A weird sort of half-assed defense of Tucker Carlson, recipient of the most disingenuous justified firing in the history of the world
“Who do you want to see fired next from Fox News?” asked some wag on Twitter a week and a half ago, right after host Dan Bongino got the first boot-to-the-butt after the Dominion settlement.
“F*cker Carlson,” I replied, never expecting it would happen. But lo and behold, Christmas came early in 2023!
Last Friday was Tucker’s last day, as he discovered Monday morning when they were all like, “Yeah, uh, Tucker, can we see you for a minute in HR? We thank you for all your hard work here at Fox News but your services are, uh, no longer needed.”
Why, Rupert, why?
Why did Fox News cast out its Golden Goose, their most popular anchorliar? Were they turning over a new leaf and perhaps finally committing themselves to journalistic integrity? (No, Rupert Murdoch has not yet fired himself).
Was it because Tucker is targeted in a workplace harassment lawsuit by a former Fox News producer? (Maybe, sexy stuff brought down Roger F/Ailes and Bill O’Lie-lly, but not, like, a day or two after it was announced).
Was it because Tucker demonstrably lied so much on the air? (Now that’s just crazy talk!)
The Wall Street journal sez that the Fox brass axed him because he’s got, well, a bit of a potty mouth, to put it mildly.
Seems some last-minute, under-the-wire texts he expressed after the 2020 election and its wake revealed some pretty critical and uncomplimentary things the Tuckster had to say about Fox management, in particular, a particular Fox senior exec, with, uh, how shall I put this delicately? Tucker has a real fondness for the c-word, and I don’t mean ‘conservative’.
Rhymes with ‘runt’.
The word was liberally (ar ar!) used on the production of Tucker’s show, if not, obviously, on-air itself. According to Abby Grossberg, not the aforementioned rhymes-with-runt but the plaintiff in a harassment lawsuit against both Tuck and Mu’ch, Tucker used the word freely as did many of the production bros. Apparently, this wasn’t a problem for Klan Murdoch.
But when he used it against a female Fox executive with whom he took a Panzer tankload or two of umbrage, and it came out in redacted private messages as part of the lawsuit (which Tucker allegedly didn’t want redacted, he wanted the world to know exactly what he thought about this rhymes-with-runt), Klan Murdoch and the network’s female CEO decided Tuck had to go.
I can’t imagine anyone I’m happier to see go Fox himself than this overgrown perpetually pouty frat-boy waste of protoplasm, unless it’s maybe that withered old squinty-eyed cockTucker at the top, but firing him strikes me as a level of hypocrisy so high that even the Geezer of Ancient Gall should have been embarrassed to Tuckernate him.
The only bigger rhymes-with-runt than Tucker Carlson at Fox News is Rupert Murdoch, and firing him for calling someone a rhymes-with-runt now is, well, wouldn’t you say, awfully late to the Nazi party?
Like, this alleged rhymes-with-runt senior executive is such a little feminazi liberal snowflake after God knows how many years at Fox News with Tacky Carlson that senior management has to break out the smellin’ salts, Aint Pittypat?
It was okay, it seems, for Tucky to use the word for just about any other woman who displeased his lordly self. Will they fire all the other free-flinging rhymes-with-runters? We’ll see.
Speaking of delicate, fragile Fox flowers, let’s talk about Abby Grossberg, the woman behind the toxic-harassment lawsuit. Her beef with The Big Ham is that Carlson created a hostile work environment for her with rampant sexism and antisemitism and gratuitous rhymes-with-runting.
Okay, I’m no fan of sexual harassment or workplace harassment and maybe I sound all blame-the-victimy again, but—isn’t that considered part of the package for working at Fox News?
It’s a super-conservative-ultra-right-wing ‘news’ network that worships Donald Trump, defends Vladimir Putin and treats Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as though he took over Hillary Clinton’s pizza pedophile CEO role after she had to quit to terrorize insecure white males by running for President.
Why would Grossberg expect a mature, responsible, adult, #MeToo-sensitive work environment?
Did she work her way through college at Hooters and complain how she was constantly ogled and sexually harassed?
It’s like listening to black Trump campaigner Omarosa Manigault Newman whine about how she had to put up with racism while she was working for Donald Trump.
The guy who called for the execution of the Central Park Five, later exonerated of the infamous Central Park ‘wilding’.
The guy who refused to rent to black tenants, hobnobbed with white supremacists, kicked black people off his casino floors, fired a black Apprentice guy for being ‘too educated’, started the rumor about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and suggested Obama got into Columbia or Harvard for reasons other than being good enough?
I’m no fan of racism, but sorry, bitch, you asked for that!!!
Donald Trump aside, I’m thinkin’ if you don’t like misogyny, or racism, or antisemitism, or homophobia, or Nazi fanboys, or sexual harassment, or Wars on Christmas, or climate change denial, or kids’s candy sexual fetishism, then, just sayin’, maybe Fox News isn’t the right professional opportunity for you.
The grand irony of Grossberg’s lawsuit is she helped craft the vicious environment for which she now requires her smellin’ salts. She’s suing not just Tucker Carlson but also Fox News itself because—as she alleges—and get this, you’ll never believe what Fox News—Fox News!!!—asked her to do—
—Give ‘misleading testimony’ in her deposition for the Dominion lawsuit.
That’s right, believe it or not, Fox News actually asked her, then pressured her, to lie.
I’m hoping she’ll use whatever money she gets from Fox News and Tucker to buy herself a nice makeover and update her look a little, since she looks like your grandmother’s eight-grade music teacher in 1952.
1996 and counting
Hard to imagine, but Fox News has been on the air for over 25 years now. Seems like just yesterday we had a fourth major non-cable network for the first time since 1956 after the demise of the late great Fourth Network of Black ‘n’ White Three-Channel TV, the DuMont.
My my, time flies when you’re having fun. Not.
Fox News has long consorted with the enemy. I wrote them a polite but critical email about a news story I’d watched in the weeks after 9/11 demonstrating how easy it was for terrorists (the ad hoc terrorists being the Fox News crew rather than Al Qaeda) to breach a supposedly secure nuclear facility by insecurely driving right in like they owned the damn reactor.
I didn’t fault them for investigating and breaking the story—job well done!—but for showing the real terrorists how it’s done!
Fox News, intent on destroying America since at least 2001, and pretty arguably before that, too!
Jon Stewart called out Tucker Carlson in 2004 when he guested on Crossfire and disappointed Tucker by asking him to stop hurting and ruining America, rather than—being funny.
Tucker didn’t listen.
In Fox News’s infancy, aiding and abetting terrorists was then-unintentional, but I had no idea that twenty-odd years later, with Tucker Carlson at the on-air helm, they’d be cheering on a filthy Russian dictator, damning the people his army had invaded and brutalized, supporting that consummate tabloid moron Donald Trump for President, cheering on kids in cages, and fomenting an attempted coup d’etat against his own country.
Lying all the way.
But that’s not, ultimately, what he got fired for.
No, he upset some little chickie-boo in the executive suite, and, okay, countless other women at Fox News, for years, by freely flinging around the word that rhymes with runt in a workplace that had no problem with that, until they did.
That’s when they finally fired Tucker Carlson, that filthy rhymes-with-dastard.
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