Yesterday was Halloween but without dressing in costume, Tucker Carlson probably grossed out a large number of viewers with what he must have imagined was a hilarious smear of Rep. Adam Schiff over impeachment.
Carlson just hates inflamed rhetoric, you may recall – so long as it's against an issue or cause he likes. Otherwise, he has proved there's no low too low for this smarmy trust fund baby playing the role of populist on Trump TV. He may have just reached a new low last night with this screed after the House endorsed the ongoing impeachment inquiry and set up rules for public hearings:
CARLSON: It was a nearly perfect party line vote, every single Republican voted against it, all but two Democrats voted in favor of it.
Adam Schiff, meanwhile, the congressman from Burbank, was ecstatic. Schiff has spent years obsessing over impeachment like it was a young Jodie Foster. Colleagues say he has pictures of impeachment taped to the walls of his bedroom. He’s believed to have written in steamy, unhinged letters with his own body fluids. So, for Schiff, today’s vote was thrilling, in ways that only a court-appointed psychiatrist could fully appreciate.
Even worse, Carlson went on to point viewers to the identity of the whistleblower, deliberately endangering him. Carlson railed against the man as some kind of anti-American partisan – while completely ignoring that “the overwhelming majority of allegations in the complaint have been corroborated by official government documents, Trump’s public statements, and news reporting.”
In short, Carlson is as sleazy as they come - and could probably use a good psychiatric evaluation of his own self. The clip below, from the October 31, 2019 Tucker Carlson Tonight, is a perfect example of why I say so.
Watching Tucker you can see why. They’re learning that emulating Trump’s politics of personal destruction is their most effective tool to defend their Dear Leader. Their process arguments are falling flat with even Trump crying like a baby over their weakness.
You’ll notice Tucker never covers the substance of the whistleblower’s complaint in his long screed. This perverse strategy worked on Mueller, a true Boy Scout too professional to fight back. I suspect it might fail here. The process is moving too quickly and the Democrats fight back – though not as much as I’d like. Coincidentally, Tucker is more than a tad desperate in his gross and highly over the top sexualization of Adam Shiff’s investigation.
Back to the trashing of the whistleblower, Tucker’s obsessive data-mining of background on the one he alleges to be he is sexed up in it’s own way using a lot of hot-button red meat terms like “left-wing” to make the essential argument Democratic testimony has no validity ever, only trusted pro-Trump Republicans (when kissing Dear Leader’s ass cheeks). Most laughable is Tucker pretending John McLaughlin’s “deep state” quip – clearly made tongue firmly placed in cheek – is a serious admission the conspiratorial ‘deep state’ exists and is trying to destroy Trump.
As Ellen says, it’s Tucker who needs a mental exam. Tucker’s sycophancy has reached alarming levels and desperately requires a professional intervention. I’d add along with his mentally ill narcissist Dear Leader.
Over the years I’ve found that “gutter humour” aka “dirty mouthing” are consistent traits of RWingers, including so many evangelicals who seem to be Christians (capital “C”) in name only.
It bemuses me to realise that so many self-called “Christians” believe that one can do absolutely anything one bloody wants to do and still get into heaven by convincing the angel on duty that one really and truly does believe in God “cross my heart and hope to die”.
If God and St. Peter are anything like they are depicted in the Bible, that gambit won’t work. If it does work, I guess I’ll have to take my chances with the less-hypocritical side of the Biblic divide.
I’ll just second the warning Ellen is making here – the outing of the man that angry Right Wingers SAY is one of the whistleblowers (and we don’t know that their assumptions are correct at this point) is clearly intended to generate real danger for him.
(And we should remember that it’s irrelevant who the whistleblower is – as Ellen notes, the actual complaint has been repeatedly verified from multiple sources. Just as it’s irrelevant whether the first whistleblower was on the actual call – since they were getting identical accounts of the call from multiple staffers who were concerned – and now that we have the verifications, the issue is about the conduct itself, not the person who originally mentioned it.)
The obvious intention of Rush Limbaugh and disgraced predator Bill O’Reilly is to dox the man – so that he can be repeatedly harassed and likely attacked in every form, including physically, as a warning to anyone else who dares step forward and reveal the uncomfortable truths of the goon behavior of the Pence White House.
This was the same approach taken with Dr. Blasey Ford from last year, where she has repeatedly been harassed with death threats and forced to live away from home, thanks to all the angry Right Wingers who have persecuted her for having the temerity to tell the truth about Brett Kavanaugh. And in the case of Dr. Ford, that approach has helped to discourage anyone else from coming forward – as was of course their intention.
I have a very real concern that the more unhinged among the Right Wing listeners of Limbaugh and his ilk and viewers of gargoyles like Carlson may take matters farther in their own hands. If we hear of anything happening to this man, we’ll have a replay of what happened to George Tiller. And I note that predator O’Reilly has repeated his conduct with this new target. I remind everyone that O’Reilly has never apologized or taken even one iota of responsibility for what happened to Tiller. I expect neither he nor Carlson will take any responsibility if something happens to the man these guys are now targeting.
