If you're looking to have your brain ripped out and replaced with a dog's plastic chew toy but don't have the sort of money that would convince a real surgeon to do the deed, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson is the man to go to. Flip on your television, America, and forget everything you have ever known or will know. Be the potted plant you aspire to be. Park yourself on that couch and pretend you are moss, soft and silent as you take in the rays of the Tucker Carlson sun.
Yes, what sort of authoritarian monster would demand their political opponents be locked up for spurious reasons? Who would fantasize about such things? And so forth.
We'll skip the highlight reel that would go here because none of us need it. Oh, but Carlson clearly didn't run his latest deeply held principle by the rest of the party, which would make things awkward if any of these people gave a flying damn about anything they say or do, which they do not.
Oh Rand. I fondly remember those days when you were clinging to your father's fundraising list like a breastfeeding baby, back before you had any self-awareness of your own, back when you were little more than a walking, talking extension of that conspiracy-mongering, racist newsletter your dad put out. Look at yourself, Rand. You grew up to be Steve Scalise. You grew up to be a less charismatic Kevin McCarthy. I mean, ew.
But the main problem here is that satire, which was already confined to an iron lung by the time the George W. Bush administration came around, has finally been rendered useless by the very existence of Carlson and his ilk. It has been murdered. It has died. Satire requires very little to exist, but it does require targets who are not already physically manifested cartoons. There is no point in putting your thumb in the eye of a multimillionaire with his own television show if the show consists of the host putting both thumbs in both eyes every day of the week.
Oh, Tucker. Poor, poor Tucker.
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We've known for two decades now that Americans who watch Fox News come away knowing less about news events than those who watch no news at all. We've known that Fox is, and always has been, an outlet that sucks knowledge of news events out of your head and replaces them with the daily ramblings of an unending series of loud and wealthy white male perverts.
Now, though, I think more study is in order. What does the brain activity look like in patients who are repeatedly exposed to Tucker damn Carlson saying one thing one day, making a contradictory claim the next, and erasing both arguments to present a third on the day after? What does the little graph look like in people who have been gaslit for such a long period of time that they likely have no memory of what life was like before Tucker started whinging at them?
Can they still recognize the emotions of other humans after being fed a diet of nothing but one face vacillating forever between "confused dog wondering where the ball went" and "desperately holding in a fart?"
Forget whether any of them believe Carlson on any given night—that is far beside the point. Does Carlson's thickheaded inability to stick to even one goddamn principle cause lasting injury to airport workers exposed to a daily diet of the stuff?
Is Carlson the asbestos of our age? The leaded gas of the new millennium? Will your loved ones be entitled to compensation in a joint settlement hashed out two decades from now?
"I love Trump, like as a person," Carlson announced on somebody else's Tuesday radio show after a lawsuit against Fox News revealed Carlson texts in which the dead-eyed moneybags groaned that he hated Trump "passionately."
Does Carlson know what "passionately" means? That's unclear, but he's a master operator when it comes to the words "lie" and "grovel." Carlson has two thumbs and two eyes, and if he had more of either he'd call Donald Trump up personally to get his advice on what to do with the extras.
It's just sad at this point. Modern Republicanism is immune to satire because the movement is addicted to clowning itself before anyone else gets the chance to. You can't strip dignity from people who base their whole personas around not having any.
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