But so far right-wingers claiming that Clinton somehow faked her concussion have gone virtually unchallenged on Fox News and right-wing sites like Newsbusters and the Daily Caller. Everyone from Charles Krauthammer to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton have gotten into the act. Even after reports that Clinton also suffered a dangerous blood clot between her brain and skull, Bolton not only failed to apologize, he suggested that she was dodging Benghazi questions in order to protect her 2016 chances.

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There's no way to know how bad or good a deal Democrats cut until the conflict they postponed is resolved, and we know what it takes to lift the debt ceiling, keep the government running and deal with the "sequester" – the combination of automatic spending cuts to defense and to social programs baked into the original debt ceiling deal back in August 2011.

As someone who believed, and still believes, that it was best for the country if Democrats stood up to Republican hostage takers and went over the cliff, I have to admit President Obama and his chief negotiator Vice President Joe Biden got some good things with this deal. Unemployment benefits were extended for 2 million Americans and so were tax credits that help the working and middle class. The deal also kept student-loan interest rates low. Lots of Democrats are also celebrating the fact that Republicans voted for their first tax-rate increase in 20 years. But since the White House got far less in revenue than it originally asked for, we'll see how great a concession that turned out to be, since the deal kept tax rates low for millions of wealthy Americans, and ceded crucial hikes on estates and investment income for the super-rich.

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Here's how it began:

What I said to you on Chris Matthews' show was the meanest and very likely the dumbest thing I ever said on TV. I was wrong to have said it and I deserve all the bunk I get for it.

But then he complained about the previous day's "Hardball" segment, in which I attacked his attempted takeover of FreedomWorks, backed by an aide with a gun.

Certainly you know that spin about guns at FW was BS. I'm sorry you reduced yourself to expanding on it. Hit me with your best shot not your cheap shot. Dick Armey

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I hope that includes the president.

On a day marked by rumors of action that mainly turned out to be false – thanks in part to a Facebook post by soon-to-be-former Sen. Scott Brown – it was easy to believe the phony blame game that apportions equal responsibility to both sides, even though it's perfectly clear that Democrats have compromised to a fault, while the GOP won't. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid misdiagnosed the problem when he said House Speaker John Boehner was running a "dictatorship" – if he was a dictator, he could have at least passed Plan B. Reid's playing Dueling Floor Rants with the impotent Mitch McConnell could make anyone say "a pox on both their houses."

Of course, Reid was right on one point: The simplest way to resolve at least the looming tax hike problem is for the House to pass the Senate bill that extends the Bush tax cuts for everyone but the top 2 percent of taxpayers. I'm not sure I trust Reid or House Democrats who claim it would get enough Republican votes, plus all the Democrats, to pass the House – never underestimate the power of Tea Party dead-enders in the caucus -- but it would be an interesting test, for all sides.

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Then over the weekend we discovered that the late Andrew Breitbart's empire of hate is imploding, and the ridiculous Dana Loesch is trying to use the lifeboat of labor law to flee the ship of bullies she once helmed.

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"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he pronounced fatuously.

As usual for the NRA, the solution to gun violence is more guns. But finally, Americans are seeing that for the destructive illogic that it is. LaPierre is truly one of the bad guys. We don't need guns to fight him, though, we just need votes. And we need the politicians elected with our votes to stand up for us.

Last June, President Obama told a roomful of donors that if he were to be reelected, "the fever may break" and the Republican Party might return to its common-sense roots. It won't be that easy. Obama and the Democrats can't passively wait for relief from the sickness that claimed the GOP, even though it may seem that the party is self-destructing on its own. They are going to have to fight.

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Brownstein is identifying a fault line, not creating it, let alone endorsing it. He raises points that are well worth discussing. But I wince at such a catchy depiction of polarization – even though Brownstein is right about the way particularly wealthy white seniors have gobbled up resources for themselves while denying them to others.

