Sean Hannity's latest book, Deliver Us From Evil, is even better than his last. It hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list the week it came out and stayed there for at least five weeks. This explains the huge cover story on Hannity in the latest New York Times magazine, as well as that big NPR profile on him-wait, neither of those happened. Indeed, not a single major mainstream newspaper has reviewed it.
That's unless you include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which briefly mentioned Hannity's book in order to say that it compared unfavorably with another book and to call Hannity an "angry conservative" (redundant in liberal-speak).
The reviewer, Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch "Senior Writer," complained that Hannity's book "reads like a long, long transcript of his television and radio shows." Inasmuch as Hannity's TV show is the second-most-watched show on cable news and his radio show is the No. 2 radio show in America, only a liberal would consider that an insult. Levins is hoping for a book that would read more like a transcript of Al Franken's listener-free show on Airhead America.
Hannity's book is chock-full of something that frequently makes liberals uncomfortable-history. He begins by reciting historic evils such as the Holocaust and the 9-11 terrorist attacks and contrasts those with everyday stories of evil culled from the newspapers: A suicidal woman is poised to jump from a bridge in Seattle and, after a few hours, someone from the crowd below yells out, "Jump, b--, jump!" The woman jumps.
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 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.
The leaders of the modern Democratic Party, Hannity says, have made excuses for evil for so long that they cannot recognize evil anymore. The closest thing to it in their vocabulary would be "someone who wears fur." And of course, they recognize evil in the person of "George W. Bush," whom they see as the very essence of evil. In fact, Bush may be the only force of evil in the world liberals haven't wanted to appease.
Deliver Us From Evil runs through an enormous amount of history that's fun to hear again. Hannity quotes Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, a few years before German warplanes began ravaging Britain, promising the British "peace in our time" and advising them, "Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." (This was just after Chamberlain's "national malaise" speech, if memory serves.)
Chamberlain's proud boast that he had removed "those suspicions and those animosities that have so long poisoned the air" sounds eerily like today's Democrats so eager for the rest of the world to love us. Sen. John Kerry has condemned Bush's "belligerent and myopic unilateralism," and called for a "progressive internationalism." To reprise an old joke from the Cold War, if Democrats aren't on al Qaeda's payroll, they're being gypped.
And speaking of old jokes from the Cold War, Hannity turns to Jimmy Carter next. Carter could see evil in the world; he just mistook it for a rapidly moving bunny rabbit. Reacting to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Carter exclaimed on ABC News: "This action of the Soviets made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office."
Hannity then runs through a few other incidents that might have caught the president's attention-Stalin's and Mao's mass murders, genocide in Cambodia, the Berlin Wall, Soviet tanks crushing uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the personal testimony of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-before concluding: "The evil of communism was no secret." Well, yes, but Carter was distracted by that rabbit.
In his defense, there has not been a documented rabbit attack on a U.S. citizen since Carter left office.
And of course there was Carter's masterful handling of the crisis in Iran, leading America to betray our ally, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. Even as Carter was backstabbing this loyal U.S. ally, the Shah was assuring those around him, "The United States has always been our friend, and it won't let me down now." Sadly, there was no one to warn him: "Run for your life! A Democrat is in the White House!"
In addition to covering Carter's accomplishments in Iran, which taught Islamicists that Westerners can be made to grovel before terrorism, Hannity reviews what Democrats in Congress have done about brewing trouble in the Middle East over the last 20 years: i.e., nothing.
After Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, torturing men and raping women, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) took to the floor of the House to say, "I hope the point will be made that we take very seriously the environmental consequences of our actions." Rep. Dick Gephardt said: "History shows that even brutal dictators have been toppled and defeated by sanctions." And so it was again after 9-11. Sixteen months after the attack, John Kerry gave a speech saying, "Mr. President, do not rush to war."
According to the latest polls there's at least a fair chance that an amoral appeaser and foreign suck-up like John Kerry could be our next president. Now everyone go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
