Kevin and Tucker’s Contemptible Ploy

Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson have each provided abundant evidence that they are utterly shameless. But when they decided to operate as a tag-team, they may have each attained a new low.

McCarthy’s lack of shame had been vividly demonstrated in his febrile quest to become Speaker: he showed himself willing to agree to virtually any and every demand by the Nihilist Faction of House Republicans. In Carlson’s case, his character is vividly revealed in the documents produced in the 1.6 billion dollar lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, the subject of groundless allegations on Fox. The Dominion documents provide compelling evidence that Carlson and his colleagues at Fox did not believe the groundless claims made by various election deniers, but swallowed their disbelief — in obeisance to the political appetites of the Fox audience and the financial consequences of disappointing those appetites.

The McCarthy-Carlson gambit began with McCarthy releasing to Carlson–exclusively–video tape of the January 6 assault on the Capitol. The exclusive release to Carlson seemed peculiar from the outset. But if we wondered why Carlson had been selected, we did not have to wonder long. Carlson immediately set about doing what McCarthy had clearly intended: giving the tapes a selective editing to portray an event far less violent than the one that many of us had witnessed as it happened.

In one of his more creditable moments, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to join in this clumsy attempt at a whitewash. “It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks,” McConnell told reporters. As McConnell spoke, he held in his hand the statement of the Capitol Chief of Police:

It is healthy, and to be expected, for different media outlets to have contrasting and conflicting points of view, and to emphasize different facts in their reporting. But for a media outlet to function as the unblinking mouthpiece of one political party is something else, and to perform that function dishonestly is even worse. For those who place importance on media integrity, we can only hope that Dominion will prevail in its lawsuit and recover damages in the magnitude it has demanded. Since Fox clearly views its responsibility through the prism of its cash register, it may be the only way of getting its attention and that of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.

So far as McCarthy is concerned, there is a cornucopia of reasons why one might wish for the end of his Speakership. His connivance with Fox is an important one, but even that is less dangerous than McCarthy’s pandering to his masters in the Nihilist Faction of House Republicans. Chief among the latter is the attempt of the Nihilistas to use the debt ceiling as a partisan plaything. Perhaps there will come a time when a few responsible Republicans will find the courage and the conscience to join Democrats in replacing him. Until that
happens, however, we are in for a very difficult and very perilous journey.