Before taking apart this SRWT, a little background.

President Obama will be awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Distinction during his visit to Israel next month, according to a report in the Times of Israel.

Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to receive the honor, which was announced by Israeli President Shimon Peres’s office on Monday.

“Barack Obama is a true friend of the State of Israel, and has been since the beginning of his public life,” said Peres in a statement announcing the decision.

Now, back to Sean.

By "left wing Obama-mania media" he means "Andrea Mitchell." And by "Israel" he means "Bibi Netanyahu."

Glad we could clear that up.

The conservatives in this country will not be happy until the entire country has turned into the fabled days of the Wild West, a literal and figurative Tombstone (like most of their nostalgia, it is rarely based in fact). It is an odd psychology, this need to blame victims. It's the poor's fault that they haven't succeeded. Those who suffer from chronic diseases and want to rely on universal health care are purposely not taking care of themselves. Those seniors should have planned better for their retirement so that Social Security benefits can be cut, for the betterment of future generations. And rape victims should most definitely be armed to prevent sexual assault.

And so it was in this looking glass world that Democratic strategist and rape survivor Zerlina Maxwell entered this week, appearing on the Hannity show with a radical notion: rather than tell women to avoid being raped, how about we teach men not to rape?

This is not without precedent. In Vancouver, an anti-rape campaign, Don't Be That Guy, actually saw number of sexual assaults drop the following year by 10%. And for a party that claims to be all about "personal responsibility," this would seem to be the most logical tactic to take. But then, when has Hannity been about logic?

Absolutely, sometimes the rapist is the guy with a ski mask who jumps out of an alley. And no, he doesn’t care about learning to be a better person. But Hannity’s offhand remark that “evil exists in the world” reduces the experience of rape to one particular type – the violent stranger attack. Absolutely, we need to continue to empower women to avoid high-risk situations, to get themselves out of them when they’re in them and to defend themselves however they best see fit. But when rape is overwhelmingly an act perpetrated by men upon women, we also sure as hell need to stop thinking of it exclusively in terms of what women have to do to prevent it. We need to involve men and boys. We need to remember, as a revealing Reddit thread last year proved, that a rapist can be your friend or your boyfriend or your co-worker. We need to acknowledge that a rapist can be your husband. That, as chilling as it is to admit, as Maxwell says, “Those kids in Steubenville were average guys.”

Maxwell says, “I don’t want anybody to lecture a rape survivor about anything. And I don’t want anybody telling women that if you don’t wear a skirt or don’t drink at all you’re going to be safe. That is a lie.” What she wants instead is more training, more dialogue and a process that is much longer and harder, and infinitely subtler, than just telling women to get a gun or not wear high heels. Maxwell says, “I knew that [doing "Hannity"] was going to be hard, but I did it because I knew that I wasn’t speaking just for myself. I’m not alone. Clearly, what we’ve been doing isn’t working. We’re telling women to be afraid of the person in the bushes when it’s the person in your house. We need a reality check. We’re talking about the wrong things. We’re asking the wrong questions.”

And if you're a Fox News viewer (or a reader of Glenn Beck's The Blaze, which did an article as well), you are apparently also internalizing the wrong message, because what happened to Maxwell after this appearance just proves how far we have yet to go:

In the wake of her appearance, Maxwell was bombarded with harassing messages calling for her to be raped or murdered, often in explicitly racist terms.

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(h/t Heather for the vid)

Bob Woodward has been attacking the White House ever since it looked like the sequester was going to happen a few days ago. To get more publicity for himself and for his book, he then proclaimed to CNN that he got into a shouting match with a high ranking Obama official and then in a subsequent email he was threatened.

That was the talk of the day all day Thursday, but after Politico published the email exchange Bob became a laughingstock. Even Bill O'Reilly admitted that Woodward wasn't threatened. Well, Woody followed this up with an exclusive Fox News appearance on Hannity Thursday night to further whine about how Gene Sperling was nasty to him in the email. He did try to make believe he was sounding objective to Hannity and as long as Woodward was trying to damage Obama, Sean didn't mind kowtowing to Bob. But almost immediately, Woodward tried to distance himself from his remarks about being threatened on CNN by saying that he never used language which could be construed as being a threat...or something.

Woodward: He was shouting at me, now I've known him for twenty years and I emailed back, I don't worry about shouts. He was really worked up and then he sent me that email apologizing, saying I'm going to regret taking this stand, now what we're talking about here is not a fact. He's not arguing with the fact because beforehand he said we're just not going to see eye to eye on this, it's an interpretation. Obviously he didn't like being challenged on this at all.