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Time magazine named President Obama its 2012 "Person of the Year," and it makes sense. Just two years ago he came out of the 2010 shellacking battered, his chance at a second term diminished. Instead he put together an astonishing coalition of America's future, and became the first president in 75 years to win more than 50 percent of the vote twice. Aware of historic second-term overreach, most notably when George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, Obama says he nonetheless has an ambitious agenda for the next four years.

It would be sad if he launched it by doing what Bush never did: cutting Social Security benefits for seniors by agreeing to a change in cost of living calculations called the chained CPI.

Once a topic for only the wonkiest of wonks, now the intricacies of the chained CPI are being debated by the hackiest of hacks. The bottom line is this: The longer you live, the less your benefits would grow. We still don't know how it would work; anonymous White House sources have promised any deal would include protections for the poorest seniors, the disabled and veterans.

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Then Victoria Soto's memorial overwhelmed me. Two of my daughter's best friends are elementary school teachers; I felt their bravery and vulnerability in a whole new way. On Monday a CNN interview with principal Dawn Hochsprung's teary, 20-something daughter Erica, begging her mother to "come back, just come back" undid me, making me miss my own mother and think about my daughter someday missing me. All of us have multiple identities that let pain find us in many different ways.

The only person I haven't been able to think about is Nancy Lanza, the first victim, shot in her bed with her own gun by her own son, the terminally mentally ill Adam. I shrink from the story despite the fact -- or because of it -- that we had things in common. She was close to my age, divorced, with children in their 20s. But I've been blessed; my daughter is as much a joy today as she was as a first grader.

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It does remain a commitment of his. What I said is, today is not the day, I believe as a father, a day to engage in the usual Washington policy debates. I think that that they will come, but today is not that day, especially as we are awaiting more information about the situation in Connecticut.

I beg to differ. Today is precisely the day. It's true, we still don't know details about the weapons the school shooter, or shooters, used in Connecticut. But we know that there are too many guns, and that the gun lobby fights all efforts to regulate them. The grief and outrage sparked by the Newtown tragedy ought to strengthen the arguments of those who fight for sane restrictions, as well as broader mental health services.

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On MSNBC's "Now With Alex" (guest-hosted by the great Joy-Ann Reid), congressional correspondent Luke Russert told the unvarnished truth about why the party that's for cuts won't lay any out. Reid asked Russert: "Do Republicans really feel that putting forward entitlement cuts will make them more popular with the American people?"

And Russert, who has good GOP sources, explained their logic:

If they have entitlement cuts as part of this deal, they would make it, through their marketing ways, and they're better communications operatives than Democrats, that the president would own the entitlement cuts. They're not worried about that. They would say "the president owns that" in 2014 and 2016.

Look at how they did that with the defense cuts as part of the sequester.  Remember those ads that Romney ran, that Republicans ran: "These are the president's defense cuts"? They'd do the same thing: "These are the president's entitlement cuts." They don't worry about that at all.

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In fact, of the top 10 worst political lies Politifact nominated, four came straight from Romney. In addition to the Jeep lie, he was dinged for claiming Obama began his presidency "with an apology tour," that the president gutted the work requirement for welfare, and that he told business owners "you didn't build that" when in context he said they didn't build businesses alone.  Only two of the top lies came directly from Obama (exaggerating George Bush's responsibility for the deficit and claiming Romney called Arizona's draconian immigration laws a model for the nation). The rest came from campaign surrogates or television ads.  In what feels like standard Politifact false equivalence, Democrats and Republicans were responsible for five lies apiece.

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Well, obviously Democrats won the election, holding the White House, increasing their lead in the Senate and picking up seats in the House. But while some Republicans promised to commence soul-searching about why most Americans rejected their message, their right-wing flank, and the plutocrats who fund them, are only getting crazier. That leaves victorious Democrats looking for ways to placate them, instead of looking for ways to exercise their mandate. This seems wrong.

I mean, how do you explain the phenomenon of President Obama winning Michigan by 10 points, and the state GOP's very next political move is passing unpopular right-to-work legislation in a lame duck session, before they concede seats to Democrats (and some less crazy Republicans) in January? That flies in the face of the way the political system is supposed to work. The electorate speaks; their servants listen.

