Tucker Carlson – who ripped Donald Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine in print and then pretended otherwise on Fox News – is attacking Sen. Mitt Romney for daring to honor his oath of office and his conscience by voting to remove Donald Trump at the conclusion of his impeachment trial.
Yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of Romney’s vote, Fox News tried to dismiss it as “a blip” that “will not really matter all that much.” But Romney knew that it was only a matter of time before he’d face a torrent of right-wing backlash and abuse. “Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?” he said. But, he concluded, “I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me.”
Tucker Carlson stepped up to the plate to smear Romney in the most hypocritical and childish way.
With his trademark frat boy “humor” the 50 year-old Carlson sneered that impeachment was like the Titanic: “Oh, pretty gripping!” he snarked.
Before long, Carlson turned his ire on Romney. For extra Fox-smearing value, Carlson skipped over Romney’s stirring and memorable words and began by likening him to a Democrat:
CARLSON: A lone Republican, as you may have read, defected and joined the Democrats.
That senator shall go unnamed on this show, on the grounds that silly moral preening should not be rewarded with the publicity it is designed to garner. An overwrought, ethics lecture from a private equity guy? Next thing you know, some payday-loan sleazeball will be telling us we're all going to hell.
We saw a graphic of Romney adorned with a French beret, mustache, and baguette above a headline that read: “PIERRE DELECTO STRIKES AGAIN.”(Pierre Delecto is the name of Romney’s once-secret Twitter account.)
Ethics policeman Carlson took a gratuitous swipe at Al Sharpton, maybe just to let his white supremacist fan base know he hasn’t forgotten them during the race-neutral impeachment trial.
CARLSON: It's just too absurd, even for the ludicrous moment we're living in. We'll take that seriously just as soon as we decide that Al Sharpton is a legitimate moral voice. So enough of that.
What’s really too absurd is for a guy like Carlson to claim the moral high ground here (or probably anywhere). In print he blasted Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine, which was at the heart of Trump’s impeachment. There, Carlson described the call as “pretty over-the-top” and warned Republicans who were trying to spin it that such behavior would lead to America becoming “just another of the world’s many corrupt countries.” The Fox News Carlson derided the issue as “a phone call Donald Trump once made to some guy in Ukraine.”
In other words, Carlson had the chance to stand up for principle but didn’t. Instead, he used middle-school-bully taunts to smear the guy who did.
Watch Carlson try to cover up his spinelessness below, from the February 5, 2020 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Romney claims that his faith requires that an oath to God be examined by his conscience. While the rest of the Repub’s have suddenly become rather squishy on a lot of heretofore accepted Republican/Christian ideas.
It’s hard to keep up with all of the ways a Republican can sell their soul to the devil of late.
Interesting to see Carlson suddenly attacking Romney as a “private equity guy”. Carlson was all about defending Romney from attacks about that in 2012, when he thought the Dems were somehow out of line to bring that up. Guess he had a change of heart for some reason.