The depths Huckabee plunged to on this weekend’s programs just goes to show how truly desperate the right wing is getting about the election. Even when they think they have a slam-dunk week coming up, something or someone comes around to throw cold water on it.

The Akin comments are reprehensible for exactly the reasoning Powers gave. They are not a “gaffe” like, for example, Obama talking about visiting 57 states or mispronouncing “corpsman”. Those are gaffes, and politicians who speak publicly are lucky if they only have a handful of those in their history. (Kennedy’s “I am a jelly donut” is another good one.) Akin’s comments indicate his thinking about the issue at hand. And that’s the part that the right wing is desperate to divert people from seeing.

So Huckabee brings up a series of political votes that were done in Illinois as an attempt to “gotcha” the Democrats some years ago. That attempt was failed then, and it continues to fail today. Huckabee’s return to that argument shows that either he has forgotten his position is untenable, or he’s hoping his viewers have. So he’s either ignorant of the facts or is deliberately trying to obscure them. He can choose whether this is negligence or truly bad intent on his part.

Either way, the polls are showing that Romney is not making the inroads he must in order to actually have a chance to win this election. Instead, we’re likely to be seeing the election play out just as it looks today – with Obama between 50 and 55% of the popular vote, and somewhere around 300 EC votes. Which will leave Hannity, Huckabee, O’Reilly and the rest of the bunch at Fox to bluster about it for months afterward. I wouldn’t be surprised if they allege fraud. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they blamed both the media and the voters with whom they disagree.

I’ve always found it strange that the right wing assumes that voters who don’t agree with them are somehow un-American. So by exercising their right to vote in a manner that upholds their opinions, they are somehow acting against the principles they are actually upholding. Does the right wing think that only GOP voters are “true” voters?

This was another desperation move for Hannity, who is becoming more and more unhinged about how the election season is going. By his own countdown, Romney has less and less time to overcome his popularity deficit, and Hannity is seeing the writing on the wall.

Cherry picking a few conservative Dems and conservative independents (including one who admitted they would have voted GOP but were angry at the McCain ticket) to say smack about Obama does not constitute good research. If this is the best Hannity can come up with, Romney’s in much worse trouble than I previously thought.

What in the world is Morris going to do on the day after the election? For that matter, what will Hannity and O’Reilly do? Anyone want to take odds that they’re going to replace themselves for at least the first night to avoid the embarassment?

There are so many lies spoken by Hannity in the radio clip that it’s impossible to count them. My favorite is how he says that he thinks it’s fine for people to misspeak and then correct themselves and is all for free speech. So I guess I’ve just imagined all the times he’s dredged up Obama saying “57 States” or “corpsman”.

What’s telling here is Hannity’s tone on the radio show. He’s clearly very worried about the impact on the election of Akin’s idiotic statement. Of course, on television, he’s trying to present another face. But it doesn’t really ring true, does it?

This was the second of three points in the same program where Hannity lost his composure and began yelling at his guest. That last backhanded slap about the college records was just a petty attempt at getting in a cheap shot before ending the segment. (Part of this is a holdover from the ridiculous plug he gave Wayne Allyn Root a few nights earlier, where Root would have us believe that Obama shouldn’t have been allowed into Harvard but he, Root should have…)

Outbursts and tantrums like this from Hannity are likely to continue and worsen as we get closer to the election, if his behavior in 2008 is any guide. The clearer it gets that Romney is going to lose, the more desperate Hannity’s attacks will become. And I’m very much looking forward to how he’s going to eat the crow on camera on the day after the election. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past him to take that night off and have Monica Crowley sub for him, or just have the network run a clip show.

This was only the first of three shameful segments for Hannity, who was clearly losing his composure in every one of them. There’s already a strong sense of desperation and bitterness coming from him at this point, which means he should be very interesting to watch around October…

Hannity has been increasingly shrill and angry this week, which leads me to think he’s seeing the non-Rasmussen numbers across the country. Last night alone, he shouted down three different guests who disagreed with him and genuinely seemed to be losing his composure multiple times.

For all of his bluster, he’s looking at a situation where the GOP candidate isn’t getting anything more than the GOP base, and his VP pick is making it impossible to pick up the independents he would need to have a chance here. Further, the point of a VP pick is usually to be able to get that person’s home state – which is why people were anticipating either Rob Portman (Ohio) or Marco Rubio (Florida). It seems that when Rubio’s potential downsides (that credit card…) came to light, and Romney blew his European trip by repeatedly making unforced errors, the campaign threw this desperation play.

Hannity was repeatedly advocating for a Marco Rubio pick, and seems to be trying to cover himself now (as does Ann Coulter) by making a big show of embracing Ryan. Except that the numbers don’t show that Ryan is doing anything for Romney other than a curiosity bounce, which isn’t helping him. So it’s natural that Hannity can see which way this is all going and he’s getting more and more panicked.

