Sean Hannity has developed a serious case of wishful thinking lately. On Thursday night (5/2/13), just two nights after Hannity called Obama’s second term “a complete and utter failure,” he announced that Obama’s presidency is “very much in peril.” Why? Because Obama's having some trouble getting his agenda enacted. “From sequestration, gun control, immigration, global warming, Obamacare, it’s been a very tough year so far for the president,” Hannity said. Funny, he never mentioned Benghazi – you know the issue that Hannity desperately hopes regularly suggests will result in Obama’s impeachment.
As the segment opened, a large graphic read, “A Presidency IN PERIL” and showed a photo of President Obama looking heavenward. Which is also funny when you consider how Fox is always painting Obama as anti-Christian or a secret Muslim or both.
On the other hand, it’s the same John Sununu who bumbled his way through his tenure as George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff. It was during that time that Sununu accidentally gave us David Souter as a Supreme Court Justice. Sununu famously assumed that Souter was a secretly hard right judge, only to get a big surprise when it turned out that Souter was an independent who tended to vote from a liberal perspective. The hard right never forgave Sununu for that one (witness all their judicial appointments since then – all of them are openly hard right). The left never forgot it – had Sununu not made this mistake, the right wing would have had a 6-3 majority on the Court as of 1991, which would have stood for nearly 20 years and done untold amounts of damage. We have Sununu’s ineptitude to thank for sparing us from that.
Regarding Kortez’s comments, I agree with part of them. It’s absolutely true that Fox News and the right wing really don’t care about what happened at Benghazi, for all their postured “outrage.” There were repeated attacks on embassies and consulates during the George W. Bush presidency that never got a GOP witch hunt thrown at them. The fact is that the GOP tried this as a “Hail Mary” to prop up Romney’s campaign, only to see it blow up in their faces during the second debate. Rather than admit failure, they doubled down.
So now we have this attempted spectacle of a new hearing with “whistleblowers” this week. Really? Three State Department/Intelligence officials who have already been criticizing the lack of response on the night in question, coming out again to discuss the matter at one of Darrell Issa’s infamous hearings? That’s what the GOP thinks “whistleblowers” are? What about the very real whistleblowers that Fox News sneered about throughout the Bush presidency when they discussed things like the warrantless wiretaps and the other shenanigans? And for the new Issa hearing, we now hear from the “whistleblowers” attorney, Victoria Toensing. That’s the funniest touch of all. Toensing? The GOP advocate who tried to make a career for herself in attacking Bill Clinton and playing up the Lewinsky scandal? That Victoria Toensing? The Victoria Toensing who attacked Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame in public after the Bush people outed Plame? The Victoria Toensing who tried to say that David Petraeus was resigning over Benghazi rather than his own scandal? Who in the world would be gullible enough to think of her as a person of any integrity, particularly in this area?
So yes, it’s pretty obvious that the GOP and Fox News would like to keep bringing up Benghazi, not to get at any truths but to try to embarass the President and hopefully stir people up for the 2014 midterms. I agree that the GOP would love for this to be a campaign talking point in case Hillary Clinton runs again in 2016. I agree that the GOP would love to find some way to twist Benghazi into finding some reason, any reason, to impeach President Obama. But then they’ve been trying that canard over and over again, practically since he took the oath of office in 2009. How many times can they play the same tune about impeachment? How many fake scandals can they try to stir up? Fast & Furious? Joe Sestak? Solyndra? What’s the next one going to be? The reality is that the GOP’s best shot at taking the Senate was in 2012, and they shot themselves in the foot. I don’t see them suddenly sweeping both houses, but you never know. Anything could happen. I tend to believe that we’ll just see a continuation of the current gridlock – a Democrat-majority Senate and a GOP-majority House, albeit with a shrinking number of GOP/Tea Party folk holding seats as more of their constituents get fed up with their intransigence.
Kortez’s final comments don’t make much sense, however. The jab about jobs doesn’t line up with the jobs report we just got, showing the unemployment rate dropping again while upwardly revising the numbers of jobs created over the last few months. So the gloomier numbers we saw earlier now look much better. But we haven’t seen Hannity extolling the new numbers, have we? Nor will we. Fox News has taken great pains to talk DOWN any employment or economic numbers for the past four years. Earlier, this was about creating “facts” with which to attack President Obama in 2012 and run him out of office. Now that tactic seems to be running out of pure spite. These guys seem to want to just make as much of a mess as they can.
I do wish that governance was “easy to do”, but in the real world, it’s actually a lot of work. And you have to have both sides talking to accomplish it. What we’ve now repeatedly seen is the President calling for bipartisan work and making repeated offers, including approaches that are friendlier to GOP politicians. This may well result in an immigration reform bill finally passing the Congress this year. But on almost every front, we’ve seen constant, solid obstruction by the GOP. The strategy since early 2009 has been simple – say “I hope he fails”, vote against everything he proposes and then accuse him of having failed. Repeat as often as possible. I’ll give the GOP points for consistency on this, but that’s not how government work gets done. It’s a shame they havn’t learned that lesson yet.
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Let me see if I understand this correctly. President Obama convincingly won re-election by a wider margin than George W. Bush, holds a much higher approval rating than the GOP Congress, has appointed two Supreme Court justices and looks to appoint two more before his second term is finished, and regularly is outflanking the right when it comes to getting his message across. If that’s losing, I’d hate to see what winning looks like.
http://freakoutnation.com/2013/04/02/fox-news-had-the-biggest-drop-in-cable-news-ratings-sean-hannity-van-susterens-hit-new-lows/