Frank Luntz and Sean Hannity were all appalled last night at the vicious and harsh language being used by those eeeeevil liberals this week in describing poor, put-upon conservatives as "hostage-takers" for merely holding up unemployment insurance payouts for poor people in order to force tax cuts for the wealthy down everyone's throat. It was heart-wrenching.

Of course, when your scenario is a heavy-duty fantasy like this one, it means that you're going to be doing a lot of projection. Sure enough:

HANNITY: Let me disagree with you. This is the liberals doing this. This is Obama attacking Republicans as hostage-takers. This is the Democratic Party saying, you know, the president f'd up, f him, screw him, he betrayed us, he's betraying other - give me the example of where are conservatives using this rhetoric?

LUNTZ: But nobody is listening. The problem is that the right isn't listening to the left. The left isn't listening to the right.

HANNITY: I'm talking about the harsh vitriol and rhetoric is coming from the left.

LUNTZ: I don't disagree with the rhetoric, but I'm out with the public and I'm doing this now almost every other night and in all of the focus groups even when it is done for corporate clients or media clients.

People aren't listening to each other and they don't want to hear what each other says. They are taking their news based on what affirms them rather than what informs them. They don't even share the same basic facts and basic understanding. Sean, this country is more divided now than it has been since Vietnam.

HANNITY: I see that, but -- if I were to call President Obama the things that he's calling conservatives, or that liberals are calling him, I probably would be, you know, victim of a boycott or firing.

Hmmm. No small irony in Luntz observing that people are now "taking their news based on what affirms them rather than what informs them" on Fox News, of all places.

And goodness, where could this disparaging rhetoric be coming from? Certainly it couldn't be inspired by right-wing talkers like Sean Hannity, could it? After all, his rhetoric is always calm and reasonable and respectful, right?

Well, maybe not so much ...

HANNITY: Because they are so harsh in their rhetoric, is this going to backfire? In other words, does this hurt the Democrats? Forget about the disagreement, which I think we have two very fundamental different views of which direction the country ought to go. I think Obama has failed as president, but this language, this incendiary rhetoric does that come back to hurt them?

Pretty funny, isn't it, how utterly un-self-aware these right-wing fanatics are. They can utter their own self-contradiction in the same sentence and not even recognize it.

And when it comes to Obama, only Glenn Beck outdoes Hannity in terms of vicious and incendiary rhetoric on Fox.

Of course, it's unsurprising that Hannity would declare Obama a failure now, since he and his pal Limbaugh have been openly working for Obama's failure from the very get-go, and he has constantly predicted that Obama would be a failure.

And when it comes to vicious rhetoric toward liberals, he is again outdone on Fox only by Beck. Hannity mostly likes his little eliminationist jokes ("If we get rid of liberals, we solve our problems").

So yeah, Sean, we're gonna cry you a river over being called out for being the hostage takers you are. Boo freaking hoo.