Common features.

Mark Halperin, worked for Politico, hated Hillary.

Glenn Thrush, worked for Politico, no friend of Hillary

Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, Hillary basher

Roger Ailes, Fox News, Hillary foe

Leon Wieseltier, editor at The Atlantic, thought women were brainless.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, openly dismissive and hostile to Hillary.

What do these guys have in common?

They are all either serial harassers or have openly bragged about their sexist acts towards women (Taibbi published a book about his days as an ugly American in Russia).

Taibbi should be investigated. He says what he wrote wasn’t true but why should we take his word for it? Even the satire he wrote is reprehensible.

And finally, we have this from post election 2008 where Jon Favreau is seen groping the breast of a Hillary cutout in an attitude not unlike what Al Franken did to a sleeping Tweeden (in that case no contact appears to be made. It’s just a pose. With Favreau’s picture, well, is there any doubt?)

Favreau has his own podcast now. It’s Pod Save America. Jon and two other former Obama alums act like three frat boys discussing politics. How come Rebecca Traister has to go on The Ezra Klein Show? Why doesn’t Ezra go on The Rebecca Traister Show? Why does the brilliant Sarah Kliff take second fiddle to Klein and whiny Matt Yglesias on The Weeds? Why is it that Clare Malone gets buried between Nate Silver and Harry Enten in FiveThirtyEight? Why are they the equivalent of the Fox News hot blondes sandwiched between two guys? Who made this executive decision anyway???

I’m on a roll. I feel a rant building up.

Hillary actually tolerates Favreau. She’s a better woman than I am. Favreau paid ZERO price for that picture. Obama didn’t do anything about it. Favreau had to apologize in a “sorry, not sorry” thing and it was over. Obama’s attitude was Boys will be Boys and Favreau went on to write speeches for Obama. That’s how much Obama, feminist in chief, cares about women in American who were dismayed at the shitty way his campaign and the DNC treated his rival, who, by the way, won the popular vote in the primaries in 2008 but couldn’t carry all of the extremely undemocratic caucuses in states like Kansas and Iowa.

I don’t want anyone on any of these podcasts to keep skipping over the Obama years as if they never happened. There’s a whole generation of women who got burned by the likes of Taibbi, Favreau and Obama. Let’s take some scalps now. I want Taibbi’s and Favreau. I don’t care that Hillary likes Jon now. The guy shouldn’t have this much attention. He didn’t do enough penance.

Here’s my point:

We got our news, our narratives for the 2008 and 2016 from all of these guys. They mentored their protégés and those guys are now the new face of the pundits. They’re young and overwhelmingly male and they’ve cut their teeth on denigrating women or groping women or treating their images as objects of derision.

They are our next Walter Cronkites. Or they were going to be until they got taken out by their own behavior.

I’m still waiting for Taibbi and Favreau to get the ax. No, I don’t think they should be spared. I’m sick of these guys sucking up all the bandwidth.

The Harrassment on the Hill.

Man o man, the timing of this revelation about Congress having a special office to settle sexual harrassment and discrimination complaints funded by the taxpayer dollar is terrible. Tomorrow, Ajit Pai is planning to end Net Neutrality. I always suspected that “controlling the message” would be one of the strategeries the Republican mobsters would employ to keep a permanent lock on power. I think we need to look to state and local government to step in and intervene.

But I digress.

With the latest news about John Conyers having to use the office to pay off staffers he harassed, we are going to be riveted to this news. Because who controls the information about who has made use of this office? That’s right. The Republicans. We’re going to hear a steady drip drip drip of news about all of the Democrats until someone filed a FOIA request for records for an office that up until this day, most of us did not know existed.