The Republican Party has been drowning in its own crapulance for some time now. The long and drawn out takeover of the conservative movement by far-right MAGA and Tea Party-inspired aggrievement has been going on for some time. The right-wing media has had to figure out how to propagandize this conflict between the aging political establishment of the Republican Party and the nihilistically fascist leadership that has risen over the past two decades.
This means that people like Tucker Carlson who could once simply crib old William F. Buckley talking points now have to work nightly, spinning word salad phrases and rollercoaster-style emotional performances. The latter is a way to obfuscate the stark evidence that the Republican Party not only lacks policy solutions for Americans, its philosophical and moral tenets have diminished to quantum level. Add to this the fact that conservatives don’t believe in math or science, and leaving your morality at quantum level is as good as having nothing at all.
On Thursday, after two weeks where President Joe Biden scored domestic and global political points by actualizing being the kind of president only a simp Donald Trump cartoonist can offer the MAGA world, Carlson brought on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to speak. Why would you want to do that? Because Greene has been very vocal, and undeterred by reality, in her strange attacks on U.S. support of Ukraine against an invading Russian oligarchy.
The segment was as wild as you might imagine.
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Telling Greene that she has been lonely in her pursuit of anti-Ukrainian policy ideas, Carlson describes her Quixotic attempts “to wake up your own party to what they’re supporting which is Joe Biden’s chief, and craziest policy aim. Like, what is this?” The reason he says, “Like, what is this?” is because the messaging at this point, in the MAGA world and the propaganda wing specifically, is so devoid of logic that he has to ask his guest how she wants to frame something so patently incoherent. Saying “like” is Carlson’s lazy brain just giving out on the question part of his … question.
You might want to buckle your seat belt and put pillows around your chair. Greene explains that this is a war “against Russia in Ukraine.” Not a typo.
“This war against Russia in Ukraine.” How’s that for framing? After picking yourself up off of the ground and waking up from that mind-bending trip through the looking glass, Greene pivots to talking about “the border” and “crime.”
Before we jump all over how bizarre a personality and politician Greene is, just remember that she’s simply trying, in her somehow less articulate way, to work the old Pat Buchanan playbook from yesteryear.
Then again, the next part of Greene’s rant puts the “huh?” in “Wha-huh?” She rambles about how Carlson is “one of the few people that tells the truth like the American people feel and talk and think, on television.” Really think about that sort of sentence thingy she said there. But don’t think too long! She then says, “like I say in Congress, but yet, we’re the ones who are supposed to be for Putin? I don’t think so. You know who’s for China?”
Yes. She somehow said that and Carlson did his laughing thing he does when there’s no logic to what he or his guest are saying. It is a trigger for his audience to believe that they missed whatever the “joke” was in something that was clearly incoherent and confusing. It is sort of an old performer’s trick of getting the audience to mirror your face in order to glide past leaps of logic and bad jokes. It’s the same as the “sharp noise” pumped into George’s ears through his government-issued transmitter in Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron.
Greene proceeds to call everyone besides her in Congress “idiots,” and then makes some more hyperbolic statements about the Ohio train derailment—the one Republican officials helped create and then allowed to happen. If you have any questions as to how Carlson and his program producers feel about Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy versus, say, I don’t know, Vladimir Putin, just check out the chyron.
President Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, on Presidents’ Day was an important moment in American foreign policy, and also an equally important moment in public relations for the Democratic Party. It showed America’s support for a free and independent Ukraine, but not from an imperialistic position. Republicans haven’t had a coherent foreign policy platform besides U.S. imperialism, and now find themselves pulled in various directions as potential conservative presidential candidates try to figure out what exactly they want to pretend to believe in.
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