anita Hill). Ariana Huffington once backed right wing politicians, particularly when she supported her husband Michael in his campaign. (We should note she’s gone back and forth across the line over the years.) On the other hand, Dennis Miller once was more openly liberal and critical of the GOP. Over the years, his conservative side took over, and he flipped to the other side. Some of this may have been consistent throughout, but there’s a definite pronounced shift we can see from A to B. Ron Silver is another one who shifted from left to right. And there are many more, going in both directions.

The difference here with Siegel, and with several of the others who have happily taken paychecks from Fox News, is that the change in positions seems to be motivated by the financial gain. And frankly, that’s not a sign of someone who really has principles in either direction.

This was a bizarre segment.

Strangest part was Coulter presenting herself as an expert on marijuana use, citing one study from yesterday as though this were a clinical fact accepted by everyone. Note to Coulter – regardless of what anyone thinks about people who smoke marijuana, it does not automatically link up with psychotic episodes. There’s a reason that there are medical marijuana dispensaries, and that multiple states have moved to legalize it. And it isn’t because those states are full of psychotic people, so far as anyone can tell.

Interesting that Coulter boldly asserted that every single shooter, particularly presidential assassins, have been left wing. As she put it “they are always, ALWAYS left wing”. Really? Let’s take a look at that. (Keeping in mind that in each of these cases, we’re dealing with a disturbed individual who should never have been able to get access to the weapons that they would then use for their murders.)

Jared Lee Loughner – Described by one fellow student as not political of either stripe and another fellow student as radically liberal, his actual statements and postings line up with multiple far right conspiracy theorists, particularly David Wynn Miller, who notes that Loughner appears to have adopted and quoted Miller’s right wing material.

James Holmes – Not indicated in either direction politically. Seems to have been a fairly smart person with extreme socialization issues. His snap seems to have been personal and not fueled by the Alex Joneses of the world.

Adam Lanza – Not indicated in either direction politically. Seems to have been a fairly smart person with a case of Aspergers. Was clearly obsessed with mass shootings, as he’d compiled a massive spreadsheet of previous incidents. Happened to live in a house with his mother, who had a large number of legally purchased guns, which he used to murder first her and then the people at the school.

Columbine – Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold – Not indicated in either direction politically. Shooters seem to have been motivated by delusion and fantasies of violent revenge on other students. Bullying has been discussed prominently on this one, particularly since these two guys were on a hunt for the jocks of the school and made comments indicating they were out for revenge against them.

2006 Amish School Shooting – Charles Roberts – Not indicated politically. Shooter seems to have been a child molester who was acting out in a different manner than he had previously done.

2008 Northern Illinois University Shooting – Steven Kazmierczak – Not indicated politically, although he expressed sympathy toward Hamas. Shooter seems to have been responding to bullying, and modeled his behavior off previous shootings like Columbine.

2007 Virginia Tech – Seung-Hui Cho – Not indicated politically. Shooter talks in his “manifesto” about revenge against the wealthy, but if you drill down past the surface, you find he was dealing with all kinds of mental health issues, aggravated by bullying. And the bullying was in part due to his manifestation of symptoms like mutism. His killing spree seems to have been, like Columbine, fueled by a fantasy of violent revenge against other students.

2011 Norway Attacks – Anders Breivik – Openly right wing. Breivik is clear about his philosophy and the reasons he planned his murders. Has expressed antipathy toward Islamic people, immigrants and those he considers “Cultural Marxists”.

2013 Arapahoe Shooting – Karl Pierson – Some indication of critical thinking about GOP on his postings. Closer look at his history shows him to be a contrarian who liked debating other students, but who got himself thrown off the debate team for taking things too far. Not sure if we know enough to give him any real political basis. His motive for shooting seems to have been revenge against the teacher who threw him off the debate team.

Presidential Attacks:

Andrew Jackson – first assaulted by Robert Randolph after Jackson had him removed from the Navy for embezzlement. Later attacked by Richard Lawrence, who misfired two pistols in his attempt. Lawrence was deemed insane – he said he was shooting Jackson for causing him to lose his job, and that killing Jackson would cause money to be “more plenty”. He also said he thought he was Richard III of English infamy, but one wonders how far gone he was by the time he said that…

Abraham Lincoln – Repeatedly threatened and attacked during the Civil War. Finally assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Booth was a Confederate sympathizer and supporter of slavery. I believe that would not put him on the left in anyone’s book.

