Deliver us from Democrats

The point I am trying to make is that drawing your moral code from the bible requires you to pick and choose which values to follow and which to discard. Therefore the authority must lay elsewhere.

mesquite wrote:

The point I am trying to make is that drawing your moral code from the bible requires you to pick and choose which values to follow and which to discard. Therefore the authority must lay elsewhere.

But you are the one telling us that Hannity is drawing his moral code from the bible, without revision or rational thought. (Isn't this what they call a "straw man"?)

I think it is more like I disagree with Hannity. He is the one that chooses to carry the old testament baggage and express himself in biblical terms of good, evil, god, and devil. I was merely pointing out why in my opinion that is so much nonsense.

MOVEABLE FEAST
By Thane Peterson

Sean Hannity's One-Sided History
Hard as it is to imagine now, the conservative commentator's Deliver Us from Evil has nothing but praise for W's Iraq policy

I recently had the flu and was feeling feverish, a condition that wasn't helped by my decision to read Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism (ReganBooks, $26.95), the new best-seller by Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox TV and radio commentator. As I read, the daily news from Iraq gave the lie to Hannity's sunny assessment that "President Bush's vision for a more peaceful, stable and democratic world is beginning to come true."

Oh, really? The news was all about the armed revolt by Iraqi Sunnis and Shi-ites, the death of five dozen American soldiers in a single week, and the kidnapping and threatened execution of Japanese and other foreign civilians if their governments don't withdraw troops from Iraq. "Chaos Rules in Iraq," summed up the main headline on Saturday in The Scranton Times, the local paper in my politically conservative and patriotic corner of Pennsylvania.

CRUEL RULE. Now come the calls for more American troops to be brought in and martial law imposed in a nation that's supposedly being liberated. Any American who expresses doubts about the war effort will be denounced as unpatriotic. Alternatively, if President Bush really does hand over power to Iraqis on June 30, as he keeps saying he will, warlords could take control, as they have in Afghanistan.

Then Iraqis will be back to the same sort of cruel rule they faced under Saddam Hussein. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand Americans will have died in vain, and American taxpayers will be out $100 billion with very little gain.

How did the U.S. get into this mess? In my opinion, conservative tub-thumpers like Hannity bear a portion of the blame for helping inflame the passions of the American Right. However, democracies end up with the policies and quality of public debate their people deserve. And the fact that millions of Americans are lapping up copies of this and similarly simple-minded and intemperate books isn't a good sign.

US VS. THEM. Deliver Us from Evil is full of name-calling trumped up as intellectual debate, one-sided history lessons designed to deceive the ill-informed, and good old-fashioned war-mongering. Why do so many people read this stuff? My guess is that it's mainly to confirm themselves in their prejudices.

To his credit, Hannity's biases and rhetorical style are revealed from the outset. In his book's title, when he equates liberals with terrorists and despots and calls them (actually, us -- I'm one of those liberals) "evil." The advantage of such black-and-white thinking is that it relieves him of any obligation to listen to his political opponents -- or provide reasoning that is more sound and substantive. (They're evil, so why bother?) The disadvantage of this approach is that it wipes all nuance and doubt out of his arguments, making them worthless as policy prescriptions.

In Hannity's view, things really started to go bad in the world about the time Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976. The author repeats two basic themes over and over again in the book's 300-plus pages. First, liberals and other "moral relativists" are Neville Chamberlain-style "appeasers" who refuse to acknowledge the existence of "evil" in the world. Second, Presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are courageous leaders unafraid to look evil dictators in the eye and face them down.

By contrast, Democrats like Carter and Bill Clinton "are like weak-willed prosecutors, happy to bargain every capital offense down to a misdemeanor."

UNPLATABLE POLICY. Sustaining these themes requires some fancy footwork. Let's be honest here: Democrats and Republicans alike have done their fair share of appeasing tyrants over the last 30 years. For instance, how does Hannity explain away the fact that both Reagan and President George H. Bush for years supported Saddam, supplying him with money and arms throughout the 1980s? Hard-nosed realpolitik to counter the Soviet Union's incursions in Afghanistan? Nope. Jimmy Carter's appeasing of the Soviet Union during his four years in office locked the U.S. into an unpalatable policy it couldn't shake for a decade, Hannity argues.

He chides Carter for pressuring the Shah of Iran before he was toppled in the 1970s to free political prisoners and observe human-rights conventions. "Carter," Hannity gripes, "also strongly urged the Shah to permit 'free assembly' -- though under circumstances that meant open season for potential insurgents to meet and plot insurrection." Hmm. Now how does that differ from what President Bush has been doing in Iraq?

Oh, by the way, just disregard that damning old photo of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (then Reagan's special envoy) shaking hands with Saddam back in 1983 in Baghdad. That wasn't appeasement.

PRAISE FOR REAGAN. On to the first Gulf War: Inconveniently, it was the first President Bush, a Republican, who led the nation into its initial war against Saddam -- and then, inexplicably, let him stay in power. Why didn't Bush get rid of Saddam back in 1991, when he had the dictator on the run? And why did Bush call on Iraqi Kurds to revolt -- and then abandon them to be gassed by the tyrant?

No explanations from Mr. Hannity. He's right when he says Clinton should have done more to destroy al Qaeda in the 1990s, but he ignores the complication that neither congressional Republicans nor the electorate likely would have supported sustained military action.

Hannity similarly ignores the qualitative differences between his two heroes, Reagan and George W. Bush. One of the few points on which I agree with Hannity is that Reagan deserves considerable credit for wearing down the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The difference is that Reagan used peaceful means -- a huge military buildup and the bluff of threatening to build a "Star Wars" type defense system, which would have made the Soviets' offensive missiles obsolete.

