Let’s try to picture this the other way round. What if, in an alternate universe, Dick Morris and the guys had been right? What if the polls had all been wrong and Romney had indeed won in a landslide as they were predicting?

Do you think that Sean Hannity would be offering support and solace to Nate Silver if it had been shown that Silver had somehow completely blown the statistical analysis he did? Or do you think Hannity would have been preening and puffing about how Morris was right and everyone else was wrong “and I knew it all along”?

The blatant hypocrisy on display here is absolutely stunning.

I would agree that you can never count someone like Rove completely out. But this is a sign that he may be out of the running in terms of running the big PACs next time around. Unless he figures out a new strategy, I would think it more likely that you’ll see him as a talking head on Fox, opining from the sidelines. On the other hand, if the big players really are as angry at him as they seem to be, it may not be tenable for Fox to have him on the air.

The bonus benefit of this election is that when the next election comes around, we’ll have the poor record of this one to keep in mind when Fox begins to tout Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Frank Luntz, Scott Rasmussen and their “reputation for accuracy”.

This is just the latest bit of right wing flailing at the electorate for not voting for their candidates. I’ve really never seen a situation where the losing party actually turned on the electorate before. I have to wonder how they think they’re going to get anyone outside the hardcore base to vote for them.

Frank Luntz must be really hoping nobody has any footage of all his Hannity focus groups over the past year. I agree with his statements here, but boy is he the wrong person to discuss this matter unless he wants to admit his own wrongdoing.

Slight typo – I said Hannity spent the entire years of 2010. I meant from 2010-2012…

I’m going to mirror ez that he blew 400 million rather than billion. But that’s some serious money in any case.

When the numbers were pointed out to me last night, Rove’s complete meltdown began making more sense. If we take the politics and the presidential personalities out of it for a second, you’re left with a situation where a group of businessmen hired a guy to accomplish a task and gave him a very large amount of money to do the job. At the end of the day, they effectively rolled snake eyes, which means he very much has some splainin’ to do. These are not people who have a sense of humor about losing that much money and then losing the election to boot, and particularly not after he told them he could do this.

I confess to looking forward with great enthusiasm to Morris’ multiple mea culpas now. He’s already posted on his website “I have egg on my face” and admitted his polling model was completely wrong. The fun starts tonight when O’Reilly should hammer him – remember that O’Reilly told him “If you’re wrong about this, you’re finished”…

Karl Rove’s loss of composure was truly odd. He wound up not even being able to defend his own argument very well. Not sure what he thought he was accomplishing by continuing to double down on the points he had already lost.

Of course, he quickly moved on to a fairly mean-spirited dismissal of the Obama campaign, starting a meme that I believe will be showing up all over Fox News during the next few days. Their new story is that Obama “went small” and “has no mandate”. Both Rove and Krauthammer tried to push that idea as Romney’s prospects went upside down.

Anyone want to take a wager that Sean Hannity will be in complete meltdown mode tomorrow night?

It’s almost eerie how accurate Nate Silver’s projections actually were now that you can see the actual electoral map. And this was in spite of every right wing pundit challenging the very idea that any polls but Rasmussen could be correct.

It’s interesting how many right wing pundits seem to already be predicting a Romney victory or even a landslide in the face of information that this may not be the case at all. It is of course possible that Romney may somehow pull it off, but the chances appear much greater that he will not be able to win Ohio or any other key state to get him to 271 EC votes. In that event, what kind of party does Ann Coulter or Dick Morris expect to be attending?

The best part of this discussion is when they made the comments about how Christie should have invited Romney on the disaster area review. One has to wonder what Romney would be doing there…

What you’re seeing here is the right wing becoming increasingly desperate in the final days of this campaign. They were hoping that the first debate would somehow catapult Romney past all of his gaffes and all the bad news for him over the last year. And then the candidate in Indiana opens his mouth and triggers the whole mess all over again.

The increasing fervency of the Romney surrogates both in public and on multiple websites indicates what looks like a growing panic in the GOP. They’re clinging to a small number of polls (mostly from Rasmussen) to try to stay hopeful, but the aggregates are clearly showing Obama ahead. This is leading to angrier and angrier statements from people like John Sununu and Sean Hannity.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Fox try to peddle something next Thursday about Benghazi or next Friday about the next economic report. And then this all comes down to Tuesday the 6th at 8pm West Coast Time. If the results come in the way they are being projected at 538, we could be looking at some really sullen faces at Fox for a few days. It could always go the other way, of course.

Of course Hannity is hypocritical about this. And we’re shocked, shocked to see that gambling is going on this establishment. (And here’s your winnings, Capt Renault!)

But this is just Hannity’s latest desperate swipe at President Obama. None of the others have worked but he’s hoping he can fan the flames of it right before the election. Good luck with that to him.

