Of Course We're Fucking Gleeful Over Tucker Carlson Being Fired. Do You Blame Us?

All over Left Commentaria last week, an orgasmic yawp of glee was released, along with a good many actual orgasms, when Fox "news" announced that it had fired its biggest star, Tucker Carlson. The thrillingly ecstatic schadenfreude only grew exponentially as more details came out: Carlson and everyone outside the executive suite were caught off-guard by the firing, it was effective immediately, and his last show was on Friday, April 21, when he had promised he'd be back on Monday, with promos for whatever fuckery he was gonna do running earlier on the day he was fired. In the corporate world, this is an execution. The only reason he wasn't escorted out by security is that he wasn't in the building. But Carlson's email was cut off, and he wasn't even told why he was fired, which means he had all the job protections of a McDonald's worker, which, c'mon, that's just fuckin' funny. (Yeah, I know that a fired McDonald's worker doesn't get a huge payout, but I'm talking the actual firing.)

This reaction goes beyond just feeling great because someone awful lost their job and lost their megaphone. Generally, when we get to feel this way, it's fairly late in the career of the receiver of the boot, whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck fading into online isolation in their TV twilight (they do have big audiences, but no reach beyond the audience whatsoever) or Rush Limbaugh dying about 20 years after it would have made a difference or Megyn Kelly trying to go legit and flopping. Gratifying as all that was, it pales in comparison to Carlson's firing because none of the others had the political cache' he had at the time of the end of his current career. They may once have, but Carlson's savage ejection from the Fox "news" compound happened while he was poised to have a huge impact on the 2024 election. 

Tucker Carlson had become a uniquely powerful threat to the nation, and that was by design. His whole career since joining Fox has been centered on vengeance against those who he saw as harming and betraying him, all while gathering an audience of violent racists who saw him as their Goebbels. He mainstreamed white supremacism and Christian nationalism, all with a fraternity president's arrogance and misogyny. He gave hatemongers legitimacy and a microphone, all while coating it in a secret sauce of fake inquisitiveness ("I'm just asking questions" was his version of saying, "I'm just joking" after you've said something really shitty that you totally meant but didn't want to be seen as an obvious asshole for saying). 

Lemme put this another way: He isn't just a motherfucker. He's a motherfucker who loves fucking mothers. He gets his rocks off hurting people. He's got a bully's belief in his own power, and if there was anything Rupert Murdoch wasn't going to stand for, it was someone trying to out-bully or out-motherfucker him. 

If you don't understand what I'm saying, check out his speech at the 50th anniversary gala for the Heritage Foundation (motto: "Providing faux-intellectual cover for your cruelest impulses for a half-century"). He compares abortion to Aztec "human sacrifice." He declares Episcopalianism is "not even a Christian religion at this point." He attacks pronouns and trans people because of course he does.

And then there's this: "You look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs. If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine War, raise your hand."

You got that? The actions over the obvious execution of a Black man by a white cop, a very real pandemic that killed over a million Americans, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia are merely things you end up agreeing with because you want to stay employed. It's impossible for him to conceive of these things as the actual beliefs of "people you know." He is propagating a fantasy that involves, necessarily, calling reality a fantasy. And a lot of assholes buy into that shit wholeheartedly because it tells them that they don't have to give a shit. Giving a shit is hard; it means personal sacrifice and the effort to actually fucking solve problems. Much easier to deny they exist. 

This is why he was such a dangerous bacterial infection in the pisshole of the American soul. He told you that it was not only okay to lack any fucks to give about your fellow humans, but that you were a stronger, better person if you didn't give a fuck about them. In fact, the only humans you were supposed to give a fuck about were the ones that Carlson told you to give a fuck about, the ones like him, and, of course, himself. We on the left do throw around the Nazi comparisons a little loosely, and I'm not simply calling Tucker Carlson a Nazi. I'm going farther. I'm saying that the original Nazis would find a lot to love in Tucker Carlson's show. In fact, our current version of the Nazis sure do love him. And why not? He talks about people in terms of weak and strong, filthy and clean, them and us. We're getting really close to "May as well round them up and put them in camps" followed by that squeaky clown eunuch laugh of his.

Carlson's ejection from the biggest audience he could get is an objective good for the country. He's a sexist, racist attack poodle who put on working-class drag to hide his patrician airs, and he was not only willing to wallow in the foulest shit pools of American fuckery, but he discovered that he liked to swim in shit, that swimming in shit was his truest self, a hateful troll with a god complex.  And it showed too clearly, getting more intense as time went by. To use the epithet he apparently was a little too free with around too many people and in too many emails, Tucker Carlson was fired because he's a cunt. I mean, when you're too much of a cunt for Rupert Murdoch, you're an absolute cunt to your cuntish core.

