Fox News host Sean Hannity struck back at Sen. Lindsey Graham’ s criticism of Hannity and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for polarizing politics.
Graham, R-S.C., made his comments to NBC’s Chuck Todd on June 2. Using a hypothetical example of how Hannity and Maddow would have pounced on Ben Franklin, he argued that today, “There is a group telling you to say ‘no’ about everything.”
Hannity, wanting a chance to respond, invited the presidential hopeful on his show on Tuesday.
Hannity asked Graham: Wasn’t Martin Luther King Jr. polarizing “in a good way” by fighting for justice? And wasn’t Ronald Reagan polarizing when he battled Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976?
Hannity added that Graham had been polarizing at times, like when he supported President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and a troop surge in Iraq.
Graham admitted that he could be polarizing sometimes, then took a jab at his party as a whole.
“I’ve come to conclude that the Republican Party and the country as a whole needs to knock off some of this stuff,” Graham said.
He used the clash over Obamacare as an example: “You’re not going to [get] President Obama to repeal Obamacare because we threaten to shut down the government. Would President Bush have agreed to repeal the tax cuts if the Democrats had threatened to shut down the government?”
Graham’s “polarizing politics” comment seemed to suggest that the TV hosts’ proposed solutions could not translate into viable public policies. Hannity then emphasized that he had his own solutions to government policies. Graham acknowledged that both Hannity and Maddow have solutions. For him, the real problem was that these solutions were too partisan to blend together.
Emily Leayman is an intern at the Washington Examiner
