February 18, 2004, 8:33 a.m.
Hannity vs. Evil
A one-man rally for America.

Have you forgotten? Sean Hannity hasn't. The conservative radio and cable television megastar's most important contribution to political discourse since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been his tireless reminder to America's liberal elite that the attacks did indeed happen — and that our enemies, foreign and domestic, must not go unpunished.

For the Long Island native, this is a personal mission. He goes to church with families who lost members to the murderous destruction at Ground Zero. He has two young children whose futures and freedoms he passionately wants to preserve. Last July, he hosted a concert that raised $1.5 million for families of U.S. soldiers killed or disabled while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And with an unabashed patriotism that greatly antagonizes the Manhattan-Berkeley-Hollywood Axis of Snivel, Hannity uses his daily bully pulpit to provide full-throttle support for President Bush’s war on terror.

In his new book, Deliver Us From Evil, Hannity rallies against the forces that threaten American liberty: “I decided to write this book because I believe it is our responsibility to recognize and confront evil in the world — and because I’m convinced that if we fail in that mission it will lead us to disaster. Evil exists. It is real, and it means to harm us.” Deliver Us From Evil takes readers through a useful tour of the nation’s (and the world’s) struggle against terrorism, despotism, and liberalism. He devotes chapters to the Holocaust, the Cold War, the first Persian Gulf War, and the corruption of the Clinton years. “Every great champion of freedom in the modern era has had to overcome a prominent voice of appeasement,” Hannity writes. “For Winston Churchill there was Chamberlain, for Ronald Reagan there was Jimmy Carter. Today, George W. Bush faces the modern Democratic Party.”

Even before the book’s Feb. 17 release, detractors were balking at the inclusion of liberalism in Hannity’s trio of evil forces. But as he notes, it is the "professional apologists of the Democratic Party…eager to turn any setback in the war into a referendum on the Bush administration” that he pegs as menaces — not rank-and-file Democrats or post-Sept. 11 national-security hawks such as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, Georgia Democrat Sen. Zell Miller, and political operative Donna Brazile, who urged fellow Democrats last spring to channel the spirit of Scoop Jackson and return to the “muscular national security principles” of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. “If voters continue to see us as feckless and effete,” Brazile noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed cited approvingly by Hannity, “they will re-elect Mr. Bush.”

The most compelling chapter of Hannity’s book, titled “Playing politics at the water’s edge,” recounts when the talk-show host obtained a jaw-dropping memo last fall, apparently written by a Democratic staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The memo detailed plans by Democratic strategists to use the panel’s ongoing review of intelligence activities to undermine the Bush administration’s case for preemptive war. “We can verbally mention [e.g., leak] some of the intriguing leads we are pursuing....We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration’s use of intelligence at any time…The approach outline[d] above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the Administration's dubious motives," the memo noted.
 
“If that isn’t bad faith,” Hannity writes, “I don’t know what is.” The memo “is only the tip of the iceberg — a symbol of the attitude of the liberal Democratic Party, which is single-mindedly bent on discrediting the president and winning back the White House — even if it means compromising national security in the process.”

There was a time when both major political parties could be relied upon to put national security above short-term political gain. Hannity might have mentioned the extraordinary bipartisan cooperation between the Roosevelt administration and Republicans in protecting the secrecy of the MAGIC decrypts of Japanese diplomatic codes. When Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey vowed to make intelligence failures at Pearl Harbor a campaign issue in 1944, which raised the dire possibility that the cracking of Japanese codes might become a public issue, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall appealed directly and confidentially to Dewey to protect MAGIC. Intercepted messages between the Japanese and Hitler were providing critical information. Citing the central role MAGIC played in the victories at Midway and in the battle of the Coral Sea, Marshall asked Dewey to consider “the utterly tragic consequences if the present political debates regarding Pearl Harbor disclose to the enemy, German or Jap, any suspicion of the vital sources of information we possess.”
 
Putting the national interest above his political ambitions, Dewey heeded Marshall’s advice — and lost the election to save American lives. Would John Kerry or Hillary Clinton do likewise today?

For its part, the Bush administration’s execution of the war on terror, especially at home, has not been flawless. I pray nightly for someone to deliver us from the evils of Saudi coddling, border insanity, Norm Mineta, and Islamist influence over the White House. My one complaint is that Hannity gives short shrift to these national-security lapses in the book, though he has been openly critical of some Republican missteps over the airwaves.

In the end, as Hannity writes, “when it comes to confronting evil, the fact is that there are essentially two types of people: those who are willing to fight it, and those who try to excuse it — or, worse, deny it even exists.” Deliver Us From Evil is a valuable read not only for conservatives, but  also for the new breed of swing Democrats-turned-“9/11 Republicans” and soccer moms (turned “security moms”) whose lives were changed inalterably by the terrorists attacks — and who, like Hannity, “pray that America will make the right choice” in 2004.
 
— Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.