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I try on a regular basis to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hnnity. More often lately, it seem to be Hannity as he is on later in the day when I need a break from work and decide to run errands.

Sadly, that means I am listening to less talk radio.

I can handle Rush. I don’t often agree with him, but most of the times his points are salient and well-thought out. I wish I could say the same for Hannity. He seems like an angry bulldog who can’t stand the fact that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.

Mostly though, the reason I can’t stand Sean Hannity for more than a few minutes at a time is his willingness to say anything today to get himself ratings and then completely ignore it tomorrow. For example, Hannity is a huge critic of polls and has often claimed they prove nothing except that it was a slow news day. Polls are simply another way the mainstream media manipulates the populace.

Yet on Fridays, or at least on a semi-regular basis, like today, he brings pollsters on to his show to argue about the significance of the latest polls. Generally, he looks to Zogby and Rasmussen as more accurate polls and anything sponsored by Time, Newsweek or the major networks as suspect.

Clearly, there is some bias in any opinion poll. Anyone who has taken a basic statistics class can argue that. But seriously, hating them all one day and using them to boost ratings the next? I guess I wish that Hannity had the integrity of Rush Limbaugh.

And, currently, I object to Hannity because of the Stop Obama Express. Not because I don’t think he has a right to campaign against Barack if he wants to—I’m all for both sides of the story being told—actually it’s because I’ve gotten bored with his diatribes against Obama.

Today the object of his ire was a change in Obama’s schedule while in Germany. He had been scheduled to visit wounded soldiers and opted out after the Pentagon said the stop could not be used as a campaign event. Hannity thought that in his role as a United States Senator Obama should have gone anyway. He complained that there is never a bad time to visit wounded veterans and that Barack chose to go workout instead.

Well, okay, his basic premise seems sound. It is always good to visit our soldiers, wounded or otherwise.  However, Barack was not in Germany as a representative of the United States government. He was there on a trip paid for by his campaign. The entire trip was, shock and faint!, a campaign tour.

I would like to think that Hannity could recognize an exercise in ethics when it occurs. The Pentagon said visits to the wounded could not be used as a campaign event, but Barack was in the midst of a huge campaign event. Had he continued on to the hospital, even without the press entourage, there would have been official photographs of him with the soldiers and someone, probably Hannity, would have accused him of exploiting the wounded for his own gain.

I realize that Democrats simply are not allowed to have made the right choice during a campaign season, but really this is going too far. Obama visited the troops at his campaign’s expense, not at the cost of the American taxpayer, and not under the false claim that he was doing it for the good of his Senate vote.

In March, Media Matters reported this about the last McCain trip to Iraq.

“During a discussion on the March 11 edition of CNN’s The Situation Room of Sen. John McCain’s upcoming taxpayer-funded trip to Iraq, congressional correspondent Dana Bash noted that McCain claimed he wanted a “firsthand look at what’s happening on the ground” and quoted from a statement about the trip in which McCain said, “Had I not traveled to Iraq, I doubt I would have been informed enough to understand what we were doing wrong and what we should do to correct our mistakes.”

Hannity likes to claim that McCain was going to Iraq before he even knew he was going to run again for President.

Poppycock, Mr.  Hannity!

Senator McCain did not simply wake up one day last year and decide to run for the Presidency anymore than Senator Obama did. We all know that the planning that goes into a presidential campaign begins years before the actual deed. If not, the candidate will never survive the process of being vetted.

Yes, I know Hannity would complain that I used Media Matters as a source. But the point is, some of us read and listen to both the right wing and the left wing. Unfortunately, at the moment, some of the right wing is pretty hard to swallow.

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