Habitat For Sean Hannity

I had some idle time this weekend so I made a rare foray into Sean Hannity’s America, because I wanted to see what angry rich white people do on the weekends when they aren’t sending jobs off to Vietnam or polluting watersheds. I also wanted to see what makes Barack Obama such an Afro-Leninist menace. I didn’t realize that I would be afforded the added bonus of Dr. Laura Schlesinger.

Hannity and Karl Rove (who looks very stiff in his new pundit roll–like a warhead with jowls and a neck sac) spent the first ten minutes assailing Barack Obama’s arrogance. “He is an ironic, sardonic observer of what’s been going on in the Senate since he got there,” Rove said. Hmmm. I think if any American body is deserving of sardonic analysis it would be the can’t-shoot-straight United States Senate. Besides, I’m pro-sardonic, and I vote.

Newt Gingrich stopped by to join in the fair-and-balanced fracas. “The left wing of the party admires American terrorists,” Gingrich said. I’m racking my brain and the only American terrorists I can come up with are Tim McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, and I never remember them in any DNC ads, though Obama may have attended a fundraiser at one of their homes.

The second half of the show ramped up to Hannity’s potboiler for the evening: That “we’ve learned” that Barack Obama attended the Million Man March in 1995 to “better understand the movement…and wanted to be an observer rather than a participant.”

They printed Obama’s remarks which they “uncovered” from a 1995 Chicago Reader article. “What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together and affirm our rightful place in the society. But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Exhortations are not enough, nor are the notions that we can create a black economy within America that is…sealed from the rest of the economy and seriously tackle the major issues confronting us.” I’m trying to figure out where the “kill the white man” subtext is that I’m apparently missing there.

“But Obama’s reaction to the March gets more shocking,” Hannity intones. “He continues, ‘But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done. Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We’ve got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We’ve got communities to build.’” You hear that, Sean? He’s coming for your daughter. You’ve spent enough time reading about what goes on in the ‘hood–you know what “nuts-and-bolts” means.

He buffered the clips with some of the least-offensive public comments Louis Farrakhan has ever made. “It is curious how the Illinois Senator will not speak about his attendance at the March. This raises the question: Just how much do we really know about Senator Barack Obama.”

I had to watch it a second time to figure out what made the whole episode and Obama’s reflection upon it so shocking and offensive, and I realized it was because it relied on black-and-white and slow-motion footage. You could take black-and-white and slow-motion footage of me buying eggs at Safeway and sell me as an al-Qaeda sympathizer.

I TiVo’d two episodes of Hannity’s America. One of them was supposed to beHannity and Colmes but I suppose there’s no difference, since they’re both Sean Hannity’s shows and Colmes is just the guy in the liberal chair who gets to speak occasionally as long as he knows his place and doesn’t press an issue that Sean can’t swat down like a slow dragonfly.

I remembered an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when someone spoke of a relative who died on 9/11. It turned out that he had a heart attack on 9/11, even though he was nowhere near New York, Washington, or Shanksville. Hannity has been beating the drum about former Weatherman William Ayers bragging on 9/11 about setting bombs and wishing he’d set more of them. Wow. That’s some pretty incendiary stuff. We’re getting into Ward Churchill territory here; maybe even worse.

Well, it turns out that Ayers was discussing a recently released book about his life. He indeed said he didn’t regret setting bombs, though he never killed anyone, even though he’s being derided as a murderer. When he said “I feel we didn’t do enough,” the context was “…to stop the war.” And the article just happened to appear on 9/11–and was on newsstands and open in coffee shops when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. It was what I believe is referred to as “a coincidence.”

Clinton ball-washer Lanny Davis was front-and-center on the second episode deriding William Ayers as “a murderer” (he never murdered anyone. Seriously.), and stirring up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright hokum again. Speaking respectively on each issue, Hannity reiterated that Ayers had made his comments on 9/11 and concurred that Obama still had “serious questions” to answer about his association with the America-hating Reverend Wright.

I made it another five minutes before I realized that I was watching the same episode over again. Or I wasn’t. Or I was. I never could tell.

In any case, that was as much as I could do. I don’t make a very good white male, I think. Maybe I’m not rich or angry enough.

But I know one thing: Mitts off, Sean. I want my America back.