And in the meantime, Dick Morris is continuing to predict both to Hannity and to O’Reilly that somehow Romney is going to have a massive victory that includes multiple states that are locks for Obama (like Michigan) (???), and swing states that are continuing to lean strongly to Obama with less than 2 weeks to go (Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania). This will be a closer election due to the non-performance in the first debate, but a blowout? At this point, it’s flabbergasting where Morris is coming from. And does this mean that on November 7th, we can do what O’Reilly suggested for Morris in the light of such a spectacularly wrong prediction?

Starting on Tuesday, I expect Fox to do a steady drumbeat of stories about how Romney is marching into the White House and how “the race is slipping away from President Obama.” They’ll cherry pick any poll they can find that shows Romney leading in any swing state and extrapolate from there. On the 6th, they’ll press that button all day long, reading any exit poll they can that shows support for Romney until 8pm West Coast Time. At which point, the situation will be over and you’ll start to hear the excuses. And yes, “voter fraud” will be one – expect James O’Keefe to be waiting in the wings with “an explosive video” on that front…

Jennifer, I appreciate your last response to me.

I now understand what you were thinking about the Darrell Issa hearing. And yes, it was on C-SPAN and there are both Dems and GOP on the Oversight Committee. My feeling about the hearing is that Issa rushed the timing of holding it – not because he’s trying to get to the bottom of what happened as that’s already being dealt with, but because he wanted to repeat what he had done over the past 18 months about the “Fast & Furious” ATF program. My problem with Issa’s approach is that it usually has him promoting himself and grandstanding rather than actually dealing with what can be fairly complex issues. And Issa’s past political history in California does not suggest that his motives are purely investigatory.

You are correct that the Administration’s public statements about what happened in Libya were fairly confused for about two weeks. And I can see that you do understand the horrific mess in the region that happened as a result of that video. From what I can tell from what we’ve learned, the video did not cause the specific attack at the consulate, but it did cause rioting across Libya that the terrorists were only too happy to piggyback. I think there was likely confusion as to whether there was a spontaneous demonstration happening that the bad guys crashed, or whether it was solely an attack, as it now seems. Given what had just happened in Cairo, with the embassy being overrun and the flag pulled down, I can understand the confusion. I also believe that our people have been tracking the people who planned and carried out the attack, and that they’re playing their cards very close to the vest so as not to let on too much before apprehending the killers. That isn’t a partisan thing – it’s a criminal investigation thing. Whether a Democrat or Republican is President, that kind of attack is going to get a careful investigation, which may not get discussed very accurately in public.

Regarding the security briefings, I’ve heard different accounts of it and don’t know enough about the subject to be an expert by any means. I did hear criticism being levelled by John Sununu that Obama wasn’t doing the briefings in person but was instead getting text briefings. Then I heard that getting mutated into the notion that he wasn’t doing the briefings, which simply didn’t pass the smell test. And Sununu has made a whole series of unfortunate comments about the President, including calling him lazy and unintelligent. So I’m tending to think the idea is a non-issue and a red herring.

Regarding the polling, I’d still recommend 538 as Nate Silver has been fairly accurate over the past few years. He isn’t perfect at this, but he offers what feels like the most impartial aggregate of multiple polls – weighting for Democrat bias or GOP bias, and weighting for various other factors including the current economic conditions, etc.

Regarding all the debate issues, we’ll see on Monday night what happens with the last one. My hope is that both men follow the rules and just discuss the issues without it turning into what we saw in the prior ones. I think you’re correct that the moderator shouldn’t be jumping into the middle of things – but if there’s a complete whopper being given and the proceedings are stopped by it, I don’t have a problem with her trying to move the guys past the issue. She didn’t do this on everything. Romney got away with a cheap shot about accusing the President of having gone on “an apology tour” and trying to “lead from behind” – both of which are debunked right wing talking points usually just heard on Rush Limbaugh and Fox. My belief is that Romney will try to repeat those on Monday and that Obama will take the time then to once again debunk them.

All of that said, we have less than three weeks before Election Day, and I believe that most voters’ minds have been made up for months now. The early voting already going on will not be affected by any of the debates. And the real poll will be taken on the 6th. We’ll see how it turns out.

Kelly’s infuriated response here is typical of the right wing reaction to the debate. Which should tell you how they really feel it went down. If these people thought that Mitt Romney was winning that debate, they would be repeating their behavior from the first one – rubbing their hands with glee, dancing around the room and making nasty comments about how Obama was shown to be this or that. Instead, they’re trying to attack the moderator for pointing out a misstatement by Romney, and they’re trying to ignore the overall debate performance, which was not helpful for them.

The actual facts of the debate are that Obama did show up for this one, where he didn’t do much at the first one. Romney attempted to repeat his performance from the first one, but found himself in a much more challenging situation – one that clearly wore on him as time went on.

In several areas, Romney did major damage to his campaign – and in others President Obama was able to point outt Romney’s inadequacy in a devastating manner.