But, ahhh, and people have said that well, this was a threat, or I was saying it was a threat. I haven't used that language, but it's not the way to operate in a White House. As you know, when somebody says you're going to regret something, particularly somebody of power like Gene Sperling, he's not just a guy in the White House, he's the economic czar for the president.

Wow, he actually said that to Hannity, of all people. Maybe he thought nobody would transcribe his whine-fest. He most certainly did use that language. What a hack.

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Karl Rove blasted some of the "grassroots" Tea Party groups who have declared war on his newest effort to repackage the conservative crap sandwich in a prettier package that "can win elections." This is the purpose of Rove's new group, he claims, though Hannity contended he was really protecting incumbents from being primaried by more conservative candidates.

Rove had unkind words for some of the groups who have criticized him for his new Conservative Victory Project, saying that most of them use issues like this to raise funds for their websites, "sucking up the majority of funds on overhead." Not that he's wrong about that, but it certainly seems to be evidence of a deep breach inside the Republican party. Malkin was ballistic over Rove's move, as were others.

Dana Loesch reacted to Rove in real time, tweeting up a storm about how wrong, wrong, wrong Rove was about Todd Akin.

Right now @karlrove is rewriting history on my state's senate primary to justify his conservative-targeting group. PERIOD.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) February 6, 2013

Erick Erickson's head must have exploded when he saw this, given his rant yesterday about Rove's new group. Erickson seems to be playing all sides of the debate, since he didn't spare the Tea Party anything either when he called their brand a "cancer."

All Rove is doing is repackaging the same damaged merchandise in shinier paper. He's fine with their crummy message, but his billionaires want candidates who will actually win with that message. On the other hand, Freedomworks, Tea Party Nation and others really want to simply put out the unvarnished goods because they're deluded enough to think people will buy it.

Either way, they're all missing the point, which is that what they're selling smells very bad to most people- rotten, even. It doesn't matter what packaging they put around it, it still stinks. But it sure is fun to watch them chew on each other. Pop the popcorn and sit back for the fireworks.

So much cognitive disconnect, so little time. While Hannity, idiot that he is, suggests that the left is pushing SO HARD and radicalizing everyone SO MUCH (projection, Sean?) that the right wing might have no option but to just secede. And don't you think that's a radical idea, but then so was the Declaration of Independence.

Oh, Scammity. Facts matter. Here are a few to counteract your nonsense.

1. Republican states receive more federal funding than Democratic states. That includes those Hannity touts in this particular rant, like Louisiana and South Carolina.
2. Make a million, keep half. That's half a million in your pocket, dude. Hannity goes on and on about how places like California and New York are so "overtaxed" that people are just going to rebel and...you know. He ignores the fact that wages are higher in these states, and high-earning individuals live in them. Here's a dirty little secret: If you earn a million dollars and pay 50 percent in taxes, you still have half a million in your pocket. That would be different than the person who earns $25,000 and might pay no federal or state income tax, but does pay sales tax and spends every single penny of that net income to live. They have zero in their pockets. Who comes out ahead?
3. Secession means an end to federal subsidies - Of course Hannity is really just posturing for the sake of posturing and firing up the wingnuts, but he should be honest enough to admit that if states secede, they take over all responsibility for their populations, and it won't be quite as easy for those people to scuttle over the border into the United States of Decent People Who Aren't Corporate Hacks post-secession.

Secede if you must, conservatives, but don't forget to take your share of the national debt with you. Make sure you take Hannity, too. Buh-bye!

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This is so damn funny on so many levels.

CRUZ: You look at Chuck Hagel's record and it places him on the outer fringe in terms of his views on national security...Now, this is a man who served honorably for his nation, he was wounded defending his nation, I respect him personally. But his views are not in the mainstream, and I don't think they'd serve this nation well leading the Department of Defense.

So Ted Cruz, who calls himself a Teabagger (along with only 8% of Americans), who calls gun control "unconstitutional," promotes nutty UN conspiracy theories and warns that Shariah law is "an enormous problem" in the US -- he's the arbiter of what "mainstream views" are?

I guess on Fox News, that's credible. Everywhere else it's just hilarious.

It's almost too predictable. Sean Hannity, being all righteous and slamming people who benefit from government programs as being like animals dependent on humans for food. The thing is, Hannity is very, very selective about who those people are.

Here's the punchline:

Apparently there is a sign. National Park Service, the US Department of the Interior, and it says "Please do not feed the animals. And the reason: The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not take care of themselves.

Well, I -- - "You don't want to help people who are poor. And starving. See?" No, it's -- the dependency issue is a lot different. You teach people how to fish, how to be independent, you create an environment where jobs are plentiful, versus people being dependent on government."

