Sean Hannity's latest book, "Deliver Us From Evil," is even better than his last. It hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list the week it came out and stayed there for at least five weeks. This explains the huge cover story on Hannity in the latest New York Times magazine, as well as that big NPR profile on him ? wait, neither of those happened. Indeed, not a single major mainstream newspaper has reviewed it.
That's unless you include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which briefly mentioned Hannity's book in order to say that it compared unfavorably with another book and to call Hannity an "angry conservative" (redundant in liberal-speak).
The reviewer, Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch "Senior Writer," complained that Hannity's book "reads like a long, long transcript of his television and radio shows." Inasmuch as Hannity's TV show is the second-most-watched show on cable news and his radio show is the No. 2 radio show in America, only a liberal would consider that an insult. Levins is hoping for a book that would read more like a transcript of Al Franken's listener-free show on Airhead America.
 Hannity's book is chock-full of something that frequently makes liberals uncomfortable ? history. He begins by reciting historic evils such as the Holocaust and the 9-11 terrorist attacks and contrasts those with everyday stories of evil culled from the newspapers: A suicidal woman is poised to jump from a bridge in Seattle and, after a few hours, someone from the crowd below yells out, "Jump, b----, jump!" The woman jumps.
Hannity says we face moral choices between good and evil every day. If we make excuses for evil ? Hitler was a "madman," a pedophile priest was "weak" or, as philandering actor Ethan Hawke recently advised us, Bill Clinton "suffered from" infidelity ? soon we cease being able to distinguish good from evil at all. (I would add to the excuses for evil, "It's just about sex.") With each choice we make, large and small, we take a step closer to the devil or a step closer to God.
The leaders of the modern Democratic Party, Hannity says, have made excuses for evil for so long that they cannot recognize evil anymore. The closest thing to it in their vocabulary would be "someone who wears fur." And of course, they recognize evil in the person of "George W. Bush," whom they see as the very essence of evil. In fact, Bush may be the only force of evil in the world liberals haven't wanted to appease.
"Deliver Us From Evil" runs through an enormous amount of history that's fun to hear again. Hannity quotes Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, a few years before German warplanes began ravaging Britain, promising the British "peace in our time" and advising them, "Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." (This was just after Chamberlain's "national malaise" speech, if memory serves.)
Chamberlain's proud boast that he had removed "those suspicions and those animosities that have so long poisoned the air" sounds eerily like today's Democrats so eager for the rest of the world to love us. Sen. John Kerry has condemned Bush's "belligerent and myopic unilateralism," and called for a "progressive internationalism." To reprise an old joke from the Cold War, if Democrats aren't on al-Qaida's payroll, they're being gypped.
And speaking of old jokes from the Cold War, Hannity turns to Jimmy Carter next. Carter could see evil in the world; he just mistook it for a rapidly moving bunny rabbit. Reacting to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Carter exclaimed on ABC News: "This action of the Soviets made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office."
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