So, yeah, we're thrilled to see him disappear for a while, even if he's promising to come back. It will take time for him to build the kind of influence he had, where he could make demands of political leaders and give airtime to candidates he supported, boosting their election chances. The bonus? Tucker Carlson's a vindictive little prick, and he'll be trying to settle scores with Fox "news." Until then, enjoy the Tucker-free era, however long it lasts.

The Pleasure of Watching Ron DeSantis Implode

There was never a chance in heaven or hell that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who looks like a 1980s shop teacher who gets off on breaking the birdhouses the kids make to prove "you can't build shit, you little pussy," was going to win the Republican nomination for president. I mean, put aside that Donald Trump owns the GOP no matter how much a few feckless fucks fail to pry it away from his tiny hands. DeSantis has all the personality of an angry Starbucks manager and all the charm of the least charming dung beetle. If you bottled DeSantis's vibe as a scent, it would be "old scrotum and expired Axe body spray." I mean, in Vegas terms, DeSantis is pissed off that the drunks at the buffet at the Tropicana aren't enjoying his terrible magic show while Trump is Siegfried and Roy rolled into one sparkly orange suit.

Beyond personality, though, DeSantis has been repeatedly stepping on his dick, misreading this moment in American history. The retro right in this country think that it's time to turn back the clock on everything, on abortion rights, on multiculturalism, on gender identity, on our understanding of history. With a complicit legislature, DeSantis has embraced this as his agenda, and he preens and prances around the country, pretending that he's some great warrior when, really, he's just "that prick, you know, that prick from Florida."

You can't go around saying stupid shit like "We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die" like DeSantis did in South Carolina this week, a variation on shit he's been saying for months. It's one thing to use the garbage word "woke" to describe everything you don't like. It's something completely different to stand there and pretend that you are some mighty warrior against...who exactly? School teachers? Writers? Cultural theorists? It's one thing to be a simpering little bitch about racism or drag queens. It's another thing altogether when you steal the language that Winston Churchill used in rallying people to fight the Nazis, you know, the ones who actually threatened to bomb and kill their way to conquering England, and use it to show that you are so tough that you'll pass a law that bans books about same sex penguins from classrooms. It's not remotely comparable and you just look like a pussy-ass tool for implying it.

In everything that DeSantis does, he has paths laid out for him: the rational, walk away, sweep it under the rug, everyone will forget about it path or the biggest fucking asshole in the world path. DeSantis has never seen an issue where he doesn't walk that asshole path. He could have just let it go when the Disney corporation criticized the "Don't Say Gay" bill that prevented any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity from K-3 classrooms. Nope. Motherfucker decided it was time to take a stand and attack Disney, one of the biggest employers in the state and, you know, fucking Disney. When Disney outmaneuvered DeSantis on the board that oversees the district Disney World is in, when DeSantis got pimp-slapped by a fucking cartoon mouse (with billions of dollars and the best legal team those billions can buy behind it), he didn't say, "Fuck it" and take the L. Nope again. He expanded "Don't Say 'Gay'" through 12th grade and threatened to do desperate shit like open a prison next to Disney. It's the kind of thing that can get other Republicans to say, "What the fuck are you doing?" to the governor, who got fucking married at Disney.

On abortion, on book bans, on concealed weapons, on academic free speech, and more, DeSantis is, yes, doing what he campaigned on, but it's fucking exhausting the Republicans in the state. The nation, especially young voters, look at Florida as if all you'll retch from the stink of sargassum, the seaweed that's smells like rotten eggs when it bakes in the sun, as it will when a giant patch of it lands on Florida's beaches soon. This is not to mention that Donald Trump is smacking around DeSantis with the sadistic glee of an abusive father whose son isn't wearing a suit to a baseball game. Jesus, that must be harsh, considering that DeSantis used his kids in a 2018 ad talking about how vigorously he sucked Trump's dick. And we oddly don't talk anymore about DeSantis kidnapping a bunch of migrants in Texas and flying them to Martha's Vineyard at taxpayer expense. He's just a fucking repulsive pit of pig shit. 

Meanwhile, Florida is fucked. It's fucked in so many ways beyond the seaweed swamp headed its way. Because the state is somewhere between "totally underwater" and "on the way to being totally underwater"on the climate change timeline, every big storm is going to be a fucktastrophe of flooding and fear. That fear, fed by shortages of gasoline and panic buying, which led to more shortages, is only going to get worse and shootier in a state with, you know, all those fucking concealed guns. And this has led to a property insurance crisis that oddly can't be solved by forcing teachers to subject their 1st-grade classroom libraries to an approval committee. It's true. You can't mitigate a 40% hike in your homeowners insurance by not telling kids about Rosa Parks.

