He must surely have chosen that gambit to give Ms. Fleming an opportunity to embarrass the White House. She accused Mr. Hannity of “selective outrage,” countering that Laura Bush had cast an even more direct aspersion on Ms. Rice’s personal life in a recent issue of People magazine.

The first lady said she thought that Ms. Rice would be a good candidate for the presidency but was not interested in running. “Probably because she is single, her parents are no longer living, she’s an only child,” Mrs. Bush said. “You need a very supportive family and supportive friends to have this job.”

Perhaps the most damning evidence against Mr. Hannity is his insistence on attacking Bill and Hillary Clinton. Real conservatives welcome Senator Clinton’s presidential candidacy, calculating that she is too polarizing a figure ever to win in a general election. But on the very weekend Senator Clinton made her first primary trip to Iowa, Mr. Hannity headlined his show with an exposé of the Clinton administration. Showing an edited scene from the much-disputed ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11,” Mr. Hannity made the case that Mr. Clinton failed to eliminate Osama bin Laden during his presidency, then pressured ABC to recut the film to omit scenes that made his administration look ineffectual.

The segment subliminally underscored mistakes made by the Bush administration. By focusing so intently on the government’s failure to capture Mr. bin Laden in the years and months before 9/11, Mr. Hannity rather pointedly reminds viewers that more than five years after Mr. bin Laden ordered suicide-hijackers to drive airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and after the deaths of more than 3,300 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Qaeda leader is still a free man.

But it’s the sex and violence that suggest that Mr. Hannity harbors a secret plan to undermine American moral fiber. Despite President Bush’s assertion that the execution of Saddam Hussein was botched and disgraceful, Mr. Hannity repeatedly flashes some of the more gruesome video images of the hanging, pictures so ghoulish and unsettling that they could well be the fare for a snuff film.

Sometimes he showcases violence that has absolutely no redeeming journalistic value. A recent feature about an indoor dodge ball tournament focused on whether players aimed at opponents’ genitals, using a term that is too colloquial and vulgar to repeat here.