Truth - Al Franken [35]
As Jonathan Chait pointed out in an October 12, 2004, New Republic article, it would have been “quite a coincidence” if the Democrats had had such an “astonishing run of bad luck” to choose a string of nominees with such “dismal personal integrity.” But it was no coincidence. In fact, it was the opposite of a coincidence. It was a result of the Bush family’s love of Lee Atwater and his protégé Karl Rove.
Uh oh! Doctor’s orders: no Rove. Nurse, OxyContin, stat!
Ahhhh. So much better. A guy could get hooked on this stuff.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Flip-flopper. You’ll have to pardon me, I’m hopped up on hillbilly heroin.
No single man or woman accused John Kerry of flip-flopping more doggedly than Sean Hannity. Sean, who has a radio audience of some 8 million weekly listeners and a nightly TV audience of nearly 2 million, has a trademark technique: assemble a litany of dishonest scraps of partisan distortion on a particular topic, and employ it at every available opportunity. His Kerry flip-flop litany was a classic of the genre.
Here’s an early version of it, quoted verbatim from Fox’s March 25, 2004, Sean Hannity Show :
Here’s a guy that supported gay marriage, now against it. Here’s a guy that by my count has had six separate different unique positions on the war on Iraq. Here’s a guy that voted for the $87 billion to fund the war before he voted against it. Here’s a guy that was for the Patriot Act. Now against it. No Child Left Behind, for it, now against it. Here’s a guy that supported—was against the death penalty for terrorists who kill Americans. Now he’s for it. The only thing he seems consistent on is that, throughout the nineteen years he was in the Senate, he voted to raise taxes consistently 350 times.
What does that tell us about a man that has no core values or principles?
Now, I’m going to debunk these one by one. But let me tell you what I’ve learned about Sean Hannity. No matter how many times you debunk the man, no matter how many times his lies are exposed, he keeps on using them. He doesn’t switch to new lies, as a minimally respectable hack like a Dick Morris or a Jonah Goldberg might. He doesn’t even wink at the debunking by slipping a qualifier or two into his litany. So, I’ve come up with a new tactic. Instead of fighting his lies with truth and calling it a day, I have taken to fighting Sean Hannity’s lies with lies about Sean Hannity.
So, here now, is a debunking of Hannity’s patented, endlessly repeated “Kerry is a flip-flopper” litany, interspersed with vicious, unfounded lies about Sean Hannity himself.
HANNITY: Here’s a guy that supported gay marriage, now against it.
This is a lie. Kerry’s position has always been consistent on this. I disagree with him, but Kerry has always been against gay marriage. He is for civil unions. Hannity was taking Kerry’s vote against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and deliberately misrepresenting it as a declaration in favor of gay marriage. Here’s what Kerry said on the floor of the Senate about that vote:
I will vote against this bill, though I am not for same-sex marriage, because I believe that this debate is fundamentally ugly, and it is fundamentally political, and it is fundamentally flawed. . . . The results of this bill will not be to preserve anything, but will serve to attack a group of people out of various motives and rationales, and certainly out of a lack of understanding and a lack of tolerance, and will only serve the purposes of the political season.
On that, I totally agree with him. In fact, it was beautifully put. So, Kerry had never flip-flopped on gay marriage. Sean Hannity was lying, and he knew he was lying.
Time to hit back with a lie about Sean Hannity. Remember, what you’re about to read is not true. It’s a lie.
But here