Tales from the Memory Hole III: O'Reilly & Hannity

It's not as important to review the statements made by Fox News commentators Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity because their duplicity has already been well-documented and they have never been serious thinkers, but just mouthpieces for George Bush. However, for the sake of completeness, I will list some of their reasons for supporting the Iraqi war. There isn't much substance to either of these two "journalists," so I'll mostly let them speak for themselves.

Bill O'Reilly supported the war in Iraq for the standard reasons: weapons of mass destruction. Let's look at a few of his quotes:

"If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein, and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and will not trust the Bush Administration again."

"If [Hussein] has 8,500 liters of anthrax that he's not going to give up, even though the United Nations demanded that he do that, we are doing the right thing. If he doesn't have any weapons, then we are doing the wrong thing."

This is pretty clear, right? If Saddam's regime possesses WMD then we are doing the right thing by invading, and if not, the wrong thing. Note that Mr. O'Reilly doesn't argue that we should invade Iraq to liberate its people from Saddam's regime, or to bring them the fruits of western democracy. The justification for the war rested solely on the belief that Iraq's WMD threatened the United States. So after it turned out that Iraq didn't have any WMD, did Mr. "No-Spin Zone" O'Reilly change his tune? Here's what he had to say in one of his nightly talking points:

Our analysis has been clear and to the point - the CIA blew it.

But then I go on Good Morning America (2/11/04), and say I'm sorry my analysis on WMD's before the war was wrong, and I'm angry about the CIA mistake. I mean, any honest commentator would say that.

But the left-wing press uses my admission as some kind of liberal policy vindication - and uses my words to hammer President Bush.

That's dishonest.

I still believe removing Saddam was the right thing to do - and that history will prove it.

As we can see, Mr O'Reilly is not above doing a little "spinning" of his own. He said he would never trust the Bush Administration again if WMD were not found, but in this memo he blames the CIA. He also says that removing Saddam Hussein was still the right thing to do. But why? Mr. O'Reilly said that removing Saddam Hussein would not be the right thing if he wasn't producing or concealing anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction. So on what basis was the Iraqi war the "right thing to do?" Mr. O'Reilly never bothers to tell us. Bill O'Reilly is not an independent journalist, not objective, and not fair, but just a partisan shill for the president, a true Bush Cultist.

If you had to grant an award to the world's number one Bush Cultist, that honor would go to Mr. Sean Hannity, author, talk radio host, and popular conservative personality. Of course calling Mr. Hannity a "conservative" is really a stretch, because he's nothing more than a true blue, dyed in the wool shill for George Bush and the errant war in Iraq. Hannity has no philosophy, no worldview, no sense of right and wrong, no belief in truth or falsehood outside the partisan interests of George Bush. Bush is his center, the unshakable axis around which his entire live revolves.

But before we continue to level any further accusations at Mr. Hannity, we should pause for a moment and ask a simple question: what is a conservative foreign policy? In 1999 when the Clinton Administration intervened in Kosovo, Mr Hannity asked a few pointed questions that revealed his foreign policy perspective:

"And then we go back to Henry Kissinger's test, which is number one, is there a vital U.S. national interest? And do we have a plan to disengage? What's the exit strategy? I don't see that we've met that test either. And why does it have to happen this second, this hour? Why don't we have a national debate first?"

Mr Hannity raises a few key objections to our intervention in Kosovo: there is no vital national interest, and there is no exit strategy. These are very pertinent questions to raise because conservatives don't believe we should go to war -- even a war as inconsequential as Kosovo -- unless it is in our national security to do so and unless we have an exit strategy. Conservatism always counsels prudence. Mr Hannity continues:

"But you know what? There's a lot of massacres going on in the world. As you know, 37,000 Kurds in Turkey, over a million people in Sudan. We have hundreds of thousands in Rwanda and Burundi. I mean, where do we stop?"

Here Mr. Hannity raises another objection: we should not intervene just for humanitarian reasons. There must be a national security interest at stake. These opinions are not controversial or surprising, but are just the natural conclusions one draws from conservative principles. However, all this changes when a Republican is in White House.

In an heated exchange with Congressman Ron Paul after the May 15th debate, Hannity was almost apoplectic that Ron Paul didn't support such indiscriminate use of our military forces. Here is part of the exchange:

HANNITY: Are you saying then that the world has no moral obligation, like in the first Gulf War, when an innocent country's being pilaged, and people are being raped and murdered and slaughtered, or in the case of Saddam, he's gassing his own people, are you suggesting we have no moral obligation there? Do you stand by and let that immorality happen?

HANNITY: We got it, Ron, you would stand by and do that, I would not.

Hannity is now arguing that the United States military has a moral duty to engage in humanitarian crusades, which is in direct contradiction to his statements on Kosovo. Why the change? That's easy. Sean Hannity is a Bush Cultist and simply supports the war in Iraq because Bush supports the war in Iraq. Now Hannity might make a few arguments for why we should be in Iraq, but ultimately it's all about defending the partisan interests of the president at the expense of all else.