James Garfield – Killed by Charles Guiteau months after he took office. Guiteau was delusional, thinking himself instrumental to the 1880 GOP because he wrote a speech that he retailored to favor Garfield. He was frustrated that the Garfield people wouldn’t name him as an ambassador, and that they were apparently telling him to leave them alone. Upon shooting Garfield, Guiteau declared himself a Stalwart GOP member (referencing the debate going on in the GOP at the time about gold) and affirmed his support for Chester Arthur.

William McKinley – Killed by Leon Czolgosz, a declared anarchist. This one would fall under a more left-wing umbrella, to be fair.

We could go through the whole list of Presidential attackers of the 20th century, but there are a LOT of them and they do not conform to Coulter’s view that they are “always, ALWAYS left wing”. Just about all of them were, frankly, wingnuts; either out to glorify themselves or to satisfy some delusion.

We should also note that Coulter’s chilling dismissal of the death threats made against President Obama is not accurate. She’s conveniently forgetting the really scary material that Fox Nation has happily promulgated over the past 6 years, and which Ellen has helpfully archived for the record.

The point of all this is to note that Coulter and Hannity’s entire basis of their discussion was completely inaccurate, which blows apart her arguments. And to agree with Ellen – Hannity is simply using the latest gun tragedy in a school as an excuse to say nasty things about left wingers. One would think that Hannity would refrain from doing this, particularly while Claire Davis is fighting for her life. The sight of Hannity trying to score cheap political points at this time, particularly given that we’ve shown he has no idea what he’s talking about, is frankly disgusting.

In a better world, Hannity would take a few minutes this evening and humbly apologize – not just to his audience but to the family of Claire Davis.

I would tend to agree that O’Reilly was simply trying to jump into the controversy to get himself some extra attention here. It wasn’t relevant to anything he would normally discuss – he just wanted to get his own facetime on it.

And yes, it is a double or triple down on the nonsense.

Best reaction I’ve seen has been Jon Stewart, noting Kelly’s non-apology and her insistence that her original comments were just a joke. And then he runs her clip again where you can plainly see she’s NOT joking. She was quite serious, and actually sounded defensive and angry. Not as angry as she is now about it, but still angry.

It’s important to note that Kelly was caught on camera lying in a bold faced manner here. In the original quote from her show, she wasn’t just joking about Santa being white for the kids. She was quite serious. Her point was to ridicule the black activist questioning the racial identity of a white icon like Santa Clause. Her intent was to make clear that there was no real debate about the notion of Santa being a Caucasian man. Which of course flew in the face of the column she was discussing – an essay about the difficulties faced by African Americans during a predominantly Caucasian holiday season. There’s a reason that Kwanzaa became a holiday, and it frankly had to do with the idea of Caucasians happily excluding other ethnicities from their reindeer games, so to speak.

Kelly’s desperate attempt to deny and evade the truth of her behavior seems to get most of its vitriol from her concern that her Fox News persona is nowhere near as balanced as she herself may in fact be. In her personal life, she actually seems to be a fair amount to the left of her on camera persona. Her vicious on-air confrontation and slam on Mike Gallagher for questioning her maternity leave is solid evidence of this. But she knows that her on-air persona at Fox News needs to be as far right as possible, if she is to maintain a prime time opinion program on that network.

Her contention of equally challenging both perspectives in a debate on her program is instantly demolished by the multiple clips preserved on this site of her conduct in the new Prime Time show. The reality is that she regularly gives a deferential ear to the more extreme right wing positions espoused by her guests of that nature, just as she regularly yells at, cuts off and dismisses her more centrist guests.

If she’s trying to portray herself as a journalist, she’s sadly mistaken. But on the other hand, that’s been the pose of many Fox News personalities. The closest one they have to a journalist is Shepard Smith. All the rest are pundits at one level or another, repeating the opinions and positions of Roger Ailes. Kelly herself has made her living as just such a pundit. She should embrace it, not hide from it.

By the way, this distraction is nearly as silly as the whole State Department “booze scandal” from last week. This was the one where Fox News tried to play up the liquor expenditures of the State Dept at the end of fiscal 2012.

The fun part was where they tried to imply that this was done in connection with their shutdown – playing that they quickly bought 180K of alcohol right before the government shut down. And they tried to imply that the Obama Administration is spending massive amounts on alcohol, given that the total annual budget allotment went from 118K in 2008 to 400K n 2013. Both of those observations were silly. First, the State Dept was clearly just spending its budgeted allotment on schedule, regardless of the GOP’s timeline of when they wanted to throw a tantrum and shut government services down. Second, any number comparison between 2008 and 2012 has to include the massive recession of 2008/2009 when comparing expenditures like this.

