Yippee, I get to Talk Tucker!

Sometimes fate is on your side. As you stare at a huge pile of dung, the shifting winds of the world place something beautiful in your hands. Not a hunk of gold. Not a diamond. But a truly bespoke, unique, and captivating piece of dung.

And wow did we get one of those this week. Before we keep going, watch this clip that went viral from a two-hour conversation between Senator “Insult My Wife, Please!” Ted Cruz and “White Nationalist Upset That His Waiter Has An Ethnically Slavic Name” Tucker Carlson. We’re gonna come back to it a few times, but watch it once now.

So, what do we have here? An argument between two wings of MAGA about whether or not we should help Israel attack Iran. That much is clear.

But the caption lays it out this way: Tucker embarasses Ted Cruz. And of course that’s the caption, because The Tennessee Holler is one of those politico-slop churn factories that make videos for Boomers to watch every night before they slip into their faded “It’s Mueller Time!” pajama shirt. You know the accounts - every day they pump out youtube videos with a terrified picture of Trump and a brave picture of whatever third-rate former cabinet official or unemployed former Republican they’ve snagged as a guest for the day. There are ton of these out there, all farming clicks off people who after 10 years think the downfall of MAGA is one scandal or election away and not something 77 million people just voted for. They are like blind mole rats in a burrow, suckling at the anesthetizing teat of false victories scrounged from whatever clips have gone viral that day.

In other words, not an objective or expert source!

But, and I rarely do this, I am an expert source on Tucker. I was one of the primary writers on what is likely the longest and most in-depth hammering of Tuck that’s ever aired on television.

My first draft of this episode was a full hour long. It was a dream come true. Some people want to do deep dives on housing or tax rates or if we can cancel the Club World Cup now that we’ve all realized it’s a bad idea. Not me. Tucker is and has been my #1 Dipshit To Talk About for years, and it was a delight to dive into his bullshit and find some bespoke nuggs.

If you haven’t watched it… I guess clear half an hour watch it and come back. Or if you don’t have time for that, I’ll explain that the thrust of the episode is that Tucker Carlson is a privileged idiot who has made a living turning quizzical fallacies into something that resembles a working and functioning brain, which scientists have confirmed he does not have. He is not particularly smart, his bouts of success vacillate with incredible embarrassing failure — he was laid low on Crossfire and fell from grace, then built a show on Fox and imploded and fell from grace, and this week he got his ass beat in public by the President:

“Come back and talk to me when you’re on television” is ur-Trump insult.

Which is why I was so incredibly surprised when I saw the reaction from “the left” to the video of Tucker and Cruz. [Now is when you want to scroll back and watch it again, I’m not going to post it twice that’d be weird.] Many people, from the center Left (aka GOP Lite) to the “Salvaging My Media Career By Being Resistance” writers and pundits to some actual honest-to-God leftists, were cheering that Tucker exposed/beat/imploded/crushed/insert-violent-verb-here’d Cruz.

And I want to say this politely, but… I cannot believe they’re that stupid.

I mean I feel like I’m watching David Blaine come out and do the street levitation thing and everyone’s screaming and crying in the streets. We’ve seen the trick, guys. We saw how it worked. We took it apart. We know the whole deal.

How in the world are y’all still falling for it?

Let’s breeze over the fact that post-Fox News Fall, there is significant evidence Tucker is a witting or unwitting agent for Russia. (You may have missed his infomercial on location from a Moscow grocery store crowing over how cheap the prices are.) Which, if you stitch together any kind of geopolitical understanding, could significantly impact his views on Iran. But that’s all substance — let’s get back to the part where ostensibly shrewd people are getting tricked by the machinery.

Tucker has a lot of moves (go back and watch the LWT episode) but quite a few of them work better on a chyron-filled monologue than they do sitting down doing “a podcast with cameras on.”

AND LOOK, I GET THAT AT THIS POINT YOU MIGHT BE OBJECTING SO LET ME ADDRESS THAT IN AN ASIDE THAT WAS GONNA BE IN A LITTLE BOX BUT IS NOW SO LONG I THINK THE BOX WOULD MAKE IT LOOK WEIRD ON THE PAGE:

You might be saying “Greg! Cruz sucks! And he’s getting nailed here! That’s great! What is wrong with you, why are you denying us this moment of joy of slamming Ted Cruz! Boo, Greg, boo! You’re the problem here! Tucker is doing things we like for once!”

