SEAN HANNITY OMITS KEY DETAILS OF PAST JOB DISMISSAL – AND ACLU ASSISTANCE!

One of the reasons why President Obama was elected in the first place is because people were trying to fight those liberals and Democrats that refuse to put up a fight – unless of course other liberals and Democrats fight them. There is no better example of that then how they repeatedly allow an absolute fifth-rate propagandist like Sean Hannity to have a commanding voice on the political stage. A simple search on the internet – or just simply cracking open a damned book – destroys any argument he makes. It seems the only ones that want to beat him back are those who have blogs, MSNBC notwitstanding. It is the blogs, both liberal and conservative oddly enough, that has called him out for associating with white supremacists like Hal Turner and Jerome Corsi, called him out for lies like when he knowing attributed a quote by Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Barack Obama, called him out for omissions like when he called those protesting military funerals as the anti-war left when the article he read from identified the persons as the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, and his double standards which are too numerous to mention. One of the best blogs in this regard is Newshounds.us, and their recent salvo against Hannity has to do with how he keeps mentioning how he got his start on radio at the University of California but didn’t last too long there before they ran him out of town or whatever. Thing is, he likes to leave out why, and that dredges up his past as a huge homophobic voice on the radio, so much so that when he was broadcasting on Atlanta’s WGST-AM, they promoted him as “making a proud name for himself by insulting lesbians.” Whenever Hannity and other conservative loudmouths get caught out there like this, they have one easy way out that works without fail: They simply ignore the charge. In the case of Hannity, if you call him out on his radio or television programs you will most likely not be seen or heard on them again. Hannity also has the added phenomenom of whenever a charge on him is sticking, people close to him run to his defense and he never has to himself. Recall that when Hannity on his show said he would be willing to be waterboarded, saying it wasn’t torture, and Keith Olbermann on Countdown repeatedly challenged him on that, it was Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View who was the first and probably only response, saying Olbermann wasn’t invited into the conversation Hannity had on his show – to which Olbermann wondered allowed where Hasselbeck’s invite was. Think about all of this as you read this article. Because you might be the next person Hannity decides to attack – and someone close to you might be giving him license to do so.

Newshounds.us

Earlier this week (September 24th) college dropout Sean Hannity interviewed Stephen Crowder in a segment which purported to show that “elite” librul University of California, Berkeley students don’t know their American history. Hannity and Crowder chuckled over Crowder’s video in which he posed questions to random Berkeley students. Breitbart pal Stephen Crowder is a conservative “comic” who says that the ACLU is anti Christian and who recently did a sting video on a Canadian health clinic to prove that Canadian healthcare is in disarray. His Hannity video was amusing and the conversation was non political except for Hannity’s dismissal of the New Deal. (I was left wondering what the responses would have been at some bible believing college; but I digress.) One thing that Hannity said, at the end of the piece, was quite interesting as what wasn’t said was important. After Hannity’s New Deal comment, Crowder joked “get your facts straight. Go to Berkeley.” Hannity replied, “I gotta go to Berkely. You know I started…They ran me out of town at one of the UC campuses when I started my radio career. They didn’t like me out there. It was a pretty amazing experience.” Yeah, Sean, they “ran you out of town” because of your big, fat homophobic mouth – not that your homophobic audience would care; but it is germane to your having been “run out of town” – which really wasn’t the case. But your audience might get upset because of which reviled group defended you.

Sean Hannity did start his radio career, in 1989, at a college station at UC Santa Barbara. His show was cancelled after less than a year because his station managers were not happy about some very homophobic remarks made by this “Great American.” Twice on his radio show, Hannity featured the book “The AIDS Coverup, the Real and Alarming Facts About Aids” by Gene Antonio. Antonio was a rabid Christian right winger who claimed that AIDS could be spread by sneezes, coughs, and mosquito bites. His belief that the “truth” about AIDS was being suppressed by the government and media in the service of the “homosexual movement” would certainly make him a hero for today’s Christian right, Doug Giles, and Fox Nation. Hannity spoke, by phone, with Antonio (as he later did with white supremacist “Hal, from Bergen, Turner.”) during these segments in which Hannity and Antonio “reportedly slurred gay men.” The UC Newspaper reported that Hannity said “Anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. “It’s very dangerous if we start accepting lower and lower forms of behavior as the normal” to which Antonio responded by calling gay men “a subculture of people engaged in deviant, twisted acts.” When a lesbian, who had a child through artifical insemination, called to challenge Dumb and Dumber, Antonio described her child as “a turkey baster baby.” Hannity added “I feel sorry for your child.”

But the plot thickens. Hannity fought his dismissal with the help of the Santa Barbara ACLU – the group that every Christian right winger loves to hate. “The civil liberties group wrote letters on Hannity’s behalf, arguing that the state school was breaching his free speech. When KCSB relented, offering him his show back, Hannity held out for more airtime, walking away from the station when he didn’t get it.”

Comment: As a Catholic, Hannity should remember his Catechism which discusses “sins of omission and commission.” While whether he commited a sin of omission is debatable, what is clear is that Sean Hannity’s short summary of his experience in California was, in addition to lacking key details, a misrepresentation (lie?) of what really happened. While subjectively, he might view this experience as having been “run out of town,” objectively, he was fired for making homophobic remarks. There was a reason why the UC folks didn’t like Sean Hannity – and who could blame them! But he was defended by a group that he and his right wing cronies despise. And if he was offered his job back, how was he “run out of town?” And now, because we have First Amendment rights, which are defended by the ACLU, Hannity has a nightly national tee vee platform for his hatred of his fellow Americans who don’t agree with his rabid white, Christian world view. But the truth is out there and it’s just a teensy bit different from how Hannity describes it. Hannity deals only with black and white (sometimes literally) and the nuances in between could tarnish the shining patriotic armor o
f this “great American.”

Gotta love those “family values!”