God, Geese, And Ganders

After a barrage of criticism, Michigan's Democratic former governor tweeted uncle. She said she'd been kidding and apologized, and appropriately so. Any serious effort to associate God's intentionality with a potentially deadly natural disaster would have been poor theology and in poor taste.

But when conservative legal authority John Eastman made the same kind of comment after an earthquake at the Nixon library in June, quipping to thunderous applause that God agreed with his opposition to gay marriage, there wasn't a peep from Sean Hannity. Go figure.

Sean's Still Putting On Ayers

They Focus-Grouped That. Looks Too Weird.

Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan on the Ash Wednesday GOP debate:

Neither of the Catholics has ash on their forehead.

Remind me to tell you about the time I imposed ashes on Sean Hannity.

Moderately Overlooked

As historians such as Rick Perlstein and Sam Tanenhaus mull the rightward progression of the GOP and conservatism from the age of Nixon to the age of Beck and Hannity, historian Maarja Krusten starts with her mother, a Nixon fan right through Watergate's bitter end, especially because of his foreign policy. Today, she doesn't watch Fox News, and she reasons that you can't balance the budget without more revenue. Her daughter concludes:

Nixon was a moderate and a pragmatist. He was not a conservative. Nor were all his supporters. Did some Nixon voters later vote for Reagan and become Fox News fans? Absolutely. Yet there also were people such as my Mom. There’s a lot in the mix. As with all issues Nixonian, working through the motives and objectives requires discernment.

Among other things, one discerns that moderates are dissed, devalued, and demoted. We don't have a cable station. Few if any Republicans would dare utter the word "moderate" without swearing or spitting. At first blush, we indeed appear to be a dwindling tribe. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates has fallen from 43% to 35% since 1992. During the same period, self-identified conservatives increased from 36% to 40%, while the liberals edged up from 17% to 21%. That means we've lost 4% each on both ends of the spectrum, a symptom, Gallup says, of our increasingly polarized politics.

But those numbers, while great news for Fox News' and MSNBC's ratings, aren't so great for the GOP's general election chances in 2012. Conservatives are prone to saying that moderates are really liberals. Spend three minutes on FreeRepublic, and you'll get the picture. Stipulating their point for the purposes of argument, that makes the U.S. electorate 56% (liberals plus moderates) to 40% conservatives. Nixon's oft-quoted dictum was that Republican candidates always had to scurry to the center to contend in general elections. This year, primary-season contenders will have had to spend so much time in birtherland and Obama-ignored-Easterland that reclaiming a sufficient share of the center back from the president may be impossible.

Five Presidents and Henry

In his next book, Bob Woodward will probably tell us everything we need to know about the deliberations leading to the U.S. intervention in Libya that President Obama announced this morning. I have no insider sources. I do get the feeling that he's been dancing in the corner since the Arab revolution became a global story in January and that he decided this week that Muammar Qaddafi had finally rung the bell.

I'm sure it's not that he's been itching to go to war. No president in his right mind has such impulses. But unlike the risings in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya offers the opportunity for what may seem to Obama to be a relatively low-risk move in a region where the U.S. has profound interests and therefore historic obligations.

I actually heard five presidents during his forceful if awkwardly written statement this morning. George H.W. Bush must admire Obama's stress on acting as the leading member of a broad coalition and on the basis of the UN Security Council's authorization. One can imagine the intense diplomacy -- conducted while Sean Hannity joked that Obama was wasting his time playing golf and filling out his brackets -- by which Russia and China were persuaded to abstain rather than exercise their vetoes.

Obama echoed Bush 43's freedom agenda when he said he feared "the democratic values we stand for would be overrun" unless Qaddafi was stopped. Where and when our values have ever stood tall in Libya, Obama didn't say.

His stress on protecting civilians, which defined the limited scope of intervention, also made me think of Bill Clinton's regret that he didn't try to stop the Rwandan genocide.

