JABbering Stooge

City and state education officials didn’t seem to have a clue about what was going wrong. "Is it teaching?" asked state Education Commissioner Richard Mills. "Is it teaching practice? Is it the material? Is it the work students are doing? What are they reading? What are they writing? What kind of math problems are they doing?"

What are these people doing with our tax dollars if they don’t even know the answers to these questions?
Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring, pg. 145-146.

This little gem was recorded on page 88 of Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. And as Franken rightly points out, Mills was asking RHETORICAL questions, not looking to be led by the hand towards a solution, as Hannity suggests.

"When you look at schools in relation to the accountability system, New York City schools have a long way to go."

Now for a little context. Richard Mills was the person who had created that accountability system. In fact, just the year before, Mills had been presented with the prestigious Corning Award for Excellence because, among other things, he had set tough new academic standards and required rigiorous testing of all students’ progress. The difficulty of the tests that Mills himself had imposed had led to the low test scores Hannity cited. Back to the article:

"There is no simple fix," he said. "I would peel the onion. I would ask questions about all the fundamentals that go on in school."

And that’s where Hannity started quoting him - when Mills started asking questions about all the fundamentals.
Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars, page 89

So why bring up a pair of two-year-old books now? Because I thought about what Hannity might have to say about the following comments by Michael Schiavo while the "Terri’s Law" circus was going on:

Have they ever met her? What color are her eyes? What’s her middle name? What’s her favorite color? They don’t have any clue who Terri is. They should all be ashamed of themselves.

I bet you anything that Hannity would say something along the lines of the following:

Is he so callous that he doesn’t know what color her eyes are? How evil he must be not to know her middle name! And yet the evil,terrorist, traitor libruls support this adulterous bastard!

This, of course, is the same Sean Hannity who whipped up a good mixture of froth because Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA) called him on his hypocrisy RE: Medicare (which was paying part of Terri Schiavo’s rather substantial medical bills).

Gems from the off-air comments:

"I’m gonna pound him, too, like those other guys…" (And yet we liberals are supposed to be the uncontrollably violent ones…)

"Asshole!" (Temper, temper, Sean!)

"God, I hate these people…you have no idea…" (Why? Because we dare to disagree with you?) Okay, to be fair, Mike Malloy has said much the same of pompous, arrogant, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing jackoffs like Sean Hannity. I guess all’s fair in love(?) and war.

"How pissed is Moran? Not that I give a shit." (Compassionate conservative, indeed…)

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 1, 2005 4:38 AM)