But instead, Gov. Rick Snyder, who once promised not to back right-wing right-to-work legislation, instead backed rushing it through, to applause from his friends at ALEC, Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers. The point is to slash wages as well as to defund an institutional pillar of the Democratic Party. No retreat, no surrender.

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And I admit: I've howled at reports of Obama "betrayals" before, only to find later that the president negotiated a better deal than early reports showed, Exhibit A being the payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment benefits he got in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts after the "shellacking" of the 2010 midterm elections.

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Such is the coverage of Sen. Jim DeMint's departure from the U.S. Senate to take over the Heritage Foundation. So many words have been spent on this news. I hadn't planned on weighing in, but after watching all the ways it's being spun as some kind of victory for DeMint and the Tea Party, I had to say: Enough!

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But what about Bill O'Reilly? He had his own meltdown on election night, blaming Obama's reelection on the disappearance of "traditional America" and "the white establishment." A few days later he began an ongoing jihad against "secular progressives" and the "far left" that was as fact-free as it was vicious. I wrote at the time that O'Reilly seemed to be going the way of Glenn Beck, who lost his Fox show after his paranoia and anti-Obama vitriol became too much even for Ailes.

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My old friend Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman who made a fortune astro-turfing the Tea Party, has left the organization he helped found, FreedomWorks. David Corn at Mother Jones broke the news, and Armey depicted the parting of ways as "matters of principle." Then AP revealed that Armey will receive $8 million in consulting fees even though – or because – he left the group, and Politico explained that Armey's alleged last straw came when partner Matt Kibbe signed a book contract that paid him personally for a book largely inspired by (and partly researched by) FreedomWorks and its staff. Sounds like a matter of principle, until you look more closely.

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"I didn't know this, but Fordham University banned Ann Coulter," O'Reilly began breathlessly. In fact, the reason O'Reilly "didn't know this" is that it didn't happen.

Here's what happened: Fordham College Republicans invited Coulter to speak. Fordham president Joseph McShane wrote a letter lamenting their choice but supporting their right to make it. The College Republicans wrote a letter announcing they'd earlier "rescinded" the Coulter invitation, before McShane's rebuke, and lamenting that he hadn't spoken to them before going public with his reservations. Dissident Fordham College Republicans wrote letters complaining that their club had canceled Coulter, but none of them claimed she'd been "banned." I wrote about all of this Nov. 9 when it happened, but it was a Friday night, and O'Reilly was probably otherwise occupied.

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I supported Hillary Clinton in 2008. Smarter people than I believe she will run in 2016, despite her protests, and I mostly hope she does. Chances are I would support her again. There is no other strong certain candidate in the field. Vice President Biden and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are likely to stay out of the race if she runs. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley probably would, or should, too. He doesn't have the stature to successfully challenge her. And there's no obvious liberal or progressive star to date. Talk about a run by, say, Massachusetts Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren seems premature to me, as much as I admire her: Let's give her a little time in the Senate to make a difference before pushing her onto the national stage. Of course, it's still quite early, and an inspiring figure may well emerge who could give Clinton an energetic run from the left. Almost nobody was betting on Sen. Barack Obama on Dec. 4, 2005. So we'll see.

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It was a calm, respectful conversation, until Davis volunteered that Romney lost because of Obama's voter turnout operation – specifically, his ability to turnout "underclass minorities" and "particularly those who orient toward the city" who were "pulled out of the apartments." Since we had been talking about the GOP's problems with women and people of color, I respectfully offered Davis some "free advice" – that it might be time to retire the term "underclass." It got worse.

Davis mumbled about the term not being "politically correct," and when I referenced Stevens's slur against people who make less than $50,000 a year, many of whom are actually middle class, Davis jumped in: "That's not where the voter turnout came, if you know your voter stats, it was really people who were making even less than that, pulled out of the apartments…groups that traditionally haven't voted." (Yes, I caught the condescending "if you know your voter stats.")

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