For instance, Hannity has been defending General Motors, a long-time sponsor. The company is truly in dire straits with sales plunging alongside the economy and available credit. But GM management refuses to make more fuel-efficient cars in order to compete. Hannity, an unabashed Escalade driver, fails to cite stats that show fuel efficiency and profitability have dovetailed for market leading automakers. Hannity continues to assert that GM makes the best cars in the world and is failing because of crushing external government regulation, leaving out the important counter-argument that Toyota and Honda adhere to the same domestic regulations in assembling 85% of their fleets here in the U.S.
Hannity is a major cheerleader for domestic drilling, claiming the short-term relief of our energy problem lie in immediate exploration and extraction of offshore oil, but lies by omission in not telling you the major commercial and environmental studies see no significant relief in domestic drilling unless the U.S. first reduces its oil-guzzling ways.
During the closing weeks of the election, Hannity implied many times that the crash of the financial markets resulted from Obama's work as a Chicago community organizer who helped steer unqualified minorities into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-held mortgages. He also magnified the role of an Obama advisor with ties to the firms, but neglected the even more damning news item that McCain's chief strategist, Campaign Director Rick Davis was on Fannie/Freddie's payroll during most of the election.
In short, Hannity's greatest ethical failure is intellectual cowardice. Instead of debating today's most pressing issues against the most qualified opponents, he censors them, refusing to show how his logic and theories fare in the face of all relevant facts and the "rest of the story". This in turn, makes us question his faith in his own arguments.
The biggest, most glaring example of this is the collapse of every major financial institution on Wall Street just in the last few months. Hannity has theorized for years that free market deregulation is key to prosperity in America, cutting taxes and reducing government spending, monitoring and interference to allow businesses to grow, innovate and create jobs. This is exactly what the Bush administration enacted, relaxing rules for reporting or verifying the viability of speculative financial instruments.
The result? Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, AIG and others oversold credit default swap policies for trillions more then could be covered. The risky sub-prime mortgages, hidden within much larger mortgage-backed securities triggered mammoth implosion of the unregulated CDS markets and when called, busted the firms for trillions. This is a clear-cut case in which government deregulation led to an urgent and widespread economic crisis which will now affect all Americans and perhaps everyone in the civilized world.
Hannity continues unrepentant however, claiming that Reagan's trickle-down economics are still what we need. This is after the middle class has given Bush's rich-skewed tax cuts every chance to work, but as a result has seen their quality of life go downhill. This is after Bush allowed rampant government spending with ballooning annual and federal deficits. This is after the preventable collapse of Wall Street. This is after the majority of Americans chose Obama's economic proposals to spread the tax cuts more widely across the middle-class.
Hannity was called out on Veteran's Day by a listener named Lisa from Georgia who tried to explain to him that the people had spoken and his negativity is palpable. Hannity simply couldn't relate to the woman because he has made $100 million by sticking to his script, putting him in the top one-tenth of 1% of taxpayers who personally reap hundreds of thousands extra every year under Bush's tax cuts.
This is why Hannity is fighting hard to continue Bush's economic and military policies - he has such a large personal financial stake in trickle-down and receives such acclaim and rewards from military-industrial profiteers, he has become an opponent of the average American taxpayers who have clearly exercised their rights and voted out the party who has failed economically yet wants a trickle-down do-over.
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