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Today in “you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” besides (waves hand in general direction of everything), Tucker Carlson has slithered back into our consciousness. But there is a silver lining here, which we promise we’ll get to, just as soon as we finish scrubbing our skin with steel wool.
Anyway, Tucker Carlson. What a versatile journalist! (Sorry, “journalist.”) A week ago he was in Budapest interviewing Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban. A head of state is a pretty good get for any journalist, even if that journalist is basically a propagandist and a cheerleader for Orban’s brand of fascism. And even if the resulting interview only streams on Tucker’s public-access-production-level Twitter feed. And even if the interview is so obsequious and fawning that Chuck Todd would have been embarrassed to conduct it.
So of course this week Tucker followed it up by reviving some old crack-smoking and gay sex pud-pulling accusations against Barack Obama. Emulating the career arc of 2008-era Glenn Beck is certainly a choice.
You old hands may recall this story from waaaaaay deep in the Wonkette archive. (Boy, we wrote short back then!) Larry Sinclair was a scammer, a convicted felon and a con man. In January of 2008, Sinclair was running around telling anyone who would listen (mostly Joseph Farah at World Net Daily) that he and Obama had had a crack-fueled gay sex orgy in the back of a limo in 1999, when Obama was a back-bench legislator in Illinois.
For some reason this was supposed to make Obama look bad, and not like a dude who knew how to party, we guess?
Sinclair even managed to book time at the National Press Club in Washington DC to push his tale, which was fucking disgusting even by the “both sides” standards of national political journalism. Unfortunately for him, his speech at the club ended with US Marshals arresting him on an out-of-state warrant in what we feel comfortable labeling as the lamest episode of Justified ever.
He then proceeded to fail a polygraph test on the subject, then accused Obama campaign manager David Axelrod of paying $750,000 to rig the test. Subsequent investigations into his background revealed he had spent time in prison in three different states on charges of fraud and forgery. In 2004 he tried to get a warrant dismissed by claiming he had a terminal illness, yet here he is still going strong almost 20 years later.
Larry Sinclair is not exactly credible, is the upshot we’re trying to convey here.
Luckily other people watched the interview so we didn’t have to. And it sounds as if it went just about as one would expect. Like The Guardian, whose columnist should send us her Venmo details so we can buy her a beer:
The segment, which aired on Monday night, was full of racist dog whistles (at one point, for example, Carlson claimed nobody could pronounce Obama’s name despite it being really very easy to pronounce) and barely veiled homophobia. Carlson made sure he signaled to his audience that he was very, very heterosexual and if a man ever attempted to try it on with him he’d break his hand.
Tucker’s getting busted in a Motel 6 with a wetsuit and a Madonna backup dancer one day. Book it.
But here is the silver lining we mentioned an eternity and a long swim through a river of shit ago. A year ago, Tucker Carlson had the highest-rated talk show in cable news. At one point, it was the highest-rated cable news talk show in history. Republican politicians would step on their own mothers to get two minutes on Tucker’s show. Granted those politicians were the likes of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and JD Vance, but water, as the saying goes, tends to find its own level.
Right, what were we just saying about that? It was the last sentence.
Then Fox News fired Tucker, depriving him of the visibility that comes with an 8 p.m. timeslot. Now he’s reduced to trawling the dregs of ancient World Net Daily smear jobs that had been lost in the mists of time for 15 years and, upon rematerializing, sound just as implausible now as they did back when Dubya Bush was president and most of us thought of Donald Trump as being nothing more than an attention-starved real estate developer.
The point is: Deplatforming works. Hoo boy, does it work. No matter how many streams Tucker’s pathetic little Twitter video diaries rack up, he occupies nowhere near the cultural heights that he occupied at Fox.
It ain’t much in the face of (again waves hand in general direction of everything). But we’ll take it.
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