I should note at the beginning that the Senator has a cordial relationship with the Spectator’s Editor in Chief, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. So my dissent here on the Senator’s book is respectful, as it would be in any case.
Which makes the Senator’s book all the more curious. Why? Because, as news accounts have noted, like this one at the Washington Times, Sasse has yet again decided to attack his own side. In 2016 it was his party’s nominee, President Trump. (A refusal to endorse Trump, which, had he gotten his way and Trump were defeated, would have resulted in Hillary Clinton appointing two Supreme Court Justices. His own Nebraska GOP angrily denounced him for abandoning Trump.) Now it’s Sean Hannity. A sample headline:
Sasse said, in part, that Hannity was trying “to intensify the political addictions to the one percent of America that is listening. The business model people like Hannity advance it is not good for the next generation.”Ben Sasse: Sean Hannity’s business model ‘not good for the next generation’
To which Hannity responded by saying Sasse was a “con artist and phony,” adding:
After your book fails, I will gladly debate you about how the success of the last 2 years never would have happened with your “never trumper” positions. Also we can talk about how you sucked up to me during your election, and why I know you are a con artist and phony. I know you desperately want access to my 600 amazing talk radio stations and to the number one show in all of Cable news.
I was curious. What in the world is Never Trumper Sasse saying in his book? So, I bought the book and looked for myself. And I confess I was seriously taken with its considerable lack of reality about the history of the conservative movement — and Hannity’s role in it.
Let me start with Sasse’s section titled “A Brief History of ‘Who Started It?’” In which he dates the division between Left and Right to the fight over Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. I have to admit, this astonished. Sasse reveals that in the summer of 1987 when Bork was nominated he, Sasse, was fifteen. I was not fifteen. In fact, I was in the Reagan White House as an Associate Director for Political Affairs and, with colleagues, was working on the Bork nomination. Without question the fight was extraordinarily divisive, and Sasse accurately describes the behind the scenes efforts of Senators Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy in working with far-left interest groups to deny a Court seat to a superbly qualified nominee. In terms of Supreme Court nominations — as the Kavanaugh battle has shown yet again — the “process” was never the same again.
But the start of the Left-Right divide? Hardly. One wonders in astonishment if Sasse is at all familiar with the careers of William F. Buckley, Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. And the fact that all three paved the way for Sean Hannity.
A short history. In 1951, 24-year-old William Buckley penned God and Man at Yale, which its publisher, Regnery Books, would describe in a special re-publication of the book in 1997 as “the protest of a young Yale graduate against the pervasive liberal bias and waywardness of his alma mater.” Buckley himself recounts the reaction to his book in that 1997 re-issue in a new foreword. Liberals of the day assailed the young conservative as a fascist, a Nazi, and a Klansman. In the latter case Buckley cites a hostile review that appeared in Saturday Review. It ended this way:
The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. If one didn’t know the date on this review was 1951, one could easily believe it was an attack on some modern-day conservative from a Leftist of today. This kind of thing went on throughout Buckley’s entire career.
In 1964, the week Barry Goldwater was nominated for president at the GOP convention in San Francisco, CBS News ran a report saying that at the convention’s conclusion Goldwater would be going to Germany, specifically “to Berchtesgadan, Hitler’s onetime stamping ground….”
Decades later in his memoirs Goldwater was still angry at the implication of the totally false story (he wasn’t going to Germany at all, or even leaving the country) that he was some sort of Nazi.
Reagan was regularly accused in the media and by opponents of being a fascist, a Nazi sympathizer, and pitching for votes from the Klan.
In other words? Long before Fox News, talk radio, social media — and Sean Hannity — these shrill, divisive attacks on conservatives were routine against the conservative stars of the day and their supporters. And like Hannity today, Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan never hesitated to dish it right back to their critics and liberals in general.
Which brings us to Sasse’s mindblowing charges against Sean Hannity. And...
