The Patriot Post® · In Defense of Sean Hannity

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/49439-in-defense-of-sean-hannity-2017-06-10

I don’t watch Sean Hannity very often. Mainly, that’s because I currently watch Bret Baier and Tucker Carlson, and I find that with the repetition of the news and some of the same guests, two hours of Fox is as much as I can take in a single day.

But if I quit watching Baier or Tucker, as I often find myself considering, I doubt if my option would be Hannity. I don’t dislike him personally, but I prefer not spending time with a cheerleader. I like Donald Trump, but I don’t think it’s treasonous to recognize that the man is not without faults.

However, I understand that the vile Never-Trumpers are targeting Mr. Hannity or, more specifically, his sponsors, in a move to freeze him out of his job. If I’m against the government controlling the media, and I am, I am unlikely to sit by and allow a bunch of thuggish cretins decide who will be allowed to speak and who should be silenced.

The only way I can see to fight back is by targeting the darlings of the Left. Keep in mind that Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert and even “Saturday Night Live” are all dependent on the dollars supplied by their sponsors. Those sponsors are no more immune to pressure from the Right than the others are to pressure from the Left. And perhaps once these liberal icons begin to feel the heat, they’ll finally be moved to call off their attack dogs.

Understand, I personally dislike boycotts, especially those that aren’t spontaneously generated, as when a company is found to have put out a shoddy, unsafe, product. If you have an argument to make against Hannity, fine, go on his show and debate him. But when a boycott is mounted and funded by someone like George Soros, it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1st Amendment, and I detest that even more than I do boycotts.

Frankly, I have never understood why conservatives sit by and let liberals intimidate cities and states over everything from minimum wages to transgender bathrooms, but never retaliate by mounting boycotts of their own by targeting places like California, New York and Illinois. It’s not as if those states and their business interests don’t count on the dollars flooding in from tourists and conventions.

As every squirt on every playground in America ultimately learns, if you don’t learn to fight back, the bullies are going to keep taking away your lunch money. Or your favorite conservative talk show hosts. And as every firefighter will tell you, it is often necessary to start one’s own fires in order to put out forest fires.

As a wise man once said, “Extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”


I don’t know what President Trump will bring away with him from his five-stop tour, but I hope it will be a realistic view of the Middle East, and that he will understand that it is not fair and balanced to treat Israel and The Palestinian Authority as moral equals.

I have been embarrassed by a series of American presidents who either assumed a neutral position between the two entities, or, in Obama’s case, came down on the side of those who celebrate suicide bombers.

It was bad enough when Bill Clinton appeared to take Yasser Arafat’s lies about seeking peace with the Jews seriously, while ignoring the fact that he was voicing the opposite sentiments in Arabic.

As Sander Gerber and Douglas Feith report in a Commentary article titled “The Department of Pay-for-Slay,” which blows the cover off our Arab/Muslim-leaning State Department: “Legalism is a trait common among authoritarians. Nondemocratic societies lack rule of law, but they generally don’t lack laws.”

That was true of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and it’s equally true of the Palestinian Authority, where Mahmud Abbas was elected to a 4-year presidential term in 2005, and is now in the 12th year of that term.

So it is that under the terms of the “Amended Prisoner’s Law No. 19,” anyone imprisoned by Israel for terrorist acts will be guaranteed “a dignified life” upon release, and that among those dignities are a state-subsidized education at government schools; free health insurance; and tuition fees for all professional training programs.

In addition, the P.A. provides bonuses as large as $25,000 to the parents of suicide bombers. Is it any wonder that Palestinians favor having very large families?

Worst of all, it is the American taxpayer who provides the vermin with the annual $140 million it takes to finance the program.

There is something pathetic about the same country that sees itself leading the fight against worldwide terrorism funneling $100 billion to Iran last year and that continues sending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to the Palestinians year after year.

We have a lot of nerve condemning Iran as the number one state sponsor of terrorism. Perhaps they are, but we definitely run a close second.


Speaking of renegade regimes, it appears that Barack Obama used the NSA to spy on millions of Americans. It has only recently come out that the FISA Court rebuked the administration countless times for ignoring the 4th Amendment’s protection against unwarranted searches and seizures.

It probably shouldn’t come as too big a surprise, considering the criminal and malicious use Obama made of the IRS. But it certainly seems as if Donald Trump’s claims of being surveilled during the campaign aren’t quite as paranoiac as portrayed by the Democrats and the media, as if the two aren’t one and the same.

It is also worth noting that the three major broadcast networks, along with the NY Times and the Washington Post, all chose to ignore the story, choosing, instead, to continue beating the broken drum about Trump’s alleged bromance with Putin.


No sooner do I find myself thinking that no country can be as obtuse as we are when it comes to recognizing the danger of Islam than I learn, in the wake of the Manchester massacre, that there are 3,500 Muslims in Britain who are seriously regarded as potential threats, and that as many as a thousand British-born Muslims have returned home from Syria, where they fought alongside ISIS.

But, thus far, action of any kind has only been taken against 40 of them. Even if you draw the line at deporting those who insist that Sharia Law should supersede secular English law, what sort of loons allow those who have allied themselves with the barbarians in the Middle East to simply pick up their former lives as if they’ve been serving abroad with the British military?

Is place of birth supposed to trump all other matters? What does it take for the Brits to confiscate passports and give villains the boot? You would think that a people who knew how to kick the European Union in the rump would know how to deal with people who think murdering England’s little girls is a nifty idea.

As Mark Steyn said: “The crime is treason. But in England, you are more likely to be censured and even arrested for blaming Muslims for committing atrocities than if you’re an English Muslim who has taken time off to join those beheading human beings and then returning to Britain.”

Apparently, Belgium has an even bigger headache on its hands. In a country of just 11 million, they have 38,000 Muslims who are suspected jihadists. If there were a bucket list competition for cities likely to suffer the next Manchester-like attack, my money would be on Brussels.

It does make me wonder what it will take to make the West wake up. Had the child of a member of Parliament or one of the royals been among the victims at the Manchester concert, would that have been enough? After all, it used to be said that a conservative was a liberal who had just been mugged.

Will it take a senator’s child being bombed or trampled at a concert in Washington, D.C., to wake our politicians up to the fact that innocent American lives count for more than whether Muslims get their feelings hurt. If the FBI is devoting more time to discovering whether Donald Trump ever split a blini with the Russian ambassador than they are to monitoring mosques, they’re wasting their time and our money.