Hannity Lies And Lies To Defend GOP's "Paucity Of Blacks" [View All]

[JABBS]

On last night's edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, conservative pundit Sean Hannity asked why the mainstream media isn't "outraged" over a comment last week from sports commentator Bryant Gumbel.

Gumbel, remarking on his HBO show Real Sports that he never watches the Winter Olympics, said, “So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world’s greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention.”

But in spite of Hannity's question, the media has hardly rallied to defend Gumbel's comments. For example, a USA Today columnist said Gumbel's comments "don't ring true." A Knight-Ridder Newspapers columnist implied that Gumbel's comments were racist. A columnist for the Annapolis (Md.) Capitol agreed. The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch called Gumbel's comments "harsh."

Of course, Hannity doesn't really care about the "paucity of blacks" at the Turin Olympics. The reason he brought up the Gumbel comment was to launch a defense of the GOP, and to imply that the "liberal media" is giving Gumbel a free pass because they hate President Bush.

So Hannity relies on a false claim -- no "outrage" against Gumbel -- to refute the notion that the GOP has a "paucity of blacks." On that point, Hannity said last night that Gumbel's comment was "not accurate" and not "productive."

But, in fact, the Bush Administration has a "paucity of blacks" when compared with the Clinton Administration.

While Bush has made several high-profile appointments of blacks, most notably Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell as successive Secretaries of State, a 2004 analysis of the 2,800 political posts that form an administration found that blacks held 7% of administration jobs under Bush, compared with 16% of administration jobs under President Clinton.

In other words, Hannity makes a false claim in order to make ... another false claim.

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Beyond relying on false claims, Hannity is a hypocrite.

Which is worse: Gumbel's comment about the GOP, or conservative pundit Ann Coulter's "joke" that liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned?

Even if you think the two comments are of equal concern, would you be surprised to find out that Hannity, while outraged over Gumbel, said nary a word about Coulter?

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," Coulter said at a January speech at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

Coulter appeared on Hannity & Colmes the next night, but neither Hannity nor guest co-host Bob Beckel asked Coulter about her "joke."

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This item first appeared at JABBS.