Looking forward to what he does and says on Election Night, and more importantly, on the night after…

Jerry Corsi? Really?
The same guy who regularly tries to peddle conspiracy theories and looney tunes to whoever will listen? That Jerry Corsi?

The same guy who spent years throwing around patently untrue statements about the Ramos & Compean trial, as well as about everything from 9/11 to anything else he could foment about?

Who besides the Alex Jones audience really cares what this guy has to say?

This is a strange choice by Romney, and I strongly doubt it’s what the higher-ups in the GOP wanted. I’m not even sure what real advantage he gets from picking Ryan.

If he had picked Rob Portman, who was long the favorite of the GOP for his experience and his Ohio flag, he might have had a chance to win that state, which might have outweighed the comments he would have endured about Portman’s service in the Bush Administration. If he had picked Marco Rubio, he might have had a chance to win Florida, which might have outweighed the controversies Rubio has plunged himself into.

But Ryan? Going with him means he’s alienating the voters of Florida and effectively writing off that state. He’s throwing Ohio away too, which leaves him in a situation no GOP candidate wants to be if they can avoid it. And he’s aligning himself with the House GOP, which means he’s writing off all the independent voters he desperately needs to get over the hump he’s been unable to clear.

This may be a turning point for the campaign.

It’s astonishing that Hannity would trot out someone as sleazy as Root, but then, he also was trying to push Ed Klein’s smear book when he had the chance.

Root was completely humiliated and discredited back in 2008, and the years since then have not been kind to him in that regard. The only people giving him the time of day are outlets like Fox News or extreme right wing radio shock jocks.

I would be very interested to see Root’s college and high school records, if we’re going to go down this line of questioning. I strongly doubt his assertion that he was that good of a student in his school, and I wonder if he was even the valedictorian. He makes it sound like he was the star student who Harvard refused to admit in favor of an unworthy non-white person. He then tries to imply both that Obama was a bad student and that he wasn’t an American citizen. Since both of these assertions have been totally disproven, it’s strange that he keeps bringing it up.

But the proof is in the pudding. Barack Obama, a fairly smart man, straightened up his act after high school, attended Occidental and Columbia, and worked his way into Harvard Law. He distinguished himself in college, and in his later career both in his community and then as a politician, climbing the ladder all the way to the presidency. What has Root done with his life and career? Gone to Vegas to be a bookmaker? Complained that America isn’t libertarian enough? Which of these men has really made a difference for anyone’s lives? I strongly doubt that the answer is Root.

The fact that Hannity is putting disreputable people like this on the air only goes to show how desperate and how angry the right wing is getting about the direction of this presidential campaign. They don’t like their candidate, and they hate Obama. They hate the fact that he’s likely to be re-elected and that they can’t just run him out of town. So they throw angrier and more desperate slurs at him. And then Hannity has the nerve to wonder why the Obama White House doesn’t see fit to invite him to events.

I turned off the Cheney “interview” after maybe 4 minutes. I simply had had enough. I like parallel universe history too, but I just don’t have time to indulge in Cheney’s repeated attempts to create it.

There was a much funnier Hannity segment to come, though. Once again, he had Dick Morris on, who heroically predicted a Romney landslide of either 330 or 350 Electoral votes. And the part that sent it into hysterics was when even Sean Hannity couldn’t go there with him. When you have both O’Reilly and Hannity saying to Morris that he’s going way out on a limb, that’s a heck of an achievement. Morris may be the last person on Fox (other than Cheney) to figure out what the rest of the country has already deduced about this election.

Let’s set a few things straight here.

During Clinton’s presidency, he was a center-right politician who regularly combined Republican and Democratic points of view, which tended to leave the GOP without any position. Naturally, this led to a series of fairly nasty personal attacks on him that started during his candidacy in 1992 and continue from Rush Limbaugh to this day. Make no mistake, the Republicans openly HATED Clinton when he was in office. Newt Gingrich made a point of refusing to shake his hand. As soon as Fox News was started, they launched an unending stream of attacks on him on any issue they could find or make. (Does this sound familiar? It should – it’s the same playbook they’ve been running at Obama, with similar results.)

Clinton became President during the bad recession that was the tail end of George HW Bush’s term. A strong case can be made that Ross Perot’s run made it much easier for Clinton to beat Bush. The economy rebounded under Clinton – but we should remember that the engine that revved everything up, in all honesty, wasn’t the tax increases, although those did help in keeping public sector workers employed. The engine that picked everyone up was the Internet, which exploded in the mid-90s and fattened many people’s wallets. There was also a real estate boom, which turned into the bubble we saw in the 2000s.

