This has been weighing on me for some time now, and I can’t take it anymore. I feel a need to unburden myself, even if it costs me the respect of my friends and loved ones. So here goes…
I have been watching a lot of Fox News lately.
I simply can’t help myself. It’s pure entertainment. Yes, I feel gross afterwards. Of course, I question what I’m doing with my life. But for those 1-2 hours a night now, when I’m locked in watching Bill O’Reilly interview Chris Christie about Donald Trump, I forget all of that. I’m blissed out, lost deep in a Foxhole, my cones and rods buzzing with “ALERT” stimuli and patriotic hysteria.
But in addition to causing some soul-searching, watching Fox News has presented me with another dilemma - who do I hate most in the world: Sean Hannity or Ted Cruz?
I’m faced with this perplexing choice every time Hannity interviews Cruz (so like, three times a week), and I have to see both of their smug faces, side by side, at the same time in HD on my television. The way my blood pressure spikes from seeing them simultaneously gives me a pleasant little buzz that can take a good twenty minutes to come down from. And after giving this matter a lot of thought, I feel I can make a definitive call…
I hate Sean Hannity the most of anybody in the world.
Now, this wasn’t easy. I don’t take this decision lightly. Both men are extremely hatable. It’s like trying to pick a winner in a fight to the death between Jack Bauer and Jason Borne: there’s no “right” answer. So let me attempt to explain how I arrived at this decision - as much for my own sake as for anybody else’s.
Ted Cruz definitely has the more sinister, punchable face. It incites a basic, instinctive, surface level reaction of hatred. I also detest his shrill voice, his transparent phoniness, and 100% of everything he stands for, as a politician and a human being. So Ted Cruz is, seemingly, the front runner for the mantle of my most hated person.
But you have to go beyond that, I told myself. Look deeper. Somehow, some way, Sean Hannity was scraping the insides of my skull in a more insidious way. It’s not as obvious as Ted Cruz. It was tough to pinpoint, but I think I finally determined what it is.
You see, Sean Hannity is in kind of rarified air in that he has a major media platform, is undeniably arrogant and smug…and yet he is also very, very stupid. Say what you will about O’Reilly or Megyn Kelly; at least they’re intelligent people. Hannity is not. He repeats the simplest of talking points ad nauseam, using them to formulate an incredibly simplistic worldview, then uses his show to suck up to all those who agree with him, and condescend to all those who do not.
It’s not even that I disagree with everything he says. That’s obvious, and not a reason to hate anybody. It’s the sheer laziness in his thought process, the lack of intellectual analysis that goes into any and everything he “reports” on. You couple that with his smug assuredness that he just knows he’s right about everything, put it on television, and you have a formula for the most off-putting possible personality I can fathom. I would rather go out to dinner with Bashar al-Assad, or Justin Bieber, or the homeless guy who hordes Russian porn magazines outside my building, than Sean Hannity. I would rather go to dinner…with Ted Cruz.
Congratulations, Sean Hannity. You are the absolute best at being the absolute worst.
