Earlier this month, terrible undertoad Sean Hannity was announced as the 2017 recipient of the Media Research Center’s William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence, commemorating a year in which words no longer have meaning. Nevertheless, those who cling to the Old Ways soon took issue with the connotations—chief among them conservative columnists like The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, who wrote an entire column deriding the symbolism of handing over an award named for one of the party’s sharpest intellectuals to the dialectic equivalent of a Peeing Calvin sticker, especially one who peddles conspiracy theories and responds to any criticism with all the dignity of a guy who’s just been politely asked to leave the airport bar. Amid the outcry, CNN reports, Buckley’s son, Christopher, reached out to the organization that bears his late father’s name and “expressed great dismay,” prompting the MRC to rescind the award—seemingly agreeing that giving it to Hannity would be undignified. And Hannity, in rebuking this implicit criticism of his intellectual merits, has spent the morning throwing a shit-fit about it on Twitter.
In an effort to defend his honor as a worthy successor to Buckley’s legacy of erudite wit and oratory elegance, Hannity first tweeted to Stephens, “I’ll say to you and the @nytimes (Fake News) I do not care what u think.” He then spent the early hours of today picking fights with CNN’s Jake Tapper—cleverly calling him “Fake News Jake”—as well as the Buckley-founded National Review—deriding them as “Never Trumpers”—all while giving his own version of why he wasn’t receiving the award, These reasons seemed to evolve from “regretfully, I cannot attend” to “I didn’t want an award from you guys, anyway” to “awards are stupid,” all in thrilling real time:
He then pulled out an old favorite from WikiLeaks about Hillary Clinton:
For his part, Tapper has responded by repeating the assertions made in his article and pointing Hannity to this withering excerpt in particular:
Sources tell CNN that the MRC leadership discussed ways to allow Hannity to save face by acting as if a scheduling conflict would prevent him from accepting the award.
“It’s my understanding there was a scheduling conflict,” Ryan Moy, a spokesman for the MRC, told CNN.
A source familiar with the situation tells CNN that Christopher Buckley said of the concocted scheduling excuse: “perhaps Mr. Hannity has been offered the Ronald Reagan Great Communicator Award on the same evening and had decided to leverage upwards.”
Sean Hannity’s outcry over the fake news reporting over the award that he didn’t even want because it’s fake—it’s all fake, and you’re fake—has already been nominated for the award for Most Incredible Self-Own.