Romney’s gaffes included not being able to provide specifics about his plans, not being able to answer Obama’s specific charges about the Arizona anti-immigrant law (Obama nailed him by pointing out that Kris Kobach is Romney’s immigration advisor and that Romney has publicly stated he wants to encourage self-deportation), not being able to answer the charges about his investments other than to yelp about Obama’s pension plan, not being able to adequately answer the question about women in the workplace without committing a major gaffe, and then two final ones that may have caused more damage than we’ll know for a few days. First, he misspoke about the President’s remarks about Libya, acting under the assumption that he had scored a major “gotcha”, thus leaving himself open to a humiliating correction by the moderator. And then he left the President a massive opportunity to close with the 47 percent quote, thus defining Romney for millions of Americans as a man who doesn’t understand or care about them.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the post-debate polling show a moderate but increasing drop for Romney, and a moderate increase for Obama. Obama’s supporters will be more enthusiastic about supporting their candidate now when asked by pollers, while the Romney supporters will be circling the wagons. This plus the fact that Ohio will indeed by allowing early voting by everyone is likely causing major concern for the Romney campaign – as they are running out of time and they still haven’t been able to catch up.

My only regret from this debate is that Obama did not correct Romney on the right wing talking point about the “apology tour” – but I believe that this will be batted down on Monday, during which time I have a feeling that Obama will repeat what I thought was a proper and satisfying correction to Romney’s political game-playing with the deaths in Libya.

And if they want to get into a longer discussion about Libya, it’s a pretty simple discussion – there were riots happening across the Middle East as a result of the anti-Islam movie, just as such things happened when the anti-Mohammed cartoon got publicity a few years ago. The riots happened everywhere from Cairo to Libya. During this mess, a terror group was able to take advantage of the situation to mount an attack and kill some people, including the Ambassador. The terrorists who did this are obviously being tracked down, but these investigations are not things that we discuss in public for obvious reasons. So the answer given by the Obama Administration was neither a lie nor a cover-up. There were in fact many spontaneous demonstrations that happened – this specific attack turns out not to be one of them, although there were others in the area. Obama specifically answered this the day after the riots broke out, referring to both the demonstrations/riots and to the killings. He referred to acts of terror, which he said would be investigated and he also urged calm. Romney’s total igorance of what the President actually said and when he said it indicates his debate prep was incomplete – he was clearly prepped to attack on the mistaken basis that the President didn’t mention terror for two weeks – which was an unfortunate fumble for Romney.

Brent Bozell has been discredited for years. Ever since his MRC and PTC were sued by WWE and suffered a humiliating loss (including paying the WWE millions of dollars and being forced to publish a humble apology), I haven’t taken them as experts on anything.

I’ve just found it interesting watching the right wing repeatedly spiking the football after the debate and taking what feels like a record number of victory laps. They should certainly do this now, if they want to engage in that kind of behavior.

At this point, unless Obama completely fumbles the next two debates and the economy collapses within the next 20 days, they are still behind in enough places that their chances of winning are still below 30 percent. Assuming Obama does well in the next debate, which I believe is quite possible and likely, you’ll see the polls swing back in the other direction, at which point Fox News will go back to the idea that the polls are not to be believed.

The right wing confidently declared that Obama had no chance to be elected in 2008 for a whole pile of reasons. When all else failed, they turned to the “Tom Bradley Effect” card – painting the whole country as racist as the people to whom they were pandering. When they lost that election, they were completely shocked. Shock turned to rage and we’ve seen the results over the past 3 years and 9 months. Now they’ve spent the past two months throwing any attack they could at President Obama only to see his lead build. With a single debate where their opponent wasn’t challenged on the falsehoods he was saying, they somehow want us to think this election has been decided. As in 2008, I strongly doubt the American public agrees with them on this.

This is just the latest bit of sour grapes from the GOP. They wanted an unemployment rate higher than 8 percent, and a job number of say 60,000 for the month so they could spend the day attacking Obama with it. Fox had already set the stage for this on the debate night when they did their first victory laps, saying that “Obama had a bad night tonight, and hoo boy, when those jobs numbers come out on Friday, this could really hurt the President’s reelection chances…”

When the numbers came in better for everyone, it was like a bucket of cold water on the victory dances. Because the numbers bear out a central tenet of the President’s campaign and nullify one of the central points of the GOP attacks.

Had this come out during a GOP Presidency, Fox News would be scrambling to promote these numbers. They would be talking about how this is a good sign for everyone and a reflection of the work the GOP has been doing, etc etc. Because it’s happening under a Dem Presidency, no less one that they’ve worked to undermine, they can’t accept the facts. And they’re further upset that this is undermining the “spike the football” discussions they were planning on having all weekend.

Brent Bozell lost whatever credibility he thought he had when he lost a defamation lawsuit filed by the WWE after his PTC posted libelous and slanderous materials accusing Wrestling of causing children to hurt each other. (Or something along those lines) The result was a settlement where Bozell was forced to pay millions to the WWE and post a humiliating retraction and apology on the front pages of his websites. Any time Bozell is trotted out as an expert on anything, that citation is useful to turn him back.