We've had a long line of right-wingers blithely peddling this fallacy of limited options: if you're not on board with the war in Iraq, then you're on the side of terror. Now, Hannity sums up this mendacious sentiment with a supremely arrogant book title that manages mainly to be an insult to liberals everywhere: Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism.
Sullivan goes on to describe the title as "obscene":
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. . . . 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?Put Hannity's book in the same absurd fantasy category besides David Frum and Richard Perle's exercise in wishful thinking, An End to Evil.
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