Then there was Obama's own doctrine, putting his action in the larger context of the year's unprecedented uprisings against authoritarian Arab regimes. After two months in which the U.S. stood by while historic events unfolded, we've finally got a chance to throw our weight behind the good guys (whoever they are). As for outcomes, Obama said, they're "the right and responsibility" of Arabs, not us.

The weakest part of Obama's statement was its claim that Qaddafi threatens "global peace and security." He doesn't. Some talking heads said they heard no reference from Obama to U.S.-driven regime change, but I did, when he spoke of holding Qaddafi's regime "accountable" for its brutality.

That's the kind of language Henry Kissinger (and maybe Richard Nixon) might've suggested leaving out. In a phoner with Fox News' Megyn Kelly a half-hour before Obama spoke, Kissinger warned against trying to bring down Qaddafi. "If you engage in regime change," Kissinger said, "you then assume some responsibility for the successor regime and how to bring it about." Obama promised to keep U.S. troops out. But one thing that doesn't change, no matter the president, is the law of unintended consequences during military interventions, especially when the dynamics and personalities are as murky as in tribal Libya. Good first round for Obama against the ruthless and wily veteran of the north African desert. Eleven to go.

A Presidents Day Epiphany

Tonight Fox News' Sean Hannity used the bludgeon of his imaginary Ronald Reagan (the one who didn't enact $400 billion a year in tax increases) to try to get Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) to attack Barack Obama on fiscal policy and stick up for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to limit public employees' collective bargaining rights. Brown said that he'd prefer to work with Obama than attack him and that Wisconsin's policies were Wisconsin's business.

While Hannity's contempt for Brown was palpable, the senator kept his cool -- which got me wondering whether Brown might have what it takes to sit at the poker table.

Read historian Maarja Krusten's thoughts on the virtue of keeping our cool here.

Who Was So Soft On Abortion, Taxes, Gun Control, Torture, Military Intervention, And Arms Control That Sean Hannity Would Have Laughed In His Face?

40.

Living In Their Own Private Iowa

After a major Bill O'Reilly interview, such as yesterday's with Barack Obama, Fox News usually spends a considerable amount of time analyzing how Bill did, what an expert thought of Bill's body language, how about Bill for keeping his cool or getting under the guy's skin, what was Bill's best question, that kind of thing.

This evening the excitement washed over into Sean Hannity's hour, when producers assembled a focus group in Des Moines for a blow-by-blow analysis of Bill's triumph that was barreling right along until it developed that nearly half said they thought the president was a Muslim. This was startling enough that even Hannity felt he had to admit that Obama's a Christian, albeit the radical, Jeremiah Wright kind.

Is the Des Moines effect a manifestation of Sam Tanenhaus's vitally important insight -- evangelical Christians saying that the mainline variety (such as Obama, baptized in the United Church of Christ) aren't really Christians at all and therefore as good as Muslims? Or are they just conspiracy hounds? Either way, their candid admission makes me wonder how much voter delusion Republican candidates will have to indulge or embrace during the 2012 primaries, and after doing so, how they can possibly get elected.

Rogue's Reading

On the Sean Hannity program tonight (a repeat from Wednesday), Sarah Palin, who twice said Iraq when she meant to say Iran, finally revealed what she reads: Newsmax.com (a conservative news compiler, which happily notes the endorsement here), the Wall Street Journal, and the Wasilla Frontiersman, plus other unspecified internet sources. Would it have killed her to have said New York Times? Perhaps. Ross Douthat reflects here on whether a conservative loses ground by sounding too smart.

Please

Drawing a strained (that is really not the word) comparison between radio talk show hosts and murderous antislavery agitator John Brown, Steve Lubet suggests we're "at the brink of civil war" over health care. It's a perfect setup for reading an exchange of comments here about the nature and roots of conservative anger. Obviously, it goes both ways. Sean Hannity is a fear-monger, yes; but in this piece, so is Steve Lubet. He just has footnotes.

