THE TWO EXTREMES

I just got through Larissa MacFarquhar’s obsequious and fawning piece on Michael Moore in the New Yorker. What was remarkable about the piece is that it documented dozens and dozens of clear falsehoods uttered by Moore and yet was never quite able to call them exactly that. It documented astonishing hypocrisy, human cruelty, and the most grotesque slandering of the United States and Americans in general in front of foreign audiences in a time of war, and yet couldn’t even bring itself to be shocked, let alone to criticize. It treated lying as if it were a kind of aesthetic achievement, to be commented on by critics of mendacity rather than by journalists interested in getting at the truth. It’s hard not to get depressed when even the New Yorker pulls punches in this way. And then, along comes Sean Hannity, whose new book has the following obscene title: “Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism.” Why obscene? It is obscene for Hannity to purloin a sentence from the Lord’s Prayer in order to advance his partisan political views. And yes, it is also obscene to equate terrorism and despotism with liberalism. Hannity isn’t worthy to speak the word “liberalism,” a long and complicated and deeply Western political tradition that is the only reason he can actually publish a book like this and face only criticism. To place it in the same context as “terrorism” reveals that this man has no understanding of what this war is about. It’s a war in defense of liberalism, in defense of pluralism, in defense of the various peaceful Western political traditions that Islamo-fascism would snuff out in an instant. Even if he wants the word “liberalism” to describe merely a kind of decadent left-liberalism, it’s still unconscionable. Peaceful Democratic leftists, however misguided, are not terrorists. Hannity, of course, is a thug. But that shouldn’t mean we should simply ignore this kind of slur. This moral equivalence is as disgusting when it appears on the right as it is when it appears on the left. So why is the right so quiet when it is displayed by one of their own?