"Let Freedom Ring" also accuses Clinton of "not effectively going after Osama Bin Laden" and suggests Clinton should have sent "a covert team over to the Middle East to take out Bin Laden." But Clinton, of course, did attempt to kill bin Laden with a cruise missile attack in 1998 and authorized several other overt and covert measures targeting the terrorist leader. He just failed. But such a claim could also be made thus far against President George W. Bush.

Without citing a reference, Hannity also states on the first page of his chapter on taxes that "the tax burden on American families is at a record high, having skyrocketed during the Clinton-Gore years." Hannity most likely arrived at this figure -- and this is a guess; footnotes are irregular and sometimes incomplete -- using deceptive calculations that simply divide total taxes collected by the government by the number of families. But the progressive nature of our income tax system means that the national tax burden is not evenly divided among families. Tax receipts naturally went up in the 1990s as the economy grew rapidly and more citizens were pushed into higher tax brackets. Yet a study from the left-leaning but well-respected Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the share of income paid in federal taxes by the middle 20 percent of families declined from 1995 to 2000, when it stood at its lowest level since 1979.

Hannity continues this faulty logic in repeating the canard spread by the Tax Foundation that, under Clinton, "tax freedom day" (the day when Americans have paid off their tax bill for the year) was pushed back from April 20 to May 1. Once again, this is a lazy use of averaging to make higher incomes (that is, more people moving into higher tax brackets) look like an increase in tax rates for average citizens.

In other cases, Hannity can't even interpret the data from his own sources correctly. In a discussion of President Ronald Reagan's economic policies, he claims that "had all of Reagan's budgets been adopted federal spending would have been 25 percent less on a cumulative basis." This statement is immediately followed by a chart, reproduced from a Web site that shows that the total difference between federal budgets enacted from 1982 through 1989 and those proposed by President Reagan was $197.3 billion, or 2.7 percent (the 25 percent number on the chart is based on a flawed method of compounding the difference between each year's budget).

When discussing Democratic opposition to Bush's tax cut, he accurately quotes House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., who stated in April 2001 that "at a time when key indicators tell us that there is an economic slowdown, the president has sent a plan that ignores the needs of average Americans and provides a blueprint to fulfill a campaign promise to cut taxes first no matter what." Amazingly, Hannity follows this quote with an accusation: "Can you believe these statements? Not even the most liberal of economists will argue for tax increases during a recession."

Gephardt, however, didn't argue for a tax increase in that quote -- or in any others during the Bush tax-cut debate. This is a blatant distortion designed to equate opposition to Republican tax cuts with support for a tax increase. And in an attack that would certainly come as a shock to those who took part in the radical New Left movement of the '60s, Hannity devotes eight pages to his contention that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is "a New Left Democrat" and "arguably the most ideologically intransigent New Left liberal to ever serve in the Senate leadership."

Recent Stories