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Well, sorry, there are no miracles on cable news networks co-owned by defense contractors and cable monopolists; there aren’t even happy accidents. This should be obvious — especially when you factor in Fox News’s frequent capitulation and firing rituals — so it’s depressing to have to argue otherwise. Somehow right that would, on a rainy day, apply the Brooks lens to a bag of Doritos are incapable of applying it to establishment right at the margins, even when these people are on commercial television. Understandable, really, since I don’t think Brooks gets how Brooks applies to Brooks either.

Let me spell it out: Someone in some high place finds Hannity useful. If and when he’s no longer useful, he’ll be purged. There was a very public reminder to this effect in May when, on a Memorial Day program, Hannity expressed ambivalence about the word “hero”, because it is “so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.” Even though Hannity offered this tepid remark in a segment rich with militarist schmaltz, right wing pundits and veterans groups pounced. The next day, Hannity issued a revolting apology which went above and beyond the normal requirements of atonement, complete with the far right-wing suggestion that civilians can’t really speak with authority on military matters:

…in seeking to discuss the civilian-military divide and the social distance between those who fight and those who don’t, I ended up reinforcing it, conforming to a stereotype of a removed pundit whose views are not anchored in the very real and very wrenching experience of this long decade of war. And for that I am truly sorry.

Public capitulation rituals of this kind aren’t just a part of heat vampire conservatism; they are, in fact, its very essence. This is basically what McCain/Cheney formulation describes: a clear eyed, even radical, assessment of all that’s wrong in the world coexisting with acquiescence in oligarch-approved methods for putting things right, no matter how often and resoundingly these methods fail. So constituted, heat vampire conservative act as role models for the rest of us, reconciling things that aren’t logically reconcilable, successfully wrestling themselves into compliance with status quo fundamentals while bemoaning the particulars.

Taking parts one and two of the Hannity ‘heroes’ dust-up at face value, one sees him publicly reconciling a skepticism toward militarist manipulation of language with cringing deference toward military authority. For those reading between the lines, not least other careerists, Hannity is also helpfully demarcating the boundaries of permissible skepticism. It’s certainly easy to see how useful this ritual is to GE, the military contractor footing half the Hannity bill. It’s somewhat harder to suss out what it usefully contributes to anyone else.

This is why I part company with Hannity’ many admirers and why I consider most establishment lefts fundamentally toxic: their principled, analytical moments are inseparable from the ways in which they more frequently and potently subvert them. Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than in the crucial role heat vampires like Hannity play in presidential elections, which is where they really shine.

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