Sean Hannity exposes the anatomy of a smear
Democrats are going to pull out all the left-wing tactics from their worn-out liberal playbook for the Cabinet confirmation hearings
With confirmation hearings for President-elect Trump's Cabinet nominees begin today, it’s no surprise Senate Democrats and their alt-radical left allies have revealed their intention to paint attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is a good man with an exemplary record, as a racist.
This is a tactic that Democrats at every level deploy every election, and it's something they've used successfully to undermine and even stop Republican nominees in the past. Just last year, President Obama played the race card repeatedly while campaigning for Hillary Clinton, shamelessly trying to link Donald Trump to the Ku Klux Klan.
“If you tolerate supporters who are Klan sympathizers before you're elected, then you'll receive their support once you're in office,” the president said at a Nov. 1 rally.
TEAM TRUMP: WHO'S WHO IN PROPOSED CABINET, WHITE HOUSE
As if to prove it was a carefully crafted talking point, Obama said virtually the same thing at rallies over the next two days as the election drew close.
“If you accept the support of Klan sympathizers -- the Klan -- and hesitate when asked about that support, then you'll tolerate that support when you're in office,” he said Nov. 2.
And the next day: “If you accept the support of Klan sympathizers before you are president, you will accept their support after you are president,” Obama said.
None of us should be surprised by this smear strategy. Democrats resort to these tactics to try and scare you, the voters, into supporting them. Consider Vice President Joe Biden, who did the same thing back in 2012.
“Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing,” he told an African-American gathering. “[Mitt] Romney wants to let --- he said in the first 100 days, he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street! They're going to put you all back in chains.”
It’s pretty disgraceful, but it is anything but new. As far back as July 12, 2000, then vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore told another African-American gathering that Republicans were out to get them.
“It's wrong, what the leaders of the Republican Party and this Congress are doing in blocking an accurate Census because they don't want to count everyone that they don't think they can count on,” he thundered.
That was just a couple of years after Gore told African-Americans that Republicans “are in favor of affirmative action if you can dunk the basketball or sink a three-point shot! But they're not in favor of it if you merely have the potential to be a leader in your community and bring people together!
“Don't tell me we've got a colorblind society!” he shouted at the 1998 speech.
And there's a lot more, sadly. A 1998 Missouri Democratic Party radio ad featured an ominous voiceover saying, “When you don't vote, you let another church explode. When you don't vote, you allow another cross to burn.”
A 2000 NAACP ad featured the daughter of James Byrd, who was killed by white supremacists who chained him to a truck and dragged him to his death. Democrats used the aggrieved woman to link George W. Bush’s opposition to hate crimes legislation to the reprehensible murder.
“On June 7, 1998 in Texas, my father was killed,” she said. “He was beaten, chained and then dragged three miles to his death all because he was black. So when Gov. George W. Bush refused to support hate crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.”
Never mind that George Bush supported the death penalty for the people that were responsible for that heinous crime.
All of these ridiculous examples show Democrats have no shame and no moral compass when it comes to playing the race card. They prove how low the left is willing to go to scare voters and to get their way.
We can expect this despicable tradition to continue as Trump nominees about to undergo the confirmation process. Back in 1987, President Reagan nominated Robert Bork, one of the brightest judicial minds in the country, to serve on the Supreme Court, and Democrats led by liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy, used the same tactics to destroy this man and block his confirmation.
“Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids and school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censured at the whim of government,” Kennedy said from the Senate floor.
Kennedy's stunt coined a new phrase for using slimy smears to ruin Republican nominees: “Borking.” Democrats tried to “Bork” Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas by bringing out his former colleague, Anita Hill, to make sexual harassment allegations against Thomas. An indignant Thomas eventually referred to the process as a high-tech lynching, it was so bad.
“This is a circus,” Thomas said. “It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
Now, that brings us to Sessions. He will start his confirmation process today by appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and liberals have already signaled that they'll be playing the race card by reviving decades-old allegations against him.
If you do just a little bit of research into these allegations, which the media refuses to do, you will find they were proven to be false. What’s more, Sessions is a man with a civil rights record that people should envy. As a U.S. attorney, he prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan. As a senator, he has repeatedly praised civil rights icon Rosa Parks and spearheaded the effort to award her with a congressional gold medal. He's often praised by his colleagues and has worked on several key bipartisan bills with senators like Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin and even Ted Kennedy.
Democrats won't tell you that Sessions was one of 19 Republicans who voted to confirm President Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder. No, instead, the Democrats will try to smear Sen. Sessions in an effort to damage the incoming Trump administration.
After all, what’s a good man’s reputation when there are cheap political points to be scored?
Adapted from Sean Hannity’s opening monologue on “Hannity,” Jan. 9, 2017
Best of Opinion
Get the recap of top opinion commentary and original content throughout the week.
By entering your email and clicking the Subscribe button, you agree to the Fox News Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, and agree to receive content and promotional communications from Fox News. You understand that you can opt-out at any time.