Thursday night, Sean Hannity warned that Delaware voters would reject Democratic Senate candidate Chris Coons for penning a college newspaper article more than 20 years ago titled “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.”

Hannity's position represents yet another flip-flop on the question of whether he thinks public figures should be held accountable for the things they wrote in college.

Flashback, September 2009. Republican Robert McDonnell was under fire during his Virginia gubernatorial campaign for controversial positions he took while attending Pat Robertson's CBN University. Hannity would have none of it:

There's been an all-out war declared by The Washington Post against Bob McDonnell, a solid conservative. And the effort to smear, besmirch, demonize, and impact that election is under full way here, and a lot of this has to do -- well, they went through the great effort to dig up a graduate school thesis that he wrote, and they're claiming that, well, he's saying that “homosexuality, working women, and abortion are detrimental to traditional American families.”

McDonnell has repudiated much of the thesis during a conference call with reporters, but it doesn't matter. I mean, it's OK, that was, let's see, 20 years ago, we'll go back to opinions that he might have held at a time when he's writing a thesis, which by design is supposed to be provocative, and yet they're not holding Barack Obama accountable to the pastor whose church he still went to throughout the campaign until he had to get rid of the pastor.

Hannity 2009's position on the writings of college students marked a stark contrast with Hannity's position on the issue a year earlier. Then, Hannity repeatedly distorted Michelle Obama's college thesis to smear her as a racially divisive figure. In 2007, Hannity fixated on the college writings of Hillary Clinton, pushing back on those who “argue that a college paper written almost 40 years earlier can't decide a candidate's politics of beliefs.”

Viewers did not have to wait a year this time for Hannity to change his position on the question. Less than 15 minutes after raising Coons' college newspaper article, he lashed out at critics of Christine O'Donnell for releasing “a tape, apparently an interview she did years ago when she was younger.”