When George W. Bush was declared President in 2000, the economy was in pretty good condition. We had a surplus starting to run, which would have allowed us to pay the deficit down and have the kind of “rainy day fund” hawks always advise. Instead, Bush’s team decided to do a series of tax cuts and give the surplus away. In one shot, Bush turned a surplus back into a deficit. The 2001 terrorist attacks certainly did help anything, and certainly did depress things for a few months, but they did not destroy the economy. The economy was damaged by a series of factors, including the mismanagement by the Bush team, two unfunded wars that had to be paid out of somewhere, and which dragged on through the rest of Bush’s term, and a housing/credit bubble that eventually, inevitably popped. Bush’s own popularity and approval rating tanked in his last two years in office, reaching horrifyingly low numbers in 2008 when the economy totally imploded. It’s no mistake that the McCain people wanted to distance themselves from Bush, and no mistake that the Romney people will not have Bush or Cheney at the convention.

The first term of our current president has unfortunately been marked by even more acrimony than what was thrown at Clinton in the 90s. The GOP in Congress still worked with him on several issues, albeit because of his taking more right wing positions on things like welfare. I have to give Bob Dole credit for sticking with President Clinton in 1993, when Saddam Hussein made some comments in an attempt to be divisive over here. This is the sort of thing we haven’t seen from the GOP in Congress over the last three years. Instead, we’ve seen willful obstruction on a scale not imagined before. These guys have openly stated that their priority isn’t to do their jobs but instead to try to unseat the President in this election. Which is really shameful.

For the record, President Obama’s plans have actually kept the economy from sliding completely off the cliff. Millions of jobs were saved and generated both by the stimulus and the auto company bailout. The GOP talking points that try to minimize this ignore that unemployment would have skyrocketed into the teens had those steps not been taken. Granted, things could have gone better had the GOP wanted to cooperate, but at least we’ve started a recovery, as weak as it is.

And it’s really interesting that Fox News pundits now want to express their admiration for Bill Clinton, a man they showed unmitigated hostility toward, including when Chris Wallace tried to ambush him in an interview a few years ago and then had it blow up in his face. Does this mean that when the next Democrat is elected after Obama’s second term, they’ll suddenly embrace Obama?

The Palin point is also interesting. Somehow Fox is now trying to rewrite her history again as well. The Fox spin from all the hosts now appears to be that she was a great asset to the McCain campaign who was then mercilessly and viciously attacked by the liberal media until she was effectively destroyed.

And that’s about a brazen a rewriting of history as I’ve seen in a while. The only thing Palin did was momentarily get some of the harder right GOP voters excited at the convention when they saw her on the ticket. But the second she opened her mouth and began to actually say anything about her worldview, about politics, about history, the train went off the tracks. Her gaffes were even worse than the ones done early in the current campaign by Rick Perry. And like the gaffes by Romney, they were all what they call “unforced errors”. Palin wasn’t destroyed by the media – she did it to herself with her own statements and her own ignorance of the issues upon which she was opining. And once she started doing that, yes, the media had a blast with it. But they were just following the story she was creating. You could call it ambulance journalism, but Palin was the one creating the accident that was getting their attention.

The funniest part of this is that the right wing pundit who really spearheaded this myth of Palin being attacked for her success – John Ziegler, has already publicly turned on Palin. But Fox continues to use Ziegler’s talking points…

Sununu’s comments made very little sense, and he really tried hard to avoid answering the direct questions that were being put to him. O’Reilly asked him very simply what he thought Romney could do to get his personal popularity up from 30 percent. Sununu responded with talking points about Obama’s comment on small businesses, which wasn’t even the question being asked. When pressed, Sununu was sure to get in the dog whistles about “community organizing handbook” and “communal way of thinking” in terms of Obama.

In the middle, Sununu made a spectacular comment about how GW Bush’s popularity was very high “until the last 5 or 6 weeks”. Is Sununu aware that Bush’s popularity and approval ratings over 2008 were simply terrible? That McCain didn’t want to campaign with Bush based on how bad Bush’s numbers were? In what fantasyland is Sununu living?

Rather than responding to O’Reilly’s question about how Romney comes across as “placid”, Sununu showered Romney with compliments about what a great guy he is and then followed that up with the fanciful thought that half of the country hasn’t been paying any attention yet, and that the real campaign doesn’t start until 2 weeks before the conventions. So somehow Sununu thinks Romney can hit a reset button next month and then half 2 1/2 months to really run his campaign, as opposed to what he’s already been doing. Once again Sununu’s comments don’t make any sense in reality.

But he was sure to get in more swipes at Obama for the unemployment rate, along with a backhanded swipe about 2008 being “an election of style over substance” with the new thought that 2012 will be an election “of substance”. Once again, welcome to Planet Sununu. Where in 2008, people were blissfully unaware, apparently, that the economy was in freefall and that the GOP had no plan of what to do about it. Where people were apparently unaware that on Fox News, guys like Hannity were desperately yelling that there wasn’t a recession happening. Where people were apparently unaware that their retirement accounts and home values had been gutted. In all seriousness, if Sununu really believes what he’s bloviating, somebody needs to have a quiet discussion with him about reality in the USA.

