Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

14
Hannity and Colmes
As we said before, there's no better examplar of the Fox News Channel's credo than its leading
left/right debate show, Hannity and Colmes. According to Rush Limbaugh, "Hannity's
vigor and clarity inspires." As hard as TeamFranken tried, they couldn't find a similarly glowing
quote from anyone about Colmes, but I told them to keep looking and hopefully have one
for the paperback edition.
To give you some idea of the show's fair balance, I picked a representative episode:
the broadcast immediately following President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. The
point-counterpoint pretty much broke down like this:
"This is a big vision. This is a bold agenda!"
vs.
"President Bush did a magnificent job!"
Quick. Which one of the critical sentiments was expressed by the liberal? If you guessed
"magnificent job," you're a winner. And you know what's also a winner? Fair and balanced
news coverage.
The show's first guest that day, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, was
struck with how, like Churchill, Bush seemed imbued with a special destiny. Hannity gushed:
HANNITY: There were two lines that we just played that I really loved in the speech.
That "we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Con-
gresses, other presidents, other generations. We'll focus on them with clarity
and courage."
NOONAN: We will do it now. We won't pass off to anyone else. We'll do it now. I
think "do it now" was a strong kind of sub-theme in the whole speech. I got to
tell you this was a big and powerful and important speech.
Lost in all the talk about not passing problems off to future generations was that Bush
was passing off to future generations a projected ten-year deficit of $1.8 trillion dollars on top
of the existing $6.4 trillion national debt. (Since then, the projected ten-year deficit has risen
to $4 trillion.) That might have been something for Colmes, representing the liberal side, to