Oh My God, 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, writing, one assumes for a large check, for Politico:
... 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.
"if only they stopped posturing"?!?
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?
Excerpted from Driftglass