At the end, O’Reilly tried to play the middle ground in saying that both Obama and Romney are nice guys. O’Reilly noted that he was very happy with the way Obama treated him and his daughter. Sununu, amazingly, refused to acknowledge this, saying only that most public officials are warm and friendly when they meet you. O’Reilly realized that Sununu wasn’t going to acknowledge anything complimentary about the President and immediately ended the segment right there.

So what did we learn? O’Reilly never got any real answers to his questions. Sununu just spouted talking points, took swipes at Obama and offered a few warm fluffies for Romney.

I personally think that O’Reilly is having major doubts about Romney, as he has for the past few months. I wouldn’t be surprised to see his comments about Romney, even from last night, adding up into part of the big “why did he lose” explanation to come in November.

The gaffe about the “Anglo-Saxon” thing nearly came up on Hannity. I may be getting my segments confused, but I recall this happening during the shouting match between Bob Beckel and the conservative radio guy. If I’m remembering right, Beckel tried to mention the gaffe, only to be completely shouted down by both of the other men.
Hannity in particular took an oddly moral tone, saying that the quote hadn’t been confirmed and was from an anonymous source.

This is of course strange for Hannity, given that he’s given comfort and shelter to almost every nasty line said about President Obama. But now he gets cold feet about a quote from a Romney advisor in the British press? Huh?

The look on Chaffetz’ face by halfway through the “discussion” was priceless.

This is pretty typical of Fox. And that’s in addition to constantly quoting Rasmussen, which heavily skews GOP. Or better yet, having Dick Morris quote Rasmussen and dramatically intone that this will be a huge landslide for Romney. One really has to wonder if there will be any consequences for Morris after Election Day. Probably not.

The purpose of all of this is clear – to talk down the Obama re-election as much as possible and try to create a narrative for the Fox viewers that shows their guy winning. At the same time, it’s curious that the smarter and wilier guys there are already preparing their own counter narrative for an Obama victory.

Had Hannity had a single guest on that segment who understood these issues in the real world and could explain them to Cheney, conversations like this would not happen.

This is just as ridiculous as the final segment of the show, where Hannity had two GOP cheerleaders on, the male of whom made the heroic decision to say that President Obama treats our allies badly, and gave as his example, the long-debunked nonsense about the Churchill bust!

I have to wonder, between Hannity’s nonsense that he throws out with regularity, and O’Reilly throwing GOP talking points at Juan Williams and Alan Colmes, are we supposed to have to relitigate EVERYTHING each night? Do we have to reestablish that the sky is blue by day and dark by night if Hannity or O’Reilly has a Rasmussen push-poll that says otherwise?

There’s a great line on The Newsroom, a show that has major problems but still manages to generate good Aaron Sorkin dialogue on a good day: Not every issue has 2 sides. If some nut opines that Pres. Obama is somehow a Kenyan, that doesn’t mean we need to have a massive debate about it every night of the week. We only need to say that the nut needs some help, and move on to the real issues.

I am relieved to see both Romney and President Obama taking the moment to note what happened and setting aside politics for the day. What both men did was absolutely the right thing.

And at the same time, it’s unfortunately typical that someone like Sean Hannity would try to find a way to score cheap political points.

Juan Williams has had his good moments, for example when he tried to explain to Michelle Malkin the difference between her work and actual reporting.

In this situation, I’m not sure what he could do other than simply tell Sununu to calm down, stop panicking and take a deep breath. Sununu’s wild statements, coupled with some of the more outrageous Rush Limbaugh rants, are leading most people to conclude that the GOP is already in desperation over their candidate, and we haven’t even gotten to the convention.

So far, Romney has not been able to get any control over the narrative of this campaign. He’s been on the defensive since before the primaries started. And now that he’s the defacto nominee, his stance of not saying anything specific in public is really hurting him. He wanted to run on his record as a successful businessman – instead, he’s having to defend himself on a daily basis for what he did at Bain. And the best answer he’s come up with is “I wasn’t there when that happened”? He’s tried to use GOP talking points about various Obama statements, and none of them are getting any tractioin. He’s tried to downplay his wealth, and instead he’s in a mess over his tax returns.

It’s no wonder that the GOP is really getting frustrated with him. You can tell they really wanted someone like Newt Gingrich to just be a firebrand, and they’re very upset that they didn’t get that. Personally, I would have enjoyed watching Gingrich flame out – but it’s clear that the guys on top of the GOP and Fox News knew this would have been a disaster for them. Of course, trying to get Romney to campaign like Gingrich is a lost cause…