Sean Hannity on Why Bill Maher's Not Funny, and the Best Plan for Congress to Raise the Debt Ceiling

Right off the bat, Sean Hannity took comedian Bill Maher to task for making fun of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann on his HBO show Real Time. “I’m getting a little sick and tired of the double standard that exists,” said Hannity, the host of (duh) Hannity on the Fox News Channel. “Because he’s a liberal, and he’s got a pro-Obama point of view, he can say anything he wants?”
 
Sounding more jealous than upset, Hannity refuted Imus’s notion that Maher is more of a comedian than a serious political analyst. “He’s serious about his political views,” Hannity told Imus. “He does add a lot of comedy, but you add a lot of comedy to your show, and you can’t tell a joke without having the joke police jump on you.”
 
And besides, in Hannity’s opinion, Maher ain’t as funny as he used to be. “He’s gotten mean, and vicious, and more ideological,” he said. Even more upsetting is that Maher’s venom is directed at people Hannity likes, such as Palin and Bachmann.
 
Accused of “weeping,” Hannity insisted he was only upset because the I-Man has cancer. “And emphysema,” Imus chimed in. “Don’t forget about that.”
 
House Republicans passed the Cut, Cap and Balance Act yesterday, which would cut government spending immediately; cap the amount of spending to a level within the normal percentage of GDP range; and require the passage of a balanced budget amendment. Not surprisingly, Hannity likes this plan, and admitted he was “pissed off” when President Obama announced yesterday a bipartisan plan for raising the debt ceiling, thought up by the so-called “Gang of Six” in the Senate.
 
“They’re undermining their fellow Republicans, and negotiating against themselves with another delegation,” Hannity said of the Republican Senators involved. “And there’s a third deal going on with Mitch McConnell, the last ditch effort, if in fact all else fails.”
 
As Hannity sees it, none of the alternative plans get to the root of the problem. “Congress spends too much money, the country’s going bankrupt, the President’s given us $5 trillion in debt,” he said. “Your kids, my kids, are going to be broke when we get older.”
 
He believes Cut, Cap and Balance would move the country toward a balanced budget, and the plan sounded reasonable enough to Imus. Then again, so did the Gang of Six’s proposal, which would increase revenue, likely in the form of taxes. He assumed some good could be taken from both plans to create an even better plan, but Hannity disagreed.
 
“Every time they negotiate, meaning Conservatives and Republicans, any spending cuts, they agree to tax increases upfront,” he said, and pointed to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as examples of Presidents who agreed to increase taxes, and never got the spending cuts they were promised.  “Fundamentally, we’ve got to decide this: is $2.2 trillion, which is what we take in annually as a country—roughly $200 billion a month—is that enough for Congress?”
 
It was enough for Imus, who changed topics to ask Hannity who he’ll support for president in 2012. “Nobody yet,” he said, though he likes Palin, Bachmann, and Imus’s guy Mitt Romney a lot. “I think odds are, he’s probably still the favorite, by far.”
 
Feeling guilty, Imus apologized for Bernard calling Hannity a “Sarah Palin boy toy” earlier today. Confused, Hannity noted that those words had, in fact, come out of Imus’s mouth.
 
“I didn’t think you’d be watching,” Imus confessed, as if that’s ever stopped him before.
 
-Julie Kanfer