It truly is fascinating what Sean Hannity is trying to pull off this weekend. In order to convince the public that the military approves of Bush's Iraq policy, Hannity is asking for soldiers in Iraq to email him and give their take on the situation. There is just one catch: Hannity only wants to hear from the troops that endorse the Bush policy. He seems to think that selectively reading a few emails on television will vindicate his pre-determined view that Democrats are defeatist and anti-military.
The Fox News host is doing this story in response to a piece that will air this weekend about the more than 1,000 GI's that are petitioning Congress to end the war. Here is Sean Hannity using Friday's edition of Hannity & Colmes to promote his show on Sunday. He even had the audacity of hope to claim that Fox is fair and balanced:
The above title is how this whole debate about torture should be framed. Because GOP senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John Warner are joining Colin Powell in , putting their military experience above politics, conservative loudmouth commentators are having an extremely difficult time defending the President.
Just look at what happened last night on the Fox News show Hannity and Colmes. Normally you can always count on Mr. Hannity to tout the party line on everything. But in this case, forced to take a stand either with Republican military veterans or with a majority of the party, host Sean Hannity gave the imaginable why U.S. and international laws should not be followed:
“I find it unconscionable that we’re gonna tie the hands of interrogators.â€
What Sean Hannity is essentially saying is that interrogators and detainees are the only individuals that Bush's policy is going to affect. What he discounts is the poor international precedent that it will set, and how that new precedent will impact our soldiers in the near future. For some reason, Hannity, O'Reilly and all the other belligerent Fox News reactionaries would rather recklessly throw around conservative talking points than objectively look at the correlation between cause and effect.
Most military leaders, whether retired or currently on the Pentagon payroll, oppose President Bush's policy on torture. Will Bush eventually listen to them? Let me put it this way: did he listen to military leaders when they encouraged him to send in more troops at the start of the Iraq war? Last night (and I'm sorry that I don't have the quote), Bill O'Reilly said something along the lines that Bush is the commander-in-chief, so therefore he knows best about what the correct interrogation policy should be.
But there is another way of thinking about it. Let's say that you are having an office party, and you are told by your co-workers that they like seafood. So that week you take it upon yourself to cook the best seafood dinner imaginable. Needing advice fast, you decide to contact your favorite seafood restaurant to get tips. Given a choice, who do you speak to -- the cook whose job it is to create and test seafood dish recipes, or the president of the restaurant chain that works in an office somewhere else in town? One thing is for sure: I wouldn't want to eat any of Sean Hannity's seafood.
Experts are experts for a reason, just as military officers know more about the military than any politician. While the commander-in-chief should be the one that decides when we go to war, military officers have the best understanding about what precautions need to be in place in order to keep our soldiers safer. When given the choice of helping the interrogators or protecting our brave men and women in uniform, I would choose both. But if I had to pick only one, I would put our soldiers first. Why is President Bush not onboard with that logic? --------------------------------------------- Other sites blogging about this issue: , , , , , .
When a Republican friend of yours claims that Clinton was weak on border enforcement, maybe you should cite the following :
Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaledback 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whichsubsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. Thenumber of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrantsdropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declinedfrom $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.
In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.
Of course, do not expect Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter to admit this anytime soon.
AP writer David Bauder is drooling all over Sean Hannity in . In it, he quoted the Fox News host saying something about President Bush that most Americans would disagree with:
"Let me be straight with you — I like George Bush,"Hannity said. "I think he's a man of principle, a man of faith. I thinkhe's got a backbone of steel and he's a real, genuine, big-time leader... He's a consequential figure for his time."
A "consequential" figure? From the two philosophy classes that I have taken as a University of Washington student, I have developed this definition of consequentialism:
The belief that what makes an action good or bad depends on the outcome of the action, not whether the action was intended to be good or bad.
So in other words, in order to determine whether Bush is a consequentialist one would have to judge whether Bush thinks mostly about outcomes?
In my personal view, I don't believe he thinks in outcomes. He over-extended our military with the intent of pursuing a nation-building operation in Iraq, yet he failed to understand the consequences that it would have on our ability to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He intended to convince the public that we needed to go to war, yet he failed to comprehend the consequences of his Administration leaking sensitive intelligence in order to do so. He intended to increase the Republican money advantage, yet he failed to realize that it was wrong to associate himself with crooked people like Jack Abramoff. These are obviously just a few of many examples.
Hannity's notion that Bush is a consequentialist does not add up.
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