Tucker's Predictable Deceit
A story that no one believed in the first place turns out to be untrue
Tucker Carlson is a Bad Person: A Continuing Series
You might remember about a week and a half ago when Tucker Carlson was breathlessly accusing the NSA of intercepting his private communications and planning to leak them in order to get his show taken off the air. There was absolutely no indication at the time that the story was anything other than Tucker doing his usual schtick of boob bait for broken-brained boomers; but now we have confirmation from Tucker himself that the whole thing was bullshit.
Oh don’t misunderstand, Tucker doesn’t admit the whole thing was bullshit, but it’s not hard to connect the dots.
Tucker admits that he was seeking an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin; and that he “contacted a couple of people” who he thought could help him secure said interview. Axios describes those people as “U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries.”
So if that’s true, then of course the NSA was spying on them. Spying on “Kremlin intermediaries” is literally why the NSA was created. The fact that Tucker Carlson was apparently talking to such people doesn’t mean, at all, that the NSA was monitoring him. It would be like if the DEA was monitoring a drug kingpin and Tucker Carlson showed up the kingpin’s house that the DEA then raided, and complaining that the DEA was monitoring him.
Nevertheless, Tucker claims that the Biden administration found out about his attempt to interview Putin by reading his emails and illegally “unmasked” his identity to the press. (“Unmasking” is the term for revealing the identity of a person not part of a warrant who gets surveilled as part of a warrant against another person. E.g., if you’re communicating with a person being legitimately surveilled, your identity is supposed to remain “masked.”) I simply don’t believe him. First of all, why would anyone care that Tucker Carlson is seeking an interview with Vladimir Putin? Media organizations seek interviews with foreign leaders — even hostile foreign leaders — all the time. Keir Simmons of NBC News interviewed Putin less than a month ago, and no one cared. It wasn’t some national scandal. Even if you grant the possibility that the Biden administration would be motivated to embarrass Tucker Carlson by unmasking him in communications with Russian counterintelligence targets — which would be a crime, remember — why would they think that revealing Tucker’s effort to interview Putin would be sufficiently embarrassing?
More specifically, why would Fox News care if Tucker Carlson is trying to interview Putin, much less to the extent that they would cancel his show? It just doesn’t make sense.
There’s a theory that Tucker is just trying to get out ahead of any fallout from this New York Times story where he’s outed as a major and free-flowing source of gossip in the Trump/Fox News world that apparently really pissed off some people in those orbits; including some of his fellow hosts like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.
That’s certainly a plausible theory, and it’s not like I have any inside information, but it seems equally plausible to me that Tucker is just bullshitting. He’s doing schtick for his audience. He knows it’s not true, he just doesn’t care. And that’s why he’s one of the worst people in cable news — which is saying something.
Undeserved Delta Panic
A friend of mine on Facebook shared one of those viral posts that was essentially just scaremongering about the so-called COVID delta variant. I won’t share it here because I don’t know anything about the original author, much less what qualifications they would have to be making such public pronouncements; but the general thrust of her argument was that the delta variant meant that we needed to go back to the protocols that were in place last December — no eating in restaurants, no close contact with non-relatives, universal masking, etc. The response to that is simple: No we don’t. “We,” in this case, meaning “anyone who is fully vaccinated.”
Sure, there is evidence that the delta variant is more contagious than COVID Classic, if you will. But there is as yet no evidence that it’s noticeably more dangerous. And while there are preliminary reports that the mRNA vaccines that most people received might be slightly less effective at preventing infection, there is still no evidence that the vaccines aren’t still highly effective in preventing hospitalizations and death. Which is to say, you might be slightly more likely to test positive for COVID, but are still exceedingly unlikely to develop severe symptoms or die from it. Which, I hasten to add, is the entire point of vaccines. If you test positive for COVID but it doesn’t affect your life at all, who cares?
There’s a certain paradox going on in the country right now where the people at the lowest risk for COVID — i.e., the vaccinated — are more concerned about COVID than the people at the highest risk for it — i.e., the unvaccinated. But as I said a couple of weeks ago, there’s only so much we can do. Vaccinated people being even more cautious isn’t going to help people who aren’t vaccinated. And at this point, the people who aren’t vaccinated — outside of the tiny percentage of people who can’t get vaccinated for whatever reason — are remaining unvaccinated by choice. So…whatever. The vaccine is free, safe, and easy to obtain. If people refuse to protect themselves with something that is free, safe, and easy to obtain, then at some point they must assume their own risks. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, and all that. If people want to die of proverbial thirst due to their own obstinance, we’re sort of powerless against it.
The fact is, vaccinated people remain at exceptionally low risk from COVID, even the delta variant. By far the most effective way to prevent COVID, even the delta variant, is to get vaccinated. Vaccinated people wearing masks and social distancing is redundant and pointless. It’s wearing a hat on top of a hat. And until such time that that is no longer true, those of us who were responsible shouldn’t do pointless and redundant things to the negligible benefit of people who refuse to be responsible.
These Friggin’ People
Speaking of people who refuse to be responsible, Congressman Chip Roy, (R-Texas, obviously) had this to say about the Biden administration’s effort to offer the vaccine door to door:
This is, of course, utterly stupid. Getting the vaccine is still completely voluntary, and the purpose of the door-to