Mass Appeal

Entertaining debate tonight between Fox's Sean Hannity and director Michael Moore. We don't see this often enough: Two evenly matched, articulate zealots going at it hammer and tong for half an hour and doing so respectfully and with good humor and even flashes of grudging affection.

Reviewing the clash, the "Huffington Post" demonstrates its own profound unfamiliarity with liturgical worship by speculating that Hannity was lying just because he said that he went to mass Saturday night and yet couldn't remember what the sermon was about. It would've been a little bizarre if he had.

When Hannity visited the Nixon Library several years ago on Ash Wednesday to launch a book, he was concerned enough about not getting to church that he asked an Episcopalian, namely me, to conduct a brief service for him and his staff. I had to rush over to the parish I was then serving to get some ashes and actually talked myself out of a speeding ticket by saying I had to impose them on Sean Hannity.

"You're Here With Your TWO-Year-Old"

This CNN segment about an anti-tax "tea party" demonstration in Chicago is getting a lot of attention. It would have been better if the reporter had just covered the story instead of dedicating herself to the enlightenment of those present. Of course over at Fox News, Sean Hannity isn't exactly a good listener, either, so who can blame CNN for lapsing into overt advocacy?

Obama Had To Shoot Them, Hannity Says

Untethered from the long suffering Alan Colmes, his erstwhile liberal conversation partner, Sean Hannity is on the verge of becoming a parody of himself. If President Obama cured cancer and won the Masters, Hannity would criticize him for neglecting Alzheimer's Disease and excelling at a sport invented in a foreign country. The American pastime not good enough for you, Mr. President?

Obama deserved praise for skillfully navigating the relatively minor but potentially tragic hostage crisis off the Somali coast. If the situation had gone south, Hannity would've been all over him like a cheap suit. Instead, grasping for any means of depriving Obama of credit for a win, Hannity misconstrued this reporting by "Politico":

Obama's involvement in the decision to authorize lethal force was legally required, officials said, because it was a hostage situation, not combat, and unrelated to the already authorized U.S. effort against Al Qaeda and other terror groups, officials said.

On his new all-Sean-all-the-time show tonight, Hannity was so desperate to bring Obama down a peg that he implied to listeners that the President was legally required to authorize the Navy snipers to act. Instead, the "Politico" passage means that Obama's personal involvement was necessary, whereas it wouldn't have been in a military operation. In other words, "Politico"'s reporting makes Obama look stronger for ordering the use of lethal force.

It was disappointing that Hannity actually seemed to want to mislead his viewers. His guest, media critic Bernard Goldberg, a persistent Obama critic, said as much, to Hannity's frustration. Goldberg said that he didn't want to behave the way some of President Bush's liberal critics did when they refused to give him credit for doing anything right. Sorry, Bernie, but Hannity intends to behave exactly that way.

San Clemente Jane

When a smirking Sean Hannity plugged Jane Fonda's new blog tonight, it occurred to me that he assumed that Fox viewers would flood it with negative comments thanks to residual anger over her support for communist North Vietnam and Viet Cong. If so, that's pretty adolescent, Sean.

It's an interesting, revealing site. I'm starstruck enough to be impressed by a movie star (or musician) offering personal observations and details in real time, especially when they type them out themselves. Most of Fonda's current entries concern rehearsals for her new Broadway play, "33 Variations."

In one entry, she acknowledges people's continued fascination with her "Hanoi Jane" days:

I intend to answer these questions. I would like nothing better than to put these lies and myths to rest once and for all. I will try to do this as soon as possible.

Her blog even includes a local angle: A photo showing her demonstrating outside the Western White House in April 1973 as South Vietnam's President Thieu paid a visit to President Nixon. Fonda (center left, carrying a sign) and her colleagues were arguing (incorrectly) that the Viet Cong were the legitimate government of South Vietnam.

What Do They Mean, The Right's Irrelevant?

Pat Boone was just on Sean Hannity's show, saying our problems would be solved by a return to the gold standard.