Enemy of the taste.

In case you were wondering whether the right wing could possibly have any remaining tricks up its sleeve in its ongoing mission to turn the United States into an Orwellian parody of itself, you're in luck: They do! Leading the charge is ever-obedient right-wing mouth breather Sean Hannity, whose new Sunday-night program is naming, I shit you not, a weekly "Enemy of the State."



Now, I'm not going to go off on how blatantly fascistic/Stalinistic this is, because that should be readily apparent to anybody with an IQ higher than their inseam (and even a few right-wingers). Instead, I want to draw attention to Hannity's choice of whom would be the first to receive this dubious honor.

Sean Penn?

Look, I got no beef with Sean Penn as a person. He's a terrific actor -- if he didn't give you chills in "Mystic River," you don't have a pulse -- and he's spoken on behalf of some causes I agree with. But let's be honest with ourselves, and I'm talking to both Republicans and Democrats here: Sean Penn is about as politically relevant as Adlai Stevenson at this point. Hannity himself even asks whom Penn represents other than "other bad actors," and the answer is, well, nobody, Sean. Nobody has ever cast a vote for him for public office that I know of, which means that when he calls you a "whore" or calls for numerous people in the Bush administration to be impeached, he's not doing so with the endorsement or backing of any major political party; thus, he's really not all that different from any of the thousands of other people who have . . . called you a whore or called for numerous people in the Bush administration to be impeached.

Yup, there's lots of 'em, Hannity, and if you're going to declare them all "Enemies of the State," it's going to take you quite a few weeks' worth of shows. But you're not prepared to do that; you only picked out Penn because he's famous and would thus allow you to whip out the same old "Hollyweird" accusations you've been lodging since pretty much the beginning of time.

Now, as much as I abhor totalitarianism of any stripe, I can still acknowledge the sheer balls it takes for someone to pop up and start advocating it, particularly in a democratic society. Sean, when I heard you were actually starting up an "Enemy of the State" feature, I was prepared for what basically amounted to a fatwa. Like Andrew Sullivan, I was waiting for a Two Minutes' Hate. I was hoping to see you call out Democrats and left-wingers at the very highest levels of our government, spew unhinged accusations of the Kevin Bacon chains connecting them directly to al-Qaeda, and order the rest of us to destroy them. I was hoping to be shocked.

Instead . . . you chose Sean Penn. You had a chance to do something balls-to-the-wall crazy, and you punted. I'm disappointed.

Hannity, you're a pussy.

So I'm gonna help you out here, because next time you do this "Enemy of the State" thing, goddammit, you're gonna do it right. You're gonna put Barack Obama's face up on that screen and you're gonna remind the world that his middle name is "Hussein" and his last name rhymes with "Osama," and you're gonna repeat verbatim all those accusations on FreeRepublic.com that he's a Muslim and, therefore, the Antichrist. You're going to put Hillary Clinton's face up there and make a direct appeal for a citizen militia to surround her house in Chappaqua and put her under house arrest. Bring Ann Coulter on your show, and together the two of you can demand proof that Nancy Pelosi didn't attend Saddam Hussein's funeral.

But if you're gonna invoke the most blatant of fascist themes, Hannity, then sack up and do it. Go big or go home. This is the very sanctity of our country we're talking about! Or do you not really care about that?

On second thought, don't answer.