Florida is one of a dozen states that haven't taken advantage of expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and the crisis that's going to cause is coming soon, along with the nursing shortage that is especially going to hit a state with a large elderly population. DeSantis likes to brag about Florida's supposed great reaction to Covid, but that relies on the short-term memory loss of Floridians. Shit got bad there, really bad, and it's not prepared if it gets bad again.

And yet he could have gotten past all of this if he wasn't such a proud cunt about everything. He's a void of charisma, so lacking in personality that he could say, "Florida is where charm goes to die" and you couldn't argue with him. So, no, he's not getting elected to anything outside of his increasingly dumb and deranged and dirty state. 

One of the great pleasures of this filthy, fucked age we're damned to exist in is watching the implosion of political figures who the posh pundits praise. We've gotten to see the collapse of Rudy Giuliani, the deflation of Chris Christie, and now the utter humiliation of Ron DeSantis. The best part is he's such a smug bastard that he'll stay on this damned path, snarling into oblivion. We can all eat our pudding cups with a spoon as we enjoy the crash.

A Note to Breathless Conservatives: Bill Clinton Was Almost Indicted in 2001, But He Cut a Deal

Lemme lay some history on you conservative motherfuckers now that you're losing your shit over Donald Trump's indictment on a shit-ton of felonies for financial chicanery. I mean, beyond the furious masturbatory screams of "election interference" and "unprecedented" and "partisan politics" and other things that simply aren't assertions of Trump's innocence, just about the stupidest fucking thing you're saying is that "If they can do it to Trump, what will you do when they try to indict a Democratic president?" 

I mean, you've got the whine squad turned up to full air raid horn. Smarmy cockmite Jesse Watters urged future prosecutions of Democratic former presidents when (if, really) a Republican is in the White House again. Rep. James "Abortions for Women I Impregnate, But None for You" Comer claimed that prosecutors in Tennessee and Kentucky want to go after Joe Biden and that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg "opened up a can of worms; they’ve set precedents now we can’t go back on." The Wall Street Journal (motto: "Hard news shell around a soft toxic waste dump of commentary") declared, "If there was ever a case that opens Pandora’s box, the first indictment of a former President in U.S. history is it," a hyperbolic response that was echoed by other screechy dicks. Of course, Tucker Carlson tuckered carlsonly, saying that Trump wouldn't be indicted if he wasn't running for president. Dumbest of all, Charlie "Forehead of doom" Kirk tweeted, "I bet Bill Clinton is a little nervous he's now fair game." 

First, fuck yeah, indict presidents. Presidents should be scared of committing crimes. As just about everyone sane has said, if we had prosecuted Nixon, if we had prosecuted Reagan, if we had prosecuted W. Bush, this shit might not be happening. We pretend to be this grand and glorious nation of laws but we want to act like a president is a fucking king except for the inconvenience of elections. Absolutely indict criminals. And people who committed crimes that they're hiding shouldn't run for president because that's just dumb. Or Trump. It's hard to separate those two words.

You'll notice I left Bill Clinton out of that list of prosecution-worthy presidents. It's not because I think he shouldn't have been indicted for perjury. He obviously committed it. It's because everyone has fucking forgotten one fact:

They were about to indict Clinton in 2001 when he cut a deal to avoid it. 

You got that? When Bill Clinton was at the very end of his presidency, as a result of the Whitewater investigation, the independent counsel, who was then Robert Ray after Kenneth Starr finally got the fuck out, was looking to indict Clinton for perjury about that blow job from Monica Lewinsky. If it had gone forward, Bill Clinton would have been an ex-president when he was indicted. If he had raged and blustered about it being untrue and told everyone to go fuck themselves with their perjury, he would have been indicted. As an ex-president. Trump could have cut a deal a long time ago, but he didn't go the Clinton route because he refuses to ever say he's wrong because he's a tiny-pricked ego monster.

See, Clinton gave up his law license in Arkansas for five years and paid a $25,000 fine, and he admitted he made false statements about the blow job. And then the whole investigation was closed with a report that pissed off a lot Clinton haters, but that pointed out how much Clinton was actually punished, including an $850k settlement with Paula Jones (google her - I don't feel like going into all that) and a $90,000 fine for contempt of court. 

It's also worth noting that the entire Whitewater matter started over a failed real estate deal prior to Clinton's presidency. Google that, too, if you want to sit there and think, "What the fuck?" and "Really?" for a few hours. The fellatio perjury was just something that got folded into it because reasons (mostly that there actually was a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get the Clintons, but, again, google is your friend here, not me).

So, yeah, hysterical right-wingers and Fox "news" liars, maybe shut the fuck up about the "damage" that Trump's indictment will do to democracy. Democracy needs this shit to happen to be stronger. As one editorial board noted, our leaders "should be indicted, upholding the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law." Strong words. You know who said that? The fucking Wall Street Journal back in January 2001. 

Pandora's box, my ass.