And, buddy, I gotta tell you — there is no way you out-disdain Ted Cruz than I do. Has he insulted a member of your family personally? Been rude to people you know? Probably yes because his entire life is a tornado of misery but if those are true then we’re tied! Ted Cruz is insane, and bad, and says things in the rest of this interview that are absolute batshit insane — I mean, this is a guy who still thinks he could win the nomination of the Republican Party! What’s more delusional, his candidacy or thinking that goatee is working for him? Heyooo Greg, you found the jokes again, time to get out of this aside and back to the main point!

Okay - Tucker’s moves all drive toward one ultimate goal. And I want you to think about the internet’s reaction to the Cruz video when I tell you what his goal is.

All of Tucker’s moves are built to make his bad and dumb positions sound reasonable. His goal is not that you agree, or you think he’s 100% right. It’s that you think he is smart and reasonable and making real grown-up arguments that are based on thought and belief and a concrete universe.

Tucker has one move he’s leaning on heavily in this clip, and to explain it I’ll use another clip of a white man being insufferable, from the 2005 film Thank You For Smoking. Have you seen it? Doesn’t matter! Because in about one minute, Eckhart lays out the False Dichotomy fallacy and explains to you one of Tucker’s core moves.

This is what Tucker does to Cruz.

Do you know exactly how many people live in Iran?” “No.” Suddenly becomes “Wow! How interesting! You don’t know ANYTHING about Iran and you want to bomb it?!?¹ ” One might ask a reader of this blog, do you know the population of Ukraine? Does that number impact your belief on whether we should or should not defend if from Russia? Are those two facts intractably connected? No? Wow, you’ve escaped the trap!

I feel legitimately, truly nauseated having to lay out why this is a stupid and childish rhetorical device, but let’s do it once if the ice cream wasn’t enough.

You and I are two parties interested in buying a house. We are both in the living room with the realtor, looking around the house. You say you love the house. I say “Do you know the cubic footage of this house?” You say no. I giggle and fiddle with my bowtie and say “Interesting, you say you love this house but you don’t know anything about it! You’re a liar! Look at the liar everyone!” You wonder what the hell is going on. I do a little dance and try to forget that my heiress mom hated me so much as a child she left me a single dollar in her will. So let’s hit it again.

If you need to re-watch Harvey Dent explain ice cream, this is a great time. Because that’s exactly what Tucker does. Either you know the exact population of Iran, or you don’t know anything about Iran. Those are the only two options, and he needs Cruz to fit into the second one so he can make himself look reasonable.

And Cruz snaps at him after this — not just because of frustration with the game but because Cruz (as he lays out more plainly in other parts of the interview) has watched Tucker evolve from churlish imp to failed agitprop factory and he knows the game. He loved the years Tucker did this to his enemies and now he can’t believe Tuck won’t drop it for their face to face. But the snap is also revealing.

Tucker creates another one: either you call for retaliatory military strikes or you don’t believe Iran is trying to kill Trump.²  

To quote another problematic outsider who took on the Deep State of his country… is this your bow-tied king? This guy embarassed Ted Cruz? Honey, Ted can do that himself, you just watched two coyotes fight over a greasy KFC box and wanted to call one a winner. You want to take on Ted Cruz? That can happen. And it can happen without you “having to hand it to” a rich WASP who fumbled several bags in a row and is now doing a cross between Art Bell’s Coast to Coast³ and an even less coherent Rogan.

There are so many bad actors out there, but if people are going to spend their lives online watching all these villains fight, they should at least memorize their superpowers. A large swath of the internet is giving props to Even Less Likable Loki, and frankly… that is what’s truly embarrassing.

1  Let’s keep in mind as well that Trump doesn’t give two shits if Cruz wants him to bomb Iran or not, he’s going to use a 20+ year old AUMF to bomb them if he wants and the Senate is absolutely powerless to do anything about it unless they’re going to rewrite Republican policy on war powers out of the blue. So the insinuation that Cruz could be responsible for bombing Iran even if he wanted to is not the reality we’re living in.”

2  [An Iranian government asset] told the FBI that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him this past September to set aside other work he was doing and assemble a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan. - AP Reporting 11/9/2024

3  Seriously, go to his YouTube page and look up the list of guests. 9/11 truthers, religious nuts, Russian state ministers, crypto bros, quack doctors, his thumbnails are one alien abduction away from coming with red string and a corkboard.