OOPS, NEVER MIND. Reagan's few actual military strikes were against the likes of tiny Grenada and toothless Libya, and I suspect he would have been shrewd enough to avoid the potential quagmire of invading Iraq. Arguably, George W.'s campaign in Afghanistan (which I supported) has been Reaganesque, while his invasion of Iraq is pure Lyndon Johnson.

Ultimately, Hannity's book is persuasive only if you don't know the broader context of the events he's writing about. For instance, he lays out the "alarming findings" last year of David Kay, the Bush Administration's weapons inspector, of all the weapons Saddam once tried to develop. But Kay later concluded the weapons had been destroyed and urged President Bush to admit that many of his justifications for going to war were mistaken.

If no weapons of mass destruction have been found, Hannity argues, Saddam must have moved them to another country. Where, I wonder, and what ally could Saddam have trusted with such lethal weapons?

SERVICE FOR ALL. I could go on, but I prefer to try to find some common ground with Hannity. We're both patriots, so let me suggest that he join me in supporting a liberal policy idea (also supported by lefties like Congressman Charles Rangel and Senator Ted Kennedy): From now on, let's never go to war unless we also have a universal military draft. No exemptions -- rich kids, poor kids, the children of Presidents and pundits all would have an equal chance of serving.

It's only fair that everyone share the burden equally. My guess is that liberal "appeasement" (read prudence) would look a lot better to our leaders and pundits if their own families had to carry out their policies.

As I read, the daily news from Iraq gave the lie to Hannity's sunny assessment that "President Bush's vision for a more peaceful, stable and democratic world is beginning to come true."

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As I read, the daily news from Iraq gave the lie to Hannity's sunny assessment that "President Bush's vision for a more peaceful, stable and democratic world is beginning to come true."

That's like claiming that the early hours of combat on D-Day "gave the lie" to the notion that the Allies would win the war.

But Kickycan, to accept the rebuttal requires one to accept premises that are not acceptable.

For instance: "Ultimately, Hannity's book is persuasive only if you don't know the broader context of the events he's writing about. For instance, he lays out the "alarming findings" last year of David Kay, the Bush Administration's weapons inspector, of all the weapons Saddam once tried to develop. But Kay later concluded the weapons had been destroyed and urged President Bush to admit that many of his justifications for going to war were mistaken."

I do not believe that Kay ever urged President B ush to admit that many of his justifications for going to war were mistakes. I think to this day Kay is saying that he thought the WMD were there. Everybody thought they were there. Some still think they are there. And I don't recall Kay saying they had been destroyed. He just said they hadn't been able to find them.

. . . Rather than admitting uncertainty, however, U.S. and British officials simply counted any unaccounted-for weapons or related materials as weapons that actually existed. (See ACT, March 2004.)

In a March 5 interview with Arms Control Today, Kay attributed this belief to Iraq's past noncompliance and deception of weapons inspectors, which had encouraged U.S. and British officials to assume the worst about its behavior. Nevertheless, Kay said that Saddam Hussein's regime likely did not offer proof of the weapons' destruction for two reasons. The first is that some were destroyed during the "chaos" following the 1991 Persian Gulf War and its war with Iran during the 1980s. The second is that Iraqi officials were "embarrassed to admit" to some of the methods used to destroy the weapons. For example, Iraq disposed of "biological agents in ways that were…dangerous to the health of people in Baghdad" he said.

You complain of Hannity. I ask why? You complain that he sees things in Biblical black and white, and show us that we don't blindly follow every Biblical more today. Fair enough, all good so far.

But here is where I question whether Hannity has claimed either that he does so or that others should, because the only person I see making that attribution for his position is you. (That seem the "straw man" to me.) Hannity didn't write that his is an absolute, black and white morality for which he cites the Bible as his source; that's your claim, your complaint.

I haven't read the book, and I assume you haven't either. We each have only the comments about that book that were used to start this discussion upon which to base our conclusions. Within those I do not see the words "Bible", "Biblical", or "God" mentioned even once.

Foxfyre wrote:

Everybody accuses anything supporting Bush of being drivel, BS, and lies. But with few exceptions, nobody says why they are.

Hannity is drivel because.

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Hannity says we face moral choices between good and evil every day. If we make excuses for evil - Hitler was a "madman," a pedophile priest was "weak" or, as philandering actor Ethan Hawke recently advised us, Bill Clinton "suffered from" infidelity - soon we cease being able to distinguish good from evil at all. (I would add to the excuses for evil, "It's just about sex.") With each choice we make, large and small, we take a step closer to the devil or a step closer to God.

If you can not see the point, nothing I can say will change your mind.

So, if you just want to complain in the abstract about the notion of an absolute and irrational Biblical-based black and white morality which neither Hannity nor anyone in this discussion has advocated, I suppose you are entitled to do so, but I assumed you were trying to articulate what it is about HANNITY's position that you dislike, and so far your complaint seems based on personal bias rather than factual evidence as to the nature of his position.

(Please don't take this personally. I'm arguing with your statements, not attacking you for making them.)

But there's something about all this that just doesn't add up

Scrat wrote:

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As I read, the daily news from Iraq gave the lie to Hannity's sunny assessment that "President Bush's vision for a more peaceful, stable and democratic world is beginning to come true."

That's like claiming that the early hours of combat on D-Day "gave the lie" to the notion that the Allies would win the war.

I agree that parts of this article are just ridiculous. But I think overall, the article is useful in the discussion of Hannity's bias.

I tend to find his bias more justified than that of those who denigrate him.

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I tend to find his bias more justified than that of those who denigrate him.

All of those that denigrate him? Who are you speaking of?