Hannity Suddenly Cares About Jobless Americans – Now That He Can Use Them To Club The Democrats
Reported by Ellen - March 7, 2010 -
Sean Hannity spent much of last week applauding Republican Senator Jim Bunning for obstructing an extension of unemployment insurance. But Friday (3/5/10), when Senator Harry Reid found the latest employment figures heartening, Hannity was suddenly transformed into a vision of concern for the unemployed. With video.
“How high does unemployment have to rise to capture (the Democrats’) attention?” Hannity asked, after accusing Democrats of ignoring joblessness for the sake of passing health care reform. The same question might be asked of him, as I can’t remember a single segment on Hannity focused on that issue that wasn't primarily aimed at attacking Democrats and/or promoting Republicans. This segment was no different. Hannity just threw a few bones of sympathy to the unemployed as window dressing.
Like Glenn Beck before him, Hannity played a deceitfully edited clip of Senator Harry Reid (whom regular guy and multi-millionaire Hannity calls “Prince Harry”) saying that it was “good news” only 36,000 people lost their jobs. Somehow Hannity “forgot” the rest of the clip in which Reid said, “Unemployment rate around America has not changed. Prognosticators thought it would go up; it has not. So, we need to extend -- there are about 15 million people in America out of work. These extended unemployment benefits will help millions of those people.”
Maybe Hannity left that part out because he didn’t want to talk about extending unemployment benefits. Not after spending several days applauding Senator Bunning, the guy who didn’t want to extend them.
There were two conservative, anti-Obama guests and nobody to speak on Obama's behalf. Just another example of Fox News "fair and balanced."
But with hammy outrage, Hannity looked into the camera and said about Reid, “I found this extraordinarily out of touch.”
The rest of the segment was about attacking Obama on health care reform and the stimulus bill. But at about the 5 minute mark in the video, conservative guest Stephen Hayes said, “There are certainly signs that we’ve seen an end to the massive hemorrhaging of jobs that we’d seen over the past year. And to that extent it’s good,” That sounds an awful lot like what Hannity had been ridiculing Reid for saying. But Hannity, of course, didn't notice.
Newly-minted advocate-for-the-unemployed Hannity said, “There’s gonna be a false sense that we’re getting a lot of jobs back because we’re now hiring at $20 an hour – and, by the way, for people that are out of work, for the three, four months that they’re hired by the government to do Census work, I’m glad at least it helps them temporarily. But come July, those jobs all go away.”
And we know he won’t want them to get unemployment benefits at that point – unless it’s at the behest of a Republican bill.
