July 25, 2010

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We've all seen the type. The standoffish, petulant misfit who doesn't really have any friends but wants to be in the center of everyone's group. When they don't get what they want they start playing gossip games and trying to turn one against the other.

Tucker Carlson is one of those. Eclipsed back in the day by Anderson Cooper on CNN, he moved on to MSNBC, where he didn't quite fit, and from there to Fox where he is comfortably nondescript and not particularly useful.

But Tucker is resourceful, cunning, cruel, and petty like most conservatives, so the idea of weaseling his way onto a private listserv where members thought they were speaking on a private email list in order to then publish those private emails selectively...well, that was too delicious for Tucker to resist. I'd call him the Hedda Hopper of the Internet age but that gives him too much stature.

Long story short: Tucker weasels his way onto a private listserv of journalists owned by Ezra Klein which, to everyone's shock and awe, has...liberal journalists on it. Oh, the horror, the awful, awful horror.

And then, I read his intellectually dishonest, lizard-scaly, creepy self-justification and just had to say it: This Daily Caller has no balls.

Tucker rushes to his own defense with this:

To be clear: We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption.

Errrrr...what part of being a senior fellow at Cato Institute isn't partisan, Tucker? Just sayin'. And no, it's not a species of intellectual corruption. Human beings are, by their nature, social and tend to gather in affinity groups where they share similar goals, outlooks, hopes and dreams. Partisanship is but one way of expressing that.

Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.

Why TUCKER, I'm so glad you looked in the mirror! You might have even seen your reflection if it weren't daylight and you weren't a slimy little vampire sucking notoriety off of ginned up blown out of proportion pronouncements. But hey, let's just see whether you actually measure up to your own standard.

I could go on, and on, and on. But you get the idea. And while we're on the topic of the corruption of journalism, perhaps it's worth pointing out that Tucker Carlson's petty two-bit "who can pee farther" contest with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann smacks of desperate penis ratings envy?

But this-- this might just frame Tucker Carlson's hypocrisy perfectly. From a Salon interview when he was pimping his book:

...even though we claim to withhold judgment until we know all the facts, but we don't, all the times. And our prisons are nAoot packed with innocent men, but there are some. And I think we all, especially those of us in the press, ought to remember that.

Unless, that is, your name is Tucker Carlson and you're a slimy weasel named Tucker Carlson who slithered onto a private email list and made a lot of weaselly Tucker Carlson promises about not flaming and then cherry-picked the email list to paint liberal journalists as incompetent partisans because your name is Tucker Carlson and you're a pathetic loser who couldn't figure out a REAL STORY. If that's who you are, then you're just pathetic.

Not innocent. Not a journalist. Not immune. Just pathetic.

Update: Oh, Jon Perr and BlueGal just sent me more reminders of how "non-partisan" Tuckie is. Among the invited guests to the Daily Caller's launch? None other than Scooter Libby. Scooter is Tuckie's special friend after he talked him up all over cable news during his trial while Tuckie's daddy was promoting and managing Scooter's Legal Defense Fund.

Yeah, nothing says nonpartisan quite like the whiff of Daddy's BigBuckBuddies in the Republican Party. Good going, Tuckie.

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