Where Now, Mighty... Doh!

As the Dow Jones Industrial Average bounces around 10,000, it's worth looking back at the pathetically cynical way Fox News host Sean Hannity has treated the stock market during the Obama administration.

Back in March, the Dow was at its recent nadir - and Hannity knew just who to blame. "Obama, since he's elected, has tanked the markets," Hannity told former Democratic National Committee financial committee chair Michael Brown. "Oh, that's Obama's fault?" Brown asked. "That's right," Hannity proclaimed. That same month, Hannity declared it "Obama's Bear Market," and claimed that "Markets react to numbers. If they had faith and hope in [Obama's] plan, why wouldn't they react more confidently?"

Either the markets found their "faith in hope" in Obama, or Hannity has no idea what he's talking about, because the day before Hannity claimed that Obama "tanked the markets," the Dow hit its low point and started to climb.

On May 1, Fox Business Network anchor Alexis Glick pointed out to Hannity that the Dow, then at just over 8,200, had made it back to the level it was at before Obama's inauguration. But while Hannity was happy to hand Obama all the blame for the Dow when it was falling, he wasn't about to give Obama any credit now that it was rising. "The market doesn't mean anything to me," Hannity said "Alexis, you're the first person to tell people don't look at the market unless you're in it for five or 10 years, right? All right, so we're not looking at the market." Glick was either unaware or too polite to point out Hannity's hypocrisy.

Almost three months later, with the Dow passing 9,100, Hannity decided that the market did, in fact, "mean something" to him - it could be a convenient excuse to attack Obama. On July 27, Hannity did a segment linking "President Obama's approval rating," which he said "has dropped 7 points in the last month," to "the Dow Jones industrial average," which he noted is "now back over the 9,000 mark." After displaying a graph mapping the Dow and Obama's approval rating, Hannity asserted, "Now you can see that as the president's job approval rating crumbles, well, the Dow has been on the rise. Is it just a coincidence? We'll let you be the judge."

Since then, Hannity has largely been silent on the issue - a search of the Nexis database for (dow or stock market) indicates that Hannity has not mentioned the Dow's 900-point rise since late July. On August 19, he did, however, share some investment advice with his audience:

HANNITY: Stuart, I've taken half of the money that I had in the stock market, which was not a big part of my portfolio out of the market. I want to get out totally. And I say that to people and they say, well, historically, over the years, you're going to do -- you're going to be better off in the long term. You're fairly young. You should keep it there.

I have a feeling that if the market continues to rise and Hannity misses out on it, he'll somehow find a way to blame it on Obama.