Tucker Carlson seems to think that if he spends a lot of time accusing the rest of the media of dishonesty, people won’t notice that he just made s*** up when he suggested Jill Biden is nothing more than a caretaker for her senile husband.
Carlson began by claiming to love America – then spent the rest of his 11-minute screed tearing it apart
CARLSON: We spend an awful lot of time in the show night after night trying to explain what is happening to our country, and it's depressing a lot of the time because the answer is always the same.
America is not rotten, it's a great place. The people who run it are rotten, so you've been betrayed by the people who lead you. And that's why things are so volatile.
What you're looking at is a crisis of our institutions, our institutions are corrupt; some of them are collapsing.
We say that a lot because it's true, but we should be more precise. Not all of our institutions are the same. Some of them are bad, some of them are awful.
But looming above the rest is the worst of all, and that's the news media. They're the most corrupt. How corrupt is the news media? Imagine a drunken teenage border guard at the crossing between Togo and Burkina Faso, shaking you down at midnight as you pass through.
"The New York Times" is much more corrupt than that. The media are more crooked than Jimmy Hoffa ever was. They are more dishonest than your average bribe taking building inspector in Queens. They are more treacherous than the mafia. They make cops in Tijuana look trustworthy.
Takes one to know one, Tucker. I remember the time you deliberately endangered New York Times journalists with lies; that Fox News defended a libel suit against you by saying you shouldn't be trusted to tell the truth; and your ridiculous lie that Joe Biden supports abortions for men. I’ll bet that everybody remembers the time you called white supremacy “a hoax,” immediately followed by a “pre-planned” mid-week “vacation,” not so different from the “vacation” Lou Dobbs took, except that you were allowed to come back.
Carlson went on with his projection:
CARLSON: [I]magine if lying was your job. Imagine forcing yourself to tell lies all day about everything in ways that were so transparent and so outlandish that there is no way that people listening to you could possibly believe anything you said.
Then imagine doing that again and again, and again, every day of your professional life for your entire life.
The ever-vicious, routine-liar Carlson went on to sneer and jeer about CNN ("they achieved feats so dishonororable that you gasp in horror as you watch them”) and, of course MSNBC.
Carlson worked in a sympathetic shoutout to white supremacists and QAnon
CARLSON: Everyone is welcome under this [mainstream media] tent. They're all invited, except the white supremacists and the QAnon people and anyone else who disagrees with anything we say, they're all going to jail. But the rest are more than welcome to stay and obey our commands.
Trump TV’s prime time host whined about favorable coverage of President Biden
Carlson proved he’s a hypocrite as well as a liar. He likened coverage of Biden to coverage of "the North Korean gymnastics team celebrating Kim Il-sung day in a soccer stadium in Pyongyang."
Oh, you mean like your colleague Harris Faulkner gushing over notoriously lazy Donald Trump’s amazing energy? Your buddies at Fox & Friends slobbering over Trump’s photo op at the Daytona 500? Or how about this so-called question from “journalist” Maria Bartiromo: “I’ve never seen anybody that can take a punch and get right back up and keep punching and where does this resilience come from that you keep getting things done in the face of all of this?”
Because as everyone but the most blindly-loyal Fox fan knows, slobbering over Republicans and conservatives and demonizing Democrats and liberals is what Fox passes off as journalism.
Carlson’s sleazy insinuations about the Biden marriage
Even Biden’s marriage was nothing more than hate-mongering fodder for this pathetic excuse for a news host. Carlson hinted with sarcasm, not facts (just indefinite enough to avoid another libel suit, probably), that Jill Biden is just a “nurse” to Joe Biden:
CARLSON: Joe Biden's family is refreshingly normal. There aren't any weird sex scandals or protracted drug problems or ongoing criminal investigations you've got to worry about. You want to know what the Bidens are doing this weekend? A recent headline in "Newsweek" will tell you quote: "Joe Biden wins in Mario Kart race against granddaughter at Camp David." It's wholesome stuff like that, not secretly lobbying for China, not impregnating strippers from Arkansas. No, they're playing Mario Kart with the grandkids just like you.
And at the heart of this great American family is a love story. One man, one woman in the fires of passion that changed the course of our history. Not since Anthony dining with Cleopatra in downtown Antioch, before they killed themselves obviously, has a country witnessed a love story as moving and poignant as Jill and Joe's. No, ladies and gentlemen, Jill Biden is not Joe's caretaker. She isn't his nurse. She is his fully equal romantic partner.
Together they are like besotted teens, yet at the same time, they are the wise and knowing parents of a nation as the headline from POLITICO on Valentine's Day put it quote: "Historians and relationship experts agree, the first couple's romantic gestures aren't just genuine -- they're restorative."
So it's official. The Biden's affection is totally real. It's in no way part of a slick PR campaign devised by cynical consultants determined to hide the President's senility by misdirection. Not at all.
What’s the matter, Tucker, jealous?
You can watch Carlson prove there’s no low too low for him to stoop below, from the February 17, 2021 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Heinlein totally ignored the whole issue of the media and the power of lies in the mouths of the unscrupulous. That’s where Orwell really hit the mark.
The work that really makes my blood run cold, dear Ellen, is Orwell’s “1984”. I sometimes believe that man had a time machine and had actually visited our time before writing. I know that’s probably not the case because I’ve just finished reading the 4-volume of Orwell’s essays, letters and other non-book works. A fantastic foray into how his thinking evolved from post WWI to his death in the late 1940s. Pity I had to return those volumes to the person I borrowed them from.
- people stop identifying themselves with their country as a whole and start identifying with a group (racial, religion, language, anything).
- economic imbalances (where Heinlein seems to me to be rather more a conservative than otherwise),
- loss of faith in the police and the courts,
- laws that everyone knows cannot be enforced (like the prohibition against walking around naked in one’s own home).
Heinlein touches on the issues of gender and racial inequality pretty thoroughly throughout the book, but ignores the role of outright lying by media like Fox(not)News and hosts like Tucker.
Can’t have everything, I guess.
“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named … but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
