Let Freedom Ring
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12 January 2022 - Hilton Head Island
Sean Hannity is one of those guys whose books I thought probably wouldn't be much different from his TV or radio show, and going back and reading Let Freedom Ring from dad's library pretty well cemented that opinion. If you have a lucrative formula why deviate from it? This book was from 2002, so September 11th was a fresh wound, Afghanistan didn't seem like a 20 year war, and Clinton was the slimiest man to have sat in the oval office. I have always enjoyed listening to Hannity, once upon a time because I found him provocative, but now because I find him predictable. It's not hard to understand why my dad, who mostly read spy and war novels when he wasn't working, tended to adopt whatever political positions Hannity espoused that week. Keeping up with politics is a full time job and Hannity was (is) more than happy to do your thinking for you. The passages in this book highlighting how two-faced supposedly moral Democrats were in supporting Clinton's sins read disingenuous after Hannity's knee-jerk support of Trump's sins. His lauding of early Fox News also rings somewhat hollow now that we know it's newsmen and executives were no better than other networks' when it came to how they mistreated women. Since Hannity has since left the Catholic church and he and his wife divorced, it seems that these convictions so vociferously defended in the book didn't stand up to the test of time either. He was about my age now when he wrote this book, but I reads with a youthful confidence that I haven't felt in years. Maybe that's why Neal Boortz always called him the Baby Jesus, because he managed to be opinionated without coming across as curmudgeonly.
