Maurice Hinchey: Certifiable Crazy Congressman

You read that right: Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY-22) is certifiably insane.

Why do I state that? Well, who but a crazy man would:

1. Accuse a senior adviser to the President of the United States of entrapping a reporting team with false evidence of dereliction of duty on the part of the President before he became President, while adducing not one scintilla of evidence to support his allegation,
2. when given an opportunity to give evidence in support of his statement, adduce nothing except a tenuous connection of associations and try to infer guilt by those associations, and then
3. the kicker--threaten to defame his interviewer's character if the interviewer will not accept his allegations at face value?

That is what Maurice Hinchey has done. First, he told a community forum on "The Future of Social Security" that Karl Rove "planted" the Killian Memoranda on Dan Rather and his team. (Hat Tip: Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, who has an audio link and a full transcript of the Congressman's remarks.) When that came out, Sean Hannity challenged Hinchey to repeat that statement on his radio program and either to give evidence in support of it, or else give his reason for making that statement, or if he had no reason, to apologize. (That is exactly what a student at my former high school would be asked to do if he were heard to complain that cheating was rife in the school--because that school had an Honor System similar to that at the United States Military Academy. Believe me, we learned that lying about another student's alleged honor violations was as serious a violation of our honor as would be cheating on one of our own tests. But I suppose that honor doesn't mean anything in Congress today, this although you have to go to your Congressman to apply for admission to West Point! But I digress.)

In any event, Congressman Hinchey launched into a monolog and a diatribe that lasted, almost without interruption, for fifty minutes, from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. on Sean Hannity's daily radio program. The essence of his charges seemed to be:

1. The man calling himself Jeff Gannon, who turns out never to have been a reporter at all, is a Republican operative from Texas. (I don't know whether that's true or not.)
2. The White House caused this man to get a press pass though he shouldn't have gotten it.
3. Karl Rove controls that whole operation, like the master strategist that everyone acknowledges him to be, whether they like him or not.
4. Therefore, it stands to reason that Karl Rove would plant phony memos on Dan Rather, because Karl Rove controls an operation a good part of which is accrediting someone as a reporter who is not a reporter.
5. And furthermore, Sean Hannity himself is involved, because "Jeff Gannon" (not his real name) e-mailed Sean and told him about a breaking story--though that tip was not about the Killian Memoranda and in fact came to Hannity well after Little Green Footballs had published the definitive analysis proving that the Killian Memoranda were a huge and frankly stupid fraud.

Thus, now that the Democratic Party can no longer insist that the Killian Memoranda are genuine, this Congressman (how fast can you say "loose cannon on the gundeck?") now says that they came from the White House in an effort calculated to embarrass the media and make people forget that the President had been derelict in his Texas Air National Guard service, whether Jerry Killian committed his misgivings to paper or not.

Understand that I am only trying to make sense of Congressman Hinchey's remarks. Hearing is believing. He was abrasive, he accused Sean Hannity of a lack of integrity (and I haven't even discussed the threat he made), and he lapsed into incoherence several times. Whether you will ever see a transcript of his remarks is up to Sean Hannity.

Before I discuss the threat, I want to take time right now to discuss the implications of the Congressman's remarks thus far. First, as I said, he has no evidence to support his statement. What he has is some rather loose associations. Thus he is trying to imply guilt by association--in this case an alleged association of "Jeff Gannon" and Karl Rove. He has no evidence even that "Jeff Gannon" is connected to the White House in any way, shape or form.

Now Sean Hannity did admit one thing: "Jeff Gannon" should never have gotten a press pass. In this post-22-Jumada-II ("9/11") world, you do not tolerate someone getting that close to the President under false pretenses! However, Congressman Hinchey did not and does not seem to care about the security issue at all. To him, the fault lay not in lax security at the White House, but rather in "fixing up" someone who could undermine the primary mission of the press--which, to Hinchey, can only be maintaining an adversarial relationship with this White House. Funny--he never objected when the White House Press Corps fawned all over the Clintons--and lapped up the off-color movie offerings in the press cabin of the Presidential air transport, while giving the President a pass when he couldn't keep his hands off the help, on the ground or in the air! But again I digress.

And now we come to the threat. I do not know the precise nature of that threat. Congressman Hinchey made the threat during a commercial break (and furthermore, when he wouldn't stop talking, Hannity had his engineers record all his remarks on the "Newsmaker Line" without bothering to hold converse with him on the air). Apparently Hinchey said that if Sean did not give his story the dignified treatment he felt it deserved, he (Hinchey) would publicly attack Sean in other media organs--essentially telling anyone who would listen that Sean Hannity was a moral coward and a charlatan. Now I fail to see, first of all, what substantive thing that Maurice Hinchey or anyone else could possibly threaten Sean Hannity with. Someone needs to remind the Congressman that the Constitution--which he is sworn to "support and defend...against all enemies, foreign and domestic"--specifically says, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...." Add to it that the Sedition Act, the only Act ever used to throw someone in jail for criticizing the government (one of John Adams' more embarrassing lapses as President), expired with the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson and has never been renewed. Besides which, Sean Hannity is not committing sedition. He is, if anything, holding the Congressman's seditious comments up to ridicule.

Thus the Congressman can do little to Sean Hannity other than to continue to rant and rave. But perhaps he is planning to introduce legislation, along with Representative Edward Markey (D-MA), to reinstate the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," which allegedly was about giving equal time to any controversial subject. In fact, Rush Limbaugh used to say, "I don't need equal time; I am equal time!" That is demonstrably true of all alternative media, including bloggers.

Now why can't I simply write him off and move on? Because he is a United States Congressman, a man charged with the making of our laws. And the residents of the Twenty-second Congressional District of the State of New York need to choose this day what sort of Republic they will serve.