Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Tucker Carlson, Super Class Warrior Hero Guy

You mean that Tucker Carlson?

Tucker McNear Carlson...grew up in Carlsbad, a suburb north of San Diego. He is the elder son of Lisa McNear (Lombardi) and Richard Warner Carlson, a former Los Angeles news anchor and U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, who was also president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and director of Voice of America. His adoptive mother is Patricia Caroline Swanson (born 1945), former wife of Howard Feldman and an heiress to the Swanson food-conglomerate fortune.

  Yeah.  That Tucker Carlson (from Salon's delightful profile) --

But Carlson was perfect for CNN. He had a TV-ready personal style — Ivy League blazers and bow ties and his “fratty side part” — and a cheerful willingness to say dumb, outrageous stuff with an eminently punchable smirk. He embodied perfectly the CNN version of politics, which is two buddies joshing each other about things they clearly know to be utterly irrelevant. Carlson rooted for “Team Republican,” and his job was to trash-talk with fans of “Team Democrat.” After “Spin Room” was unceremoniously canceled, they sent Tucker to one of the many interchangeable shows it was modeled after: “Crossfire.”

The more you’re on TV, the dumber you get, to paraphrase “Repo Man.” Carlson largely stopped interacting with people outside the Beltway politico-media bubble for stories, and his formerly occasional forays into lazy, glib generalities became just about all he was capable of. But at least Paul Begala and James Carville and even Ann Coulter can be funny — sometimes even witty — in their sports talk radio call-in show “political debates.” Carlson’s idea of a laugh is fratty sexism and pervasive gay panic. Like most other crappy pundits he has a blithe disregard for accuracy, especially when the truth gets in the way of scoring some asinine political point. This vintage Media Matters catalog of his various distortions captures Carlson’s TV style nicely. Especially fun to recall are his many strong arguments in favor of invading Iraq, like: “I want to know what are the Pope’s plans to liberate the Iraqi people.”

Carlson eventually decided he didn’t actually support the war, because his job isn’t to actually believe the shit he says on TV...

-- is suddenly born again hard, kicking ass for the middle class and taking it to The Man!

From Politico:

Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right

And, my dear fellow Republicans, he's all your fault.

By Tucker Carlson -- 1/28/2016

Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly.  It's "all your fault" not "all our fault".

And. yes, as probably guessed, Carlson's entire "Norman Bates goes Norma Rae" column is positively overflowing with the hilarious pathologies of  Republican Detachment Disorder.

You see, as the clickety-clack of wingnut tumbrels rolling down the cobblestones gets very loud and very close, the greatest show in town has become the sight of privileged Republican party twats like Carlson scrambling to find someone else to blame.

Someone else to throw to the wolves.

Today, for example, Mr. David Brooks penned a long, sad shoulda-woulda column ("What Republicans Should Say") about the loss of the Completely Imaginary Burkean Camelot which he continues to insist existed once, out there, beyond the veil of history and lost in the mists of time.  Woe unto thee, privileged Republican party elite, for abandoning the commandments of Thatcher and Reagan and becoming debauched and unclean.

Eagerly I wished the morrow; – vainly I had sought to borrow
From my Burke surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Gipper – 
For the rare and radiant Conservative whom the angels name Gipper 
– Nameless here for evermore...

Maybe later, just to be different, I'll write a post about Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times and his latest Whig fan fiction pity-party diary entry.

But for now, OhMyGod, Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, bow-tied, jumped-up wingnut man-baby with the 3rd most punchable smirk on teevee.

Tucker Carlson, who has spent his entire fucking career crashing rent-free in the Privileged GOP Frat House, sponging up their booze, puking in their sink, making long distance calls on their phone and cashing their wingnut welfare checks to support his life of ease and smarm.

Tucker Carlson, Super Class Warrior Guy.

... But just because Trump is an imperfect candidate doesn’t mean his candidacy can’t be instructive. Trump could teach Republicans in Washington a lot if only they stopped posturing long enough to watch carefully. Here’s some of what they might learn:

He Exists Because You Failed

"if only they stopped posturing" 

"what they might learn"

"You Failed"

Yeah baby!

Then, for flavor, Tucker sprinkles in a little of that fake Both Siderist history that's so popular with the young wingnuts these days:

American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump.

Then back to Tucker Carlson going all Mario Savio --

-- about the very machine that manufactured Tucker Carlson:

It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.

"party leaders and intellectuals imagined" ... but not me.

"the GOP brain trust"... but not me.

"They had no way of knowing"... but not me.

It wasn't me.  It was never me.

Mr. Carlson continues (with emphasis added by me):

On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn’t appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good.

Yes, thing have gotten so weird that any day now I fully expect to see Tucker Carlson in a Ted Nugent tee-shirt, running through a trailer park near me screaming "Attica!  Attica!"

But the sweetest moment of all, by far, is the sight of Tucker Carlson not merely biting the hand that feeds him, but using his baby teeth to rip the teats of the Wingnut Welfare system clean off.  A system of unearned rewards and and undeserved privilege for doing the scut work of "party leaders and intellectuals" which has kept him comfortably swaddled and protected from the horrors of the actual job market out in the real world since before he was in long pants.  But now that the mob is at the door...

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped...

Wow.  Just fucking wow.

And so Republican Detachment Disorder strikes down another Conservative hero -- Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, Human Windsock -- in the flower of his youth.  

Why, Republican Jebus, Why?

But remember, there is hope!

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