No. 22: Tucker Carlson
The former cable pundit has a history of thin-skinned hypocrisy
Tucker Carlson A long time ago, Tucker Carlson was a good journalist. He wrote interesting magazine features with actual reporting involved. TV had a hand in ruining him, but his essential dickishness consumed him.
Full disclosure: Carlson has promised to destroy me. (In those words!) (He also said “I will destroy you” to a video store clerk he got fired for blogging about how Tucker Carlson had opened an account at his video store.)
Carlson is a thin-skinned mess of hypocrisy. He’s obsessively protective of his privacy (no crime!) despite coming up as a TV pundit by fixating on Bill Clinton’s sexual exploits. He sued to win control of TuckerCarlson.com and then registered KeithOlbermann.com as a stunt. And it’s sometimes apparent that he has no clue just how much of a dick he is. He proudly admitted to gay-bashing a dude (Carlson is terribly sensitive about his masculinity), and he’s generally a fratty sexist.
After getting fired from all three 24-hour cable news channels, Tucker decided to start a website. It would be a smart website, he promised! With real journalism! Now, a lot of people with better intentions than he have discovered that there’s simply no market for “a Conservative Salon.” What conservative readers on the Internet want is red meat. They don’t want Slate-y challenges to their preconceived notions; they want those notions reinforced early and often. The Daily Caller, to its credit, is not one of Andrew Breitbart’s frothing cesspools. It has settled on being more like a low-rent Daily Beast, or HuffPo with poorer standards of reporting and slightly fewer celebrity nipple galleries. But its attempts at actually grabbing the attention that goes to Breitbart’s cesspools led to its completely misleading “exposé” on the contents of “Journolist,” in which it breathlessly misrepresented random e-mails from bloggers as proof of a liberal media conspiracy. In a shameless editor’s note, Carlson said the stuff his reporter had been treating as a smoking gun was actually mostly “banal.”
No one on either side of the aisle takes its “scoops” seriously — and Tucker remains exceptionally thin-skinned when people point out his failings.
Repeat offenses: Sexism, dickishness, defensive hypermasculinity, dishonesty.
Representative quote:
“Fuck you.”
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
The War Room Hack Thirty
Our complete list of America's worst pundits
The War Room Hack Thirty is a list of our least favorite political commentators, newspaper columnists and constant cable news presences, ranked roughly (but only roughly) in order of awfulness and then described rudely. Criteria for inclusion included writing the same column every week for 30 years, warmongering, joyless repetition of conventional wisdom, and making bad puns.
The full list can be found here. Pass it along, argue about it, and print it out and glue each pundit’s photo into your scrapbook!
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 1: Richard Cohen
The looooongtime Washington Post columnist is the hackiest pundit in America
Richard Cohen The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has been a columnist since 1976. He’s good friends with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. He works one day a week. At a certain point, in that exceptionally privileged and cushy position, his brain disintegrated. He’s not so much an old liberal who grew conservative as he is a simplistic old hack who believes his common prejudices to be politically incorrect truths and his Beltway conventional wisdom to be bracing political insight.
That’s how we get work like “leave Roman Polanski alone!” and sending me mean e-mails is “digital lynching” and affirmative action punishes all white people and you stupid snot-nosed bloggers don’t get that Cheney was probably right to torture people and Barack Obama should read a newspaper instead of a BlackBerry because a BlackBerry is full of lies. All in the singularly smug, grating prose style of a man who knows he’s an immovable object in one of the most comfortable positions in all of journalism.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 2: Mark Halperin
The Drudge-loving political analyst who gets everything wrong
Mark Halperin I thought we were all done talking about former Bob Dole speechwriter former ABC News political director Mark Halperin, whose star had seemed to stop rising toward the end of the Bush years — but then he attached himself, leechlike, to reporter John Heilemann, to co-write “Game Change,” a lengthy catalog of the 2008 presidential campaign’s moments of least import.
Halperin used to write this thing called the Note, which was an e-mail newsletter that various Washingtonians whom Halperin referred to as “The Gang of 500″ used to read to find out what they themselves thought about the news of the day. It was written as privileged wisdom from Beltway insiders — cryptic references, obscure jokes, endless name-dropping, constant inexplicable plugs for the Palm restaurant — when it was in fact just “whatever a professional political operative recently told Mark Halperin, along with links to political stories in the major papers.”
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 3: Thomas Friedman
The flat-earther and metaphor-mangler pollutes the minds of our CEOs
Thomas Friedman Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from back when he was telling the world that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would lead to a glorious new dawn of freedom/democracy/whiskey/iPods/Old Navy in the Middle East as a whole.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 4: David Broder
"The Dean" never met a problem that couldn't be solved by more serious calls for bipartisanship
David Broder The dean of the Washington Press Corps, David Broder has also been What’s Wrong With the Washington Press Corp ever since he stepped off the campaign bus and began applying his wisdom toward the great problems plaguing the country.
He has a simplistic understanding of politics and no understanding of the electorate except as an abstract concept. His hatred of partisanship is actually a thinly veiled disdain for popular rule itself. He defines extremism as principled adherence to any sort of ideology. When he wants to understand what The Voters are thinking, he asks a think tank academic. Despite his disdain for the fiery populists that the idiot voters repeatedly send to our sadly broken Congress, he remains convinced that The American People are a wise and noble breed who long for sensible, bipartisan moderation in all things.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
Page 1 of 6 in War Room's Hack Thirty