Then there was the cluck-clucking that somehow the State Dept shouldn’t have any budge for liquor in the first place. Which is fine, if you want all our embassies to have all their functions be completely alcohol free. Because this isn’t about State Dept people drinking on the job. This is about over 100 embassies around the world holding diplomatic events, dinners, parties, etc. These events involve wine or cocktails. New Years celebrations involve champagne, etc. And frankly, when you do the math, the State Dept’s budget for this isn’t extravagant at all. It’s a reasonable budgetary figure for a reasonable situation. Unless we’re planning on re-instituting Prohibition again (and that worked out so well the last time…), this is just another nonsensical rationale to once again attack President Obama.

The linked article at rightwingwatch is extremely informative. It points out a simple truth: the GOP have tried to completely change their stripes on this issue, based solely on the identity of the President making the nominations.

When George W. Bush was proposing a whole slew of inappropriate nominees to multiple positions, the same group “Judicial Crisis” had a different name – the “Judicial Confirmation Network”, whose purpose was to make sure that all of Bush’s nominees got a “fair hearing”. (read – “make sure they all got confirmed no matter what the Democrats said”)

The difference during the Bush Administration was that the Dems were not filibustering EVERYBODY. They let Bush have most of what he wanted. They let him put both John Roberts and Samuel Alito onto the High Court, even allowing him to make Roberts the Chief Justice without any prior High Court judicial experience. (He had been a clerk for Rehnquist, but that’s really not the same thing as being a justice, is it?) They allowed Bush to appoint a lot of really unfortunate people into his cabinet, with Russ Feingold among others, noting that Bush had the right to a cabinet of his choosing. The Dems were heavily criticized by the left at the time for not blocking everyone, with Alexander Cockburn impishly posing the question: “What if he nominates David Dukes?” (The critics always left out the rest of Feingold’s statement – which clarified that the president has the right to the cabinet of his choice barring any serious concerns about the nominee’s qualifications or serious ethical lapses…)

But in general, Bush got most everything he wanted. His proposals mostly went through the Congress. It was only a small number of appointees or judges where the Dems showed any backbone – and that was only when the situation was egregious. John Bolton was blocked by the Dems because he had openly shown total hostility toward the U.N., and Bush had to get him in a recess appointment. And a few judges were so far out of the mainstream that the Dems simply couldn’t stomach them, including Janice Rogers Brown, Miguel Estrada, William Pryor, Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owen and a few others. The GOP always forgets that all the others got in. They don’t mention that when discussing the filbusters of a small number of justices on principle. And they don’t mention that at the time, they were the ones threatening the “nuclear option”. They also don’t mention that the Dems agreed to the “Gang of 14” idea, and to allow a few of those objectionable judges through in order to keep the peace. The key to remember, which the GOP and Fox News would prefer that you didn’t, is that the Dems only objected as a group to a small minority of Bush’s appointments, with very clear reasoning stated for each time they took that action.

The situation under President Obama has been completely different. The GOP pledged to oppose EVERYONE he nominated, no matter who the person was or what the position was. They have challenged everybody he put up there, even when the appointees were Republicans! They have offered blanket opposition to Obama judicial nominations, even before they even knew who the nominees were. The general rule in effect seemed to be that they simply didn’t want any Obama appointments to the court or various agencies to get through. By taking this approach, they have crippled multiple courts and bureaus, since they don’t have enough people in place to do their work. Which gets you backlogged courts, or bureaus that cannot do their work. One could argue that this is exactly what the libertarians would want – a government that is completely stymied. I can’t imagine who else would think this was a good idea. But it’s clear that the GOP has been hoping to gum up the works as much as possisble, say NO to everything that President Obama does, and make sure that he is unable to pass anything or appoint anyone wherever possible. Were they to have their way, they would be able to hold out until the next GOP President gets in, at which point they would of course say that the judicial appointments are an urgent business given how backlogged the courts are, etc, and thus push to get a slew of right wing judges in there.

There’s no question that the Dems have changed their position on the “nuclear option”, and that both sides have played politics with these appointments. The difference has been that the Dems didn’t play at this level of extreme obstructionism. The GOP have made it their mission to block everything they could, and Fox News has played that idea out along with them. The usual play here is for the GOP to blindly object to whatever President Obama proposes, or whoever he nominates, after which the right wing media, like Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh, then backs them up and offers a talking point to give them cover. A major reason to support this website is that at least we have a record of the hypocritical actions taken by Fox News and others, and when they try to deny that the record exists, it can easily be referenced.