Have Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham boxed themselves into an inescapable corner?

Now, of course, the easy retort to this would be that it's still mid-August and, as they say, a day in politics is an eternity.

But it's looking real bad for Squirrel-Hair. Reince Preibus is nervous. Down-ballot candidates are nervous.

And the two most ridiculous Trump-bots of all, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, are in a frenzy. They're reduced to - well, check it out for yourself:

Assuming Trump loses, there is no evidence to suggest that it will be because he didn’t get enough Republican votes. It will be because the entire concept that Trump and Hannity sold to GOP primary voters that he could appeal to Democrats and Independents, while Hillary would be easy to beat, was an obvious myth. In my view, there is no election to “sabotage,” because it was forfeited the moment Trump was nominated.

But none of this was nearly as bizarre as when Hannity brought on Trump super fan Laura Ingraham. After his rant, Hannity went to Ingraham for the classic TV talk host device of “here’s a guest who agrees with me on to tell me how right I am.” Ingraham proceeded to utter what is now the leader in the clubhouse for the most asinine thing a (once) respected conservative has said about Trump:

“If you call yourself a conservative and a Republican, it’s actually immoral not to vote for Donald Trump.”

Let that one sink in for a moment.

We conservatives are now being lectured that if we don’t vote for a guy who has at one time held nearly every liberal position there is, is professionally and temperamentally unqualified for the job, gave Hillary lots of money and praised her even after Benghazi, and consulted with Bill Clinton just before he entered the race, we are IMMORAL?!

We have officially left the gravitational pull of the rational earth. This reminds me of a black leader claiming that blacks had a moral obligation support O.J. Simpson in his murder trial (when O.J. wasn’t really even “black” and he certainly didn’t deserve to win).

Of course what is really happening is that Hannity and Ingraham know that they picked the wrong guy in the primaries (those ratings Trump provided rendered them intoxicated) and that it is they who are going to be responsible for whatever Hillary does in office. They are just getting a huge jump on trying to dupe the very same naïve customers they fooled into supporting Trump in the primaries, into believing it wasn’t really the fault of Trump, or his surrogates, that he lost.

And poor Sean has to keep assuring us himself that the pivot is still forthcoming, as does the so-he-humiliated-me-during-the-primaries-I-now-am-placing-my-hopes-in-him Hugh Hewitt:

For more than a year Trump and his choir assured everyone that he would indeed “pivot” and become more presidential.

As he told Hannity: “At the right time, I will be so presidential that you’ll call me and you’ll say, ‘Donald, you have to stop that, it’s too much.’” “

As I get closer and closer to the goal, it’s going to get different,” he told Greta Van Susteren in February. “I will be changing very rapidly. I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”

As I wrote last week, this was always a lie (and a ridiculous thing to say even if it weren’t). Trump can no more promise to be presidential than a leopard can promise to be a top-loading washing machine that runs on good intentions when in energy-saver mode (did I get that phrase wrong?).

But as 8 trillion eggs on Twitter keep telling me, what I think doesn’t matter. But Sean believed it. Hannity even suggested in that interview that the real Trump – the one Hannity has known for years — is the presidential one. Hannity in effect seconded Trump’s own assurance that Trump could change instantly into a mainstream, mature candidate whenever he wanted. Many honest and decent people pocketed this IOU of presidentialness. In fact, this promise of a new, disciplined Trump seemed to be the only thing that kept Hugh Hewitt off suicide watch.

And now poor Sean is becoming a case study in how denial wraps itself in fantasy:

He has chosen to eschew the numbers of more reliable polls, in favor of the Gateway Pundit nonsense, as mentioned here this past weekend.

From Hannity’s own site:

As we’ve seen recently with Reuters, presidential polls cannot always be trusted.

So for anyone who’s been disheartened by the post-convention bump for Hillary Clinton, the Gateway Pundit has some uplifting numbers for you:

The website reports that analysis from the two candidates’ social media accounts could mean Donald Trump will win in a landslide.

Consider the two candidates’ Facebook accounts: Trump has over 10 million “likes” while Hillary has just over 5 million.

Stop laughing. That’s an actual excerpt from his actual website.

How about when the two candidates live stream their events? Trump averages 30,000 live viewers per stream while Clinton receives on average, a measly 500 viewers.

And on Reddit, “Hillary for Prison” has more than double the subscribers (55,000) than the actual Hillary Clinton page does (24,000).

This is an entirely new level of seat sniffing for Sean Hannity. If anyone ever had any lingering shreds of respect for the man, I’m not sure how those remain, at this point.

So, no, I am not at all getting hot under the collar in response to the finger-wagging from Sean and Laura. This righteousness pose they've assumed is wearing pretty damn thin.


The Hugh Hewitt types, the Mark Davis types, good people like Dennis Prager and the great bloggers Bookworm and Ace, I will not comply with their exhortations to get behind Squirrel-Hair, but at least I can respect them. They were vehemently opposed to him right up until that night in May, when, in Indianapolis, the finest candidate in the original field of seventeen, Ted Cruz, pulled the plug on his campaign. They still acknowledge S-H's awfulness and in fact usually preface their exhortations with such acknowledgement.

But Sean and Laura? No, you people were palpably giddy about this walking train wreck last damn summer, when the world was full of sweet possibilities.

You have a lot of nerve trying to shame those of us who remained actual conservatives.