The Strange World of Sean "Upside-Down" Hannity

 

Few people lie so well, first to himself, and then to others, quite so thoroughly as Sean Hannity. Rush Limbaugh may have pioneered the Right Wing Media Cult, but Hannity perfected the art, and all the other conservative windbags out there pretty much orbit his gravity well.

Since Wednesday, November 4th, Hannity, and indeed much of the rest of conservative media, will not stop talking about one thing: FRAUD! They are absolutely convinced that the ass-kicking Trump received at the polls is fake, and they are determined to back that up with whatever false narrative they can manufacture.

Take this gem which Hannity talked about on Friday, November 6th, on his podcast:

"I'm citing law. If we can look at the laws in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, for example, and many of them are very much the same, and that is, 'Partisan observers may observe at polling locations, and may still until time of the counting of the votes is complete.' Hang on a minute, didn't we see, and don't we have evidence, of poll workers papering over windows so that people can't look in? Yeah. Don't we have videos now of poll watchers being thrown out and then a lot of people clapping? Yeah, we have that too."

Did you see it? If not, let me highlight: Hannity cites law (he doesn't say which, because he doesn't want you to research which state he's citing) which says "Partisan observers may observe AT polling locations." Notice that this law (whichever mysterious one it may be) doesn't say observers may observe IN polling locations! Yet this obvious error in interpretation is completely ignored by Hannity. In his Bizarroland universe, poll workers who refuse to have their already-stressful-enough-jobs constantly interrupted by "poll watchers" who want to subject them to endless proctological examinations are somehow being un-American. And when such disruptive people are finally thrown out of the room, as well they should be, Hannity thinks this is somehow a HUGE outrage!

Now that's some seriously deluded bullshit.

But Hannity is just getting warmed up! He cites a case of a Michigan county clerk discovering a "computer glitch" which tabulated 6,000 votes for Biden instead of Trump. He cites this video (without bothering to name it, or who the person is speaking - shoddy work!). The person speaking is Michigan GOP Chairwoman Laura Cox, and she complains loudly:

"If all this wasn't enough, in Entram County, ballots were counted for Democrats that were meant for Republicans, causing a 6,000 vote swing against our candidates. The county clerk came forward and said, 'tabulating software glitched, and caused a miscalculation of the votes.' Since then, we have now discovered that 47 counties use this same software in the same capacity. [Groans and grumbles are heard from numerous Republicans in the room.] Antrim County had to hand count all of the ballots, and these counties that use the software need to closely examine their results for similar discrepancies. The people of Michigan deserve a transparent and open process.” [Applause.]

And here Sean says, "I mean, aren't you as shocked as I am that this could happen in the United States of America?"

What shocks me, Sean, is that you could lie about this so thoroughly. Fact checkers quickly jumped all over this one, and debunked it immediately.

What actually happened was due to human error. A county clerk did not update the software that counts the physical results and which posts unofficial results online. So, when the unofficial election results online didn’t match the physical count, election officials stopped using the software in the county and manually updated the site. The Michigan Department of State later said, “the software did not cause a misallocation of votes; it was a result of user human error.”

In other words, the vote counters did their jobs, double-checked their results, fixed it, and fixed it in a way which benefitted Donald Trump. They did their jobs well!

And their reward was to have their error-catching success spun into a fake scandal meant to call the entire vote-tallying process into question.

So Hannity, and Kaylee McEnany who retweeted it, and the entire conservative media complex who repeated this, all colossally fucked up. If you and I were to have made a mistake this huge, we would be fired from our jobs!

Why does Hannity still have a job?

And all this is just ONE of the many falsehoods Hannity spews for two and a half hours every single working day. He continues on his 11/6 podcast:

"Nevada Republican Party announced that they sent a criminal referral to the Attorney General Bill Barr. 'Our lawyers just sent a criminal referral to AG Barr regarding at least 3,062 instances of voter fraud,' Nevada Republican Party wrote. 'We expect the number to grow substantially. Thousands of individuals have been identified who appear to have violated the law by casting ballots after they moved from Nevada. Washington Post reported the party's lawyers sent Barr a list of the voters, identified by cross-checking voter registration names and addresses with the national change-of-address database.' Uh, do you think anybody in the media cares? Do you think Big Tech cares? Or are they gonna ban people from hearing that, too?"

Yeah, except Politifact debunked that one the day before!

Turns out, if you moved out of Clark County (which is the county in Nevada in question) within 30 days of the election, you can still vote legally. Furthermore, many of the names on the list were of servicemen serving overseas! How dare soldiers in Afghanistan cast a ballot while serving their country!

In other words, Hannity should have been able to fact-check this in plenty of time before he went on the air with it! Instead, he didn't bother to fact check it, and just threw it up.

Do you think anybody in the Right Wing Media Cult cares? Do you think Fox News cares? Or are they going to ignore fact-checking that too?

A week later, Hannity is still unrepentant over his colossal fuck-ups. And again, on yesterday's podcast, he continues to do his job so poorly that he allowed his podcasting co-host, Lynda McLaughlin, to utter this unbelievable falsehood on his show:

Sean: "For example, I said, the reason wear - chose earlier to wear a mask is cause I won't wanna, only... if I ever had this thing [Covid-19], I would never want to give it to grandma or grandpa."

Lynda: "Right. But the World Health Organization maintains their stand that the masks that we're all wearing does nothing to prevent the transmission of anything."

Sean: "No, now, listen. I know that - listen, they got everything wrong. Everybody, you know, it's amazing how, every model, evry - everything."

Lynda: "No, they actually got that right. They maintained that. They never changed that."

BULLSHIT! Lynda is referring to an instance way, way back on March 31, when the W.H.O. did stick to its guns regarding masks - at first. But on June 8, 2020, it reversed its stance and recommended everyone wear a mask!

Five MONTHS later, McLaughlin still doesn't have that straight! She stuck with that story, even when Hannity, who intrinsically knew it was wrong, tried at first to raise an objection. Then, distracted by other subject matter, he dropped it. The misinformation got put out there, uncorrected, on Hannity's own show.

Hannity later cited an instance in Anson County, North Carolina, where the husband of a Democratic candidate was seen escorting people into the polling area and assisting them - to the point of even filling out one of the ballots himself with the voter looking on from behind with his hands in his pockets!

Now, I'll grant that this video looks pretty bad. But three things: 1) The video only captures several people being assisted in this way. That's hardly massive voter fraud, if it even IS voter fraud, because... 2) The husband, John Montgomery, was entirely within his rights within the law to assist people with registered disabilities, such as legal blindness. It isn't clear yet whether those assisted had such disabilities, but until we know for sure, Hannity doesn't have much of a case. And finally 3), the Democrat candidate, Dannie Montgomery, was only running for Register of Deeds - which is not exactly a huge office with a big turnout impact.

And this teeny-tiny little example is the best that Hannity can offer.

Later that same podcast, Hannity doubled-down on the same Entram County, Michigan story I just debunked above. The same story he presented on his podcast one week earlier! What new evidence did he present? Only affidavits! No actual evidence, no actual proof!

Hannity keeps repeating the same instances over and over, even after they've been debunked repeatedly! This indicates just how desperate he is to make it seem like there's any voter fraud going on at all!

Even a cursory analysis of anything Hannity puts on the air these days reveals similar lies, easy to debunk, obvious to detect.

If Hannity had a real job, he would be filing for unemployment, and hoping the government doesn't screw him out of his stimulus check because they prioritized a Supreme Court Justice instead!

Eric

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