I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but Tucker Carlson is hack. He is a right wing, dog whistling, opportunistic hack who cares more about placating his cribbed viewer base than making cogent points or saying things with any kind of value. He repackages bargain basement talking points that high school debate students use when throwing mock cases together. He provides no value in terms of discourse, and more than that, he knows it. He’s been told to his face by better men than me that he sucks (Jon Stewart…where are you? We need you…). Anyway, recently one of his bigoted dog whistle diatribes where he suggested that helping poor people was bad for the bottom line, which lead him to suggest that immigrants make America “dirtier”, caused some of his sponsors to FINALLY take notice that he’s a scumbag. As of this writing, 4 of his sponsors dropped him, and it looks like he might lose more in short order. This of course caused him to give a non-apology where he unconvincingly said that he did indeed like immigrants and immigration. As it turns out, that didn’t help his situation. Do I expect this to collapse his career? Unfortunately, no, but it is nice to see that unlike Sean Hannity or Donald Trump, some bad people know that this level of humiliation is supposed to be a bad thing. But make no mistake, the only thing making America dirtier are people like Tucker Carlson.
So, Donald Trump called himself a “Nationalist” on Monday night, and naturally, the left went nuts because of it. And I can see why. The word “nationalist” has connotations leading to racism, with many far right folks often identified as “White Nationalists”. But it’s important to note that it’s unfair to claim that Donald Trump is a racist simply because he self identifies as a nationalist. It is fair to claim that it makes him a Xenophobe and an isolationist, but being a nationalist DOES NOT mean he’s a racist. The way he treats people of color and his policies that show he only cares about White People is what make him a racist. Because he is still definitely a racist. The way he talks about people from predominantly non-white countries, his dog whistles towards White Supremacists during his campaign, and his reluctance to condemn the White Supremacists who give him support are the obvious examples. If you did research, you can find examples of him and his family’s racist tendencies in the way they treated black tenants in their properties as far back as the 1970s. Now, some might say “is the distinction between racist and nationalist REALLY that important?” and to that I have to argue YES. Yes it is. Because the fact that Donald Trump identifies as a nationalist is bad for reasons completely separate from his racism. His nationalism is already to leading to policies and actions that are damaging our relationships to the rest of the world, and with world that gets more interconnected by the day, having a leader who wants to focus only on our borders, and create an “us” versus “them” scenario, with “them” being 7.3 billion people…well nothing good comes of that.
I wonder if it’s ever going to be too much for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, aka The Huck. I mean, the questions she’s forced to contend with are genuinely unlike anything any other press secretary has had to deal with. I imagine even Bill Clinton’s Press Secretary after the Lewinsky scandal broke wasn’t as bad, because at least in that case, the number of terrible things that were being discussed were limited to one. With Trump, it’s any number of 50 things. This week it’s what Trump meant when he suggested the so-called sanctuary cities as “breeding concepts” . Because obviously there is a racially charged connotation if he was suggesting that said cities were breeding grounds for the Hispanic community. And stuff like this feels almost day to day, where the Huck is out tap-dancing around Trump’s words, and trying to deflect by calling everyone else racist for suggesting Trump meant something racist. There has to be a breaking point, yeah?
Mind the Exit 