Sean Hannity’s Relationship Tips
Never acknowledge, accept or admit
Jeffrey Denny
When your spouse, partner, girlfriend/boyfriend or anyone with the right to call your BS does, and you don’t want to deal with the awful truth, consider the Five D’s of the Sean Hannity Response:
- Deny
Whatever it is, it never happened. Even if it did, stick with the denial. Repeat denial incessantly until it wears down mate in frustration, fatigue or general ennui. Harness your highest dudgeon and passionate, powerful rhetoric. Act offended to have your truth questioned or described as laughable. Don’t worry about reality — that’s in the eye of the beholder anyway. Best to have the old Watergate “plausible deniability.” Denial is not easy — your conscience might be screaming out and asking your deity for forgiveness. Denial is not just a mountain in Alaska. But gas-lighting a mate is still a thing because it still works, right?
2. Deflect
Blow the issue back on your mate. Say he/she does something much worse. Trump’s people may have done something bad — fake news but even if real, a big fat nothing-burger — but OMG, Hillary did that. She committed treason by selling out America to pad her wealth by selling nuclear weapons-grade uranium to the Russians! You may have locked your mate’s beloved cats in the trash room over a weekend, but didn’t she once forget to feed them? Leverage that.
3. Dissemble
Pick a story that works best for you. Line up the most convenient facts to support your story. A welter of details makes lies plausible; as the incessant Law & Order series tells us, more details always beats a case with fewer details. Keep hammering on your “facts.” We have insurmountable evidence from indisputable sources that crooked Hillary is a greed-head, liar and murderer who belongs on “Orange is the New Black.” It’s easy to come up with facts and details to support/defend any failing; e.g., the preponderance of the evidence demonstrates the cats locked themselves in the trash room.
4. Divert
Say the issue is really about a different, more critical issue. You laundered money through nefarious Russian agents, compromised the presidential election, and attracted a 24-hour media stakeout at your home. That was business. But when she forgot to pick up the laundry again it was about her passive aggression stemming from unresolved daddy issues.
5. Downgrade
Neuter a problem by turning it into a neutral “issue.” “Issues,” writer Carina Chocano suggested in the New York Times, is “perfect word for the current moment. It is a word that acknowledges problems without actually addressing them, that minimizes them in hopes that they’ll just drift away.” When I locked the cats in the trash room, it’s the “cat trash room issue.” Not about me and my negligence.
Above all, if you want to be as successful in your relationship as Hannity is with Fox audiences, remember and apply George Costanza’s advice: “It’s not a lie — if you believe it.”
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer
