Sean Hannity was so busy clutching his pearls over the Donald Trump/Ted Cruz wife wars, he “forgot” that he has spent years race baiting and smearing Michelle Obama. Well, we’re here to remind him!
During an interview with Newt Gingrich last night, Hannity blatantly tried to acquit Donald Trump of any wrongdoing with his smear of Heidi Cruz or a story in Trump’s BFF-run National Enquirer about Ted Cruz’s supposed five mistresses, with the following sanctimony:
HANNITY: For the life of me, I don’t understand when families and wives are brought into it. And I’m just trying to look at it fairly from both sides. I’m sure he’s [Donald Trump] mad about the ad about Melania [Trump]. I’m sure he assumed it was the Cruz campaign. Cruz says no. Then he does a retweet. That then is on him. And then you have this whole thing that breaks in the National Enquirer, which I think is total BS also. But I know that that was—you know, that was pitched a long time ago by another campaign. So it all gets—it all begins to coalesce around the wrong things we ought to be talking about.
If you haven’t rolled on the floor laughing over this hypocrisy, let's take a stroll down Hannity Memory Lane. It's the street where Hannity has deliberately targeted Michelle Obama, not just in her role as First Lady, but specifically as Barack Obama’s wife:
- Hannity repeatedly attacked Michelle Obama for saying, in 2008, about her husband’s campaign, “People in this country are ready for change… and let me tell you something. For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
- Hannity also dubiously accused Michelle Obama of being “Apparently closer to Rev. Wright than Barack Obama was, according to reports.”
- Hannity attacked Michelle Obama for going on Late Night with David Letterman (because of his comments, three years earlier, about Sarah Palin) during President Obama's re-election campaign.
- Also, during 2012, Hannity race baited Michelle Obama because a photo of her with Mrs. Louis Farrakhan appeared on the cover of a magazine.
- In 2011, Hannity used Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” and healthy eating initiatives as an excuse to depart from his self-described attempts to “stay away from presidential families and children.” He "joked," “Maybe the Obamas will take the kids to Reverend Wright’s church, maybe they’ll introduce them to Bill Ayers.”
- In 2012, when President Obama was running for re-election, Hannity tried to make race-baiting hay over a 1988 memo then law-student Michelle Obama wrote. Her crime? “Argu(ing) for race-based and gender-based faculty hiring.”
- More recently, when Michelle Obama spoke frankly about being an African American at the historically black Tuskegee University, Hannity attacked her for sounding “so angry. …(A)ll I heard was a lot of bitterness here. …Is she proud of the country she’s describing here? …Why is she pushing this narrative?” He spent at least three segments race baiting her Tuskegee speech.
Surprisingly, Gingrich didn’t buy into Hannity’s efforts. Gingrich blasted Trump for getting “down into this mud that I think really has hurt him. I'm not sure anybody in the Trump campaign understands yet what a big mistake this is. And they can't keep doing this and think that they're gonna get the nomination.”
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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