I doubt, for example, that he included Big Agrobusiness and Big Oil while he was busy slamming people. Their billions in annual subsidies are nothing if not a dependency. Look what just happened with the farm bill! Instead of accepting the cuts that Senator Debbie Stabenow had carefully made to the fat-cat subsidies, they put the pork-laden one in place instead.

This is where conservatives like Hannity really show their true colors. Ordinary people who receive benefits like Medicare and Social Security which they paid for all their lives or who are in need of temporary assistance while unemployed, are scorned and ridiculed as dependent bloodsuckers.

God forbid Exxon/Mobil, AT&T, Verizon, and those corporate farmers would suffer the same scorn. Oh, no. They're the job creators. Sure they are.

As for plentiful jobs, let's have a conversation about what those might be when they actually materialize. Are they jobs where we get to scrape along for eight bucks an hour? Are they jobs where we'd need at least two of them to survive? Would those jobs have benefits?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

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Even for Krauthammer, this is a stretch. Somehow the rift between the tea party conservatives and mainstream Republicans (not that there's all that much daylight, mind you), is all President Obama's fault.

It's surely not the millions spent by billionaires to fund and perpetuate tea party ideas via think tanks, political organizations, and Fox News. Surely not. No, no, Charles Krauthammer manages to twist himself up enough to blame President Obama, specifically with regard to the fiscal cliff negotiations. Here's what he said:

He’s been using this, and I must say with great skill–-and ruthless skill and success–to fracture and basically shatter the Republican opposition… His objective from the very beginning was to break the will of the Republicans in the House, and to create an internal civil war. And he’s done that.

If I parse that claim carefully, he seems to be saying that by standing by the promises he made during the election, President Obama is somehow exposing the rift we always knew was in the Republican party. I can't say it often enough: When you roll in the mud with pigs to further your own aims, you might find yourself stuck.

And stuck is what the Republican Party is. They used the tea party conservatives to get elected and then have to deal with their stubborn idealism about how not to govern the country. The real cliff would be the one these wingnuts would push the entire country off, save the billionaires, of course.

I admit that it's sort of fun watching them implode. I just wish we weren't having to temper the fun with the knowledge that this isn't a game, and they aren't serious.

In the meantime, what other suggestions can we give Krauthammer for things that are Obama's fault? I'm sure we could make a whole list. I would start with the things they don't believe in. Like climate change, which is surely Obama's fault if it really exists but of course it doesn't, according to these loons. What else?

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All of Sean Hannity's show Thursday night was an exercise in whining babble. You almost had to have a translator to understand all of his nonsense about taxes and cliffs and the vaunted values of conservatism. But right in the middle, he took a time out to spend a few minutes smearing...the Occupy movement.

Now why would he do that, do you think? After all, the Occupy Wall Street folks have been instrumental in organizing and getting assistance to people in the hurricane-ravaged areas of New York.

Aside: Hannity spent a full five minutes earlier in the show interviewing angry residents of Staten Island as though he had sympathy for them before he brought on a guest to explain why they were all victims of liberal "gimme-ism." No sympathy for YOU, little folks, but if he can use them to slap President Obama while slapping them, he sees it as a two-fer, I guess.

Indeed, the OWS people have been hard at work organizing and doing good things to effect change in their communities. From their hurricane relief efforts to their debt relief efforts, they've definitely been a force for good, not evil.

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Nothing riles the rubes quite like screaming OBAMAS TURNING US INTO EUROPE as Mark Steyn did on Hannity.

STEYN: A majority of Americans essentially voted for European levels of spending...we're 1% under Canada. Americans, conservative Americans think there's a difference between America and Canada. There actually isn't any more, not in terms of government spending. We're close to Norway, we're not quite the full Sweden yet. But we're spending like Europeans but we're not taxed like that, and the idea that you can close that gap...if he [Obama] can make this level of spending permanent, he changes the United States into a European social democracy and he will be the most consequential president of the last 100 years. He will finish the work of FDR and LBJ and that'll be it, we'll be a big Sweden.

First, it's amusing that wingers are always trying to make Canada and European countries something to fear when those nations are hugely popular with Americans.

In fact, polling shows that Americans want an income distribution that's close to, wait for it -- Sweden's.

So when you say "Sweden" and "Canada" to non-Fox viewers, they think, "Yes, please."

Second, it goes without saying that Steyn's numbers are all made up. The US is nowhere near Sweden in terms of spending as a percentage of GDP.

We are, however, spending more than Syria, Haiti and Tanzania, so maybe Steyn would be more comfortable there.