We need to stop talking about all the asinine blather that gets attention during election seasons. And the distraction factor is why it's beneath the notice-let alone the mention-of real members of the press like Charlie Gibson. This is, of course, why political hacks like Hannity latch onto them so tightly-so they can wield them like a club, over and over again, thudding into the dirt louder and louder so that nothing else can be heard above the violent din. The problem is that they distract from issues that do mean something to Americans, to the voting process, to our future as a nation and as a world. The problem with issues like these aren't that they mean nothing, even though it can be argued that they don't. Gibson-if Sean Hannity can let go of such a useless issue, surely you can too? "It comes up again and again when we talk to voters…it's all over the internet," he said in one of his many lines of useless questions from the Pennsylvania debates. Over six months ago: an eternity in politics. Random appearances on his own show aside, Hannity isn't even wearing a flag lapel pin on the cover of his 2005 book Deliver Us from Evil (which in the light his above argument, should probably have been subtitled And Don't Forget the Flag Pin).īut this was October of 2007. But putting aside that illogic, Hannity isn't even consistent in terms of his own argument. "Because our nation was under attack." This is sort of like claiming that you own a Rockies jersey because the Red Sox won the World Series-the two statements might both be true, and be interconnected-but not in the way on which the argument seems to depend. Sean Hannity was one of the early adopters of the lapel-pin strategy, taking Obama to task for his comments. He was just the only one challenged to defend it. But in this case, Obama was far from the only one making this move. This is how Obama has gotten into trouble, of course-by speaking casually about complex issues not yet made ready for sound-byte politics, whether it's about lapel pins or the bitterness of mid-America. Even though he went on to clarify that "you show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans…by values and ideals," the political cat was out of the bag, running around the FOX news set, and pissing on everything. When in October of 2007 Barack Obama made his now-famous comment about not wearing the flag lapel pin because it had "become a substitute for true patriotism," he caused a tremor in the political force that has yet to completely subside. Twenty-seven years later, the decals have changed to lapel pins, but the argument is back full-force.
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