Category: Fox News

Tucker Carlson opened his show Tuesday night by taking aim at one of the most overrated neocon gasbags in Washington:

“Here’s a helpful hint about how your government works. We’re full of helpful hints on this show. If you ever see consensus forming in Washington, run — something awful is about to happen. For decades you’ll remember, there was total consensus that our trade deals could not be better. They helped everyone. Meanwhile, as they were telling you that, America’s manufacturing sector died and huge parts of the middle class died along with it. There was bipartisan consense on the Iraq War and the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction we would supposedly find there, but didn’t. A few years later, there was consensus on banking regulations; that was just before the financial crisis hit. There was still more consensus on the creation of an all-seeing surveillance state that was supposed to somehow help you, but that is now scanning your face and reading your texts. There wasn’t much debate in Washington about any of those policies. There should have been.
“So it is with some skepticism that we note a new consensus forming here, this one about our southern border. ‘It may look bad down there,’ they’re telling us, “but calm down! It’s fine! Everything’s just fine!’ That’s the new word from Max Boot. Boot is a columnist for Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, but more than that, Boot is the living repository of every warmed-over cliché, every silly half-truth, every stale scrap of stupid conventional wisdom the buffoons who run this place have thought up recently. So here’s the latest — this is from Boot’s appearance on CNN last night.

MAX BOOT ON CNN: “I’m ready to declare a national emergency. The national emergency is not on the southern border, it’s in Washington, D.C., with a president who is lawless and out of control.”

“Who is this guy? Well, Max Boot calls himself a foreign policy expert. That’s a title that doesn’t actually mean anything, but in practice, it allows Boot to agitate for more counter-productive foreign wars. In the years since 9/11, Max Boot has demanded military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea, and likely many other places. He’s called for the U.S. to topple the Saudi monarchy, and of course, like so many neocons, Boot fell headlong into the Russia conspiracy for more than two excruciating years. It’s hard to think of anyone in this country more discredited than Max Boot. Going to him for foreign policy advice is like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a cooking show — he’d be the last person you’d ask. So of course, Max Boot now has gigs at CNN, the Washington Post and the Council on Foreign Relations, because that’s how Washington really works. The key is, never apologize, never admit fault, no matter what. Watch Max Boot explain that the idea of toppling the Libyan government — which was deranged — was in fact brilliant. We just didn’t do it right.”

MAX BOOT, 2014: “We did a great job of overthrowing Gadhafi, but did nothing to secure the country afterwards, and there was, I might add, a similar lack of planning for our pull-out in the case of Iraq, where there was very little sense of what would happen after U.S. troops left in 2010. We can’t think about these as being kind of quick in-and-out engagements — we send some troops, kill some people and then come back home to a victory parade. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Boot didn’t explain how exactly it does work. He didn’t need to explain. Everyone knows his assumption is the same as permanent Washington’s core assumption — military occupation is always the right answer, no matter what the question is. Sending somebody else’s kids to a foreign country is always and everywhere the right thing to do. When Donald Trump pledged to pull Americans out of Syria, Max Boot went crazy, just on principle, because no troops can ever leave, ever.”

MAX BOOT, DECEMBER 2018: “There is nobody who knows anything about the situation in Syria who recommends doing this. … This is a Christmas gift to America’s enemies. This will help ISIS, this will help Russia, this will help Iran, this will help Bashar Assad and this will hurt Israel and our Kurdish allies.”

“What did Max Boot not say? What do you notice about that? Well, he never explained how keeping Americans in Syria would help the United States. Why didn’t he mention it? Because he doesn’t care. Nobody in Washington cares, and maybe that’s why you never hear anyone ask questions about our current military commitments.”

You can watch the whole thing on video:

By the way, do you realize how small CNN’s audience is? Monday night, Tucker Carlson’s audience on Fox News was 2.9 million, while the 8 p.m. hour on CNN got barely 800,000 viewers. The Fox audience is more than three times larger than CNN, and in fact, CNN’s audience is also smaller than Nickelodeon, HGTV and the Discovery ID true-crime channel. Fox News is Number One in primetime cable ratings; CNN is 15th.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Several of the commenters have complained that the headline is too obvious, but it’s important to have it stated plainly for the sake of Google searches and future historians who may wonder, “What the f–k went wrong with the Republican Party during the first decade of the 21st century?” The answer: Max Boot, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, quite generally.

In his Wednesday opening monologue, Tucker Carlson explained that the real collusion is between Democrats and the “mainstream” media:

This past Sunday afternoon, we learned that the Trump campaign did not collude with the government of Russia. That was the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation, an investigation that spent two years exhaustively looking into the question. This was very good news for America — we don’t have a spy in the White House. But it was apocalyptic for the Democratic Party and their press agents in the news media.
These are the people who would stake their reputations and their fortunes on the collusion hoax — and they were stunned. Befuddled politicians stammered on television, trying to figure out what to say about the news. Viewers of liberal media outlets didn’t want to hear anything about it. Huge numbers of them just quit watching immediately. On Tuesday night, CNN’s 8 p.m. show lost nearly 50 percent of its viewers.
For progressive channels, this was a catastrophe. Something had to be done. So into this disaster steps the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. On Monday, just hours after the collusion story collapsed, Pelosi announced that the Democratic Party would be switching gears. Going forward, Democrats would focus intently on health care, just like she disingenuously claimed they always had.
“We’ve never taken our focus away,” she said. “I hope that it focuses the press on these issues.”
“I hope the press focuses healthcare,” Pelosi said. She didn’t have to ask twice. At CNN, they were paying close attention to every word Pelosi uttered. To Jeff Zucker and the anchors who work for him at CNN, Pelosi isn’t just a politician, she’s the leader of the party — their party. The party under whose banner Zucker has said he may someday run for office.
When America’s most powerful Democrat speaks, CNN listens with pen in hand. These are marching orders, and the network swung into action immediately. The rundowns of every primetime show were scrapped and rebuilt. Gone were the segments about office towers in Moscow and Carter Page’s spying and Don Jr. going to prison. In their place, long editorials about health care. The Democratic health care plan is sensible and necessary, CNN told us. The Republican plan — cruel and heartless. . . .
Democratic officials pick the topic and the storyline. Their servants in cable news dutifully repeat it to the word, all day long.
CNN is not a news outlet, it’s a super PAC. It is running unregulated campaign ads 24 hours a day.

Watch the video: