While many journalists, even some at Fox, expressed dismay at Donald Trump’s anti-American attack on the press yesterday, Sean Hannity all but put on a party hat and called for the day to be declared a national holiday. 

As I previously noted, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith called out Trump for his unprofessional treatment of CNN reporter Jim Acosta yesterday and even the Trump-friendly Tucker Carlson seemed queasy. But not Trump fanboy Hannity. He began the “Opening Monologue” portion of his show last night with his delight. All transcript excerpts via FoxNews.com, with my emphases:

HANNITY: But first, President-elect Donald Trump’s press conference today was the single greatest beatdown of the alt-left, abusively biased mainstream media in the history of the country!

Without a hint of irony, Hannity started whining about our American media:

HANNITY: All right, today, President-elect Donald Trump took on the press after the so-called journalists at CNN and BuzzFeed exposed themselves to be nothing more than political hacks. They ran wild with unconfirmed and completely unfounded allegations that President-elect Donald Trump has been compromised by Russia and that they hold embarrassing personal and financial information about him.

Actually, CNN reported on what was in a classified briefing prepared by the intelligence community. It’s not as if the network ran with some completely unfounded conspiracy theory about a birth certificate. And while Hannity would clearly like to bury his warm embrace of his beloved Trump’s bogus birtherism, there’s actual proof to the contrary.

In other words, Hannity only cares about truth in news so long as it benefits his politics. But, apparently, Hannity thinks that the more he hate mongers, the better he hides his hypocrisy:

HANNITY: And when it comes to the alt-radical left liberal press, there is a massive double standard. Now, they’ll push fake news stories about President-elect Trump, but they never bothered to even ask about or look into President Obama’s very troubling past.

From there, Hannity took us on a stroll down Obama-smearing memory lane with just about every hate-mongering meme Hannity embraced over the last eight years, minus the birtherism:

HANNITY: Now, the media asked Barack Obama only one single time—and I fed the question to George Stephanopoulos about his relationship with the unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, even though Obama launched his political career in Ayers’ living room, gave speeches him and sat on boards with this guy. Well, They didn’t care.

That was Obama, and for 20 years, for example, no problem. He attended the church of “g-d America,” “America’s chickens have come home to roost.” He listened to Reverend Jeremiah Wright all that time, and they turned a blind eye to all of this, Obama embracing the tactics of left-wing activist Saul Alinsky? These are only a few of the examples. They didn’t do their job in 2007 and ‘08.

This is a familiar litany of Hannity distortions: Obama and Ayers were never close; Ayers long ago gave up his 60s radical life and has been an upstanding citizen for decades. As for Wright and Alinsky, it speaks volumes that Hannity never pointed to one thing since Obama took office that was the act of a wild-eyed radical.

Meanwhile, we’ve got real reasons to worry about Trump’s citizenship. In a must-read column today (that also touches on Bill O’Reilly), Frank Rich sums up Trump’s Russia problem perfectly:

Let’s not pretend we don’t know what is happening here. There is evidence that Donald Trump and his administration-in-formation are partially, perhaps wholly, beholden to the Kremlin and/or those Russian oligarchs in its thrall. This is why Trump refused to answer that question about contacts with Russia during the campaign — and why he’ll lie about it when he finally feels he must muster some kind of answer. His symbiosis with Russia is also why he will never release his tax returns, for what other reason could there be at this point except that they reveal the Russian financial ties he denies? After all, we already know the other embarrassments contained in those returns — that he hasn’t paid taxes for years, that he practices no actual philanthropy, and that his businesses are in a perennial waltz with bankruptcy, fraud, and failure.

No, Russia is the big story here. The elephant in the room is a bear. Trump has made no bones about repeatedly hiring fellow Putin sycophants, whether his former campaign chief Paul Manafort, the incoming National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, or the secretary of State nominee, Rex Tillerson. When the heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh was awarded a medal, the Service Cross of the German Eagle, by Hermann Goering “by order of der Führer” before World War II, it helped make him persona non grata in the FDR White House. When Tillerson received a Russian Order of Friendship Award from Putin, Trump regarded it as an incentive to hire him.

How this will play out once Trump is inaugurated is impossible to fathom. We have a president-elect who trusts Putin and Julian Assange more than he does America’s intelligence agencies, whom he has compared to the Nazis.

No, we don’t know how this will play out. But one thing we can be sure of: Hannity will turn a blind eye to any and all evidence of Trump's malfeasance(s), attack anyone trying to get to the truth as anti-American and hold himself up as the big patriot.

God help us.

Watch the deceit below, from the January 11, 2017 Hannity.