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Book Review: Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring
Posted on Wednesday 15 January @ 09:06:04
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Every week (or thereabout) HGLEE.COM will review a book or film. Each work will have a brief review and a quick link to Amazon, should you decide to pick up a copy for yourself. This week's selection: Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring.
Relevant, hard-hitting, and insightful...to a degreeHannity accomplishes much that is good in this wide-ranging and sometimes rambling indictment of the American Left Wing. To his credit, the author goes a long way toward correctly identifying the mindset of the American liberal.
Perhaps of greatest value in the book is Hannity's proven talent for identifying the true cause of many issues. He should also be commended for his dogged pursuit (and timely use) of facts to support his case—something not often seen from the other side of the political aisle. He argues from a position of strength (i.e., a premise based in fact and supported by a logical argument) on many issues, but where he falls short of the mark is in the intellectual discipline to consistently apply this formula to all of his arguments.
Like many conservatives who embrace that title, Hannity remains objective only on issues related to fiscal policy and the nation's defense (of course, other trivial exceptions also apply). True to form, Hannity loses all semblance of the circumspect, logical thinker on issues that invoke his unabashed religious views.
To his credit, the author confronts this bias explicitly; he openly states his religious tenets and then argues from them. While his candor is appreciated, it is precisely this logical inconsistency that dilutes the value of the book. For there is a certain intellectual dishonesty involved in placing equal weight on arguments that flow from fact-based, logical premises and those steeped in faith-based, irrational premises. The inevitable and regrettable result, is a book containing a hodge-podge of truly brilliant, rational arguments commingled with religious appeals to authority, the fallacy of self-exclusion, the fallacy of composition, and other logical fallacies.
These intellectual flaws do not, however, diminish the importance of those arguments that do stem from a rational basis. Hannity provides cogent and insightful attacks on the leftist mindset, and he lends much to the establishment of a proper agenda to combat it.
Topics in the book include the war on terrorism, military defense, taxation, abortion, the enrivonment, and general social mores. Many of the topics are handled deftly, and much is provided in the way of historical and political perspective. However, as noted above, Hannity too often disarms himself by not arguing from a position of perfectly consistent logic. It would be nice to see a conservative completely identify the root cause of the insidious positions espoused by the likes of Al Gore and Tom Daschle. While much is made of their ample record of hypocrisy, Hannity refuses to take the moral high ground in attributing anything sinister to their motives. Why not?
Perhaps it's time to call a spade a spade. Tom Daschle is another left-wing campus fruitcake that would have been perfectly at home in the hippie movement. Indeed, the only thing truly dangerous about this man is that the same asinine policies being spouted from the muck in Woodstock are now being bellowed from the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Al Gore is an even easier case, and Hannity does a fair job of identifying Gore's anti-American screed ("Earth in the Balance") as just that. However, after correctly identifying the hateful nature and harm that works such as these can do to the United States, Hannity goes to great lengths to explicitly and repeatedly refer to the former Vice President as patriotic. Why the hesitation to drive the point to its proper conclusion?
Perhaps Hannity's hedging on important points such as these is a technique devised by his publicist to keep the door open to visitors on his radio and televisions shows. (If that is the case, perhaps his publicist should be noted among the contributors.) I suspect, however, that there is a sort of pragmatism at the root of the conservative movement, for this sort of logical inconsistency is the hallmark of many conservatives today. Indeed, we see this sort of timidity with conservatives a great deal: lucid identification of crucial issues pursued only to the 80% mark...it's like a bad horror movie where the villain is always left alive to haunt us another day. Perhaps conservatives fear that a complete pursuit of their enemies might jeopardize their faith in the almighty compromise; perhaps it might take them too close to some of their own irrational premises. Either way, this hesitation is the reason that conservatives will never fully prevail in the war of ideas.
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