I’ve known Tucker Carlson for almost 10 years now. Back in 2009, he hired me to help launch The Daily Caller, plucking me out of complete obscurity and launching me into slightly less complete obscurity. He also helped me out a lot when I moved to D.C. and was almost immediately struck down by a government SUV. He used his connections to get me some good lawyers to stand up to the State Department bastards who crippled me for life and lied about it, and he personally pushed my wheelchair through the ice-clogged sidewalks of D.C., during the city’s worst winter in 100 years, to meet with those lawyers. I think he was actually angrier about what happened to me than I was, and I was pretty damn angry. He’s the best boss I’ve ever had, he’s a genuinely good person, and he’s my friend. We don’t agree on everything politically, especially for the last, oh, 850 days or so. But who cares? He went out of his way to help me when I needed it, because he thought it was the right thing to do. That’s more important than politics. That’s more important than anything.
So I freely admit my bias when people start whining about how angry he makes them. Now that he’s got the #1 show on cable news and he humiliates Democrats on a regular basis, they just don’t know what to do. They tried going to his house to scream at him and pound on his door, but that didn’t work. So now they’re yelling at him for jokes he made on a shock-jock radio show over a decade ago. They’re pretending to be outraged at stuff they didn’t care about at the time, because back then, Tucker wasn’t a threat to them. He wasn’t standing in their way.
Now they’re shocked. Shocked, I tell you!
“This is vulgarity. This is hate speech. This is homophobic speech.” Former ABC News anchor Sam Donaldson reacts to audio tapes of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. “This is the kind of speech, if left unchecked, will change this country forever,” Donaldson adds. https://t.co/hemqMUsywb pic.twitter.com/ljcnXYQVbb
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) March 13, 2019
Did you know Sam Donaldson was still alive? I didn’t. Well, “this kind of speech” he’s decrying was “left unchecked” for 10-15 years and nobody gave a damn. MSNBC, which was Tucker’s employer at the time, didn’t do anything about it. Then some “research fellows” at Scumbag Central Media Matters* dug it up, and Fox News’ competitors dug up old fossils like Sam Donaldson to be Deeply Concerned™.
All this pearl-clutching over some dumb radio jokes. I never listened to Bubba the Love Sponge, even when Tucker was on, but I listened to Opie and Anthony for a while (YMB) and I’m familiar with the style of humor. It’s shock comedy, cringe humor, whatever you want to call it. It’s not for everybody, but it’s humor. It’s jokes.
Jokes are bad. Jokes are wrong. Do not ever make jokes.
If you never doubted Tucker Carlson’s anti-elitist bona fides, you are a sucker.
“I only have, you know, American, white servants. It’s not because I’m racist, it’s because I’m not. It’s because I feel better beating them.” @aidachavez reports. https://t.co/3pJD9RzHaD
— Ali Gharib (@Ali_Gharib) March 12, 2019
“That’s not funny!”
As Media Matters launches yet another coordinated campaign against a political opponent, it turns out that their president, Angelo Carusone, also used to say shocking stuff to get a reaction.
The guy leading the Media Matters campaign against Tucker Carlson wrote blog posts describing “bags of Jewish gold,” called Japanese people “Japs,” praised KKK leader Robert Byrd and denigrated trans people…all around the time of Tucker’s radio comments: https://t.co/U0paYKMZNP
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) March 13, 2019
That’s different, though. He’s one of the good guys, so he gets to do that.
Today’s “scandal” is that Tucker made some jokes about that goofy Miss Teen USA contestant back in 2007. Remember Miss South Carolina?
So now he’s in “trouble” for going on a comedy show and making jokes about her. If it’s so terrible, why did it take 12 years to “surface”?
It’s annoying to watch all these lefties pretend to be shocked, but it’s also kind of funny. Remember when right-wingers were the humorless scolds?
I notice the conservatism-conservers at The Bulwark are also tsk-tsking over this:
The great thing about Twitter is that the folks who led outrage mob last week are outraged about outrage mobs this week. Good times.
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) March 12, 2019
Here’s one important difference, Charlie: When I called you out for sending Molly Jong-Fast to CPAC, promoting her work, and then accepting no responsibility for anything she said, I wasn’t trying to get her fired. I just asked how she was helping you “conserve conservatism” by mocking pro-lifers and the pro-life position. I’ve yet to receive an answer, because you don’t have one. I don’t like Trump either, but I don’t hate him so much that I’ve allowed him to turn me into a liberal.
Tucker isn’t apologizing. Even if I thought he should (which I don’t), it wouldn’t do any good. Media Matters and their ilk don’t want an apology. They want him to go away. They want him to quit destroying CNN and MSNBC in the ratings night after night. And then, when somebody takes his place, they’ll go after that person for any possible reason they can dig up. That’s what they do. They can’t compete, so they try to destroy.
If you’re genuinely offended by jokes Tucker Carlson made over a decade ago, on a radio show you never listened to, congratulations. I assume you’ve stopped watching his show, which you never watched in the first place.
*I don’t pretend to be unbiased about Media Matters, because they lied about me when I was recovering from that crippling injury. They didn’t even wait until I was out of the hospital to start making up a bunch of lies about me. They saw me as an enemy, and they ended up turning me into one. I hate them, and I’ll never stand with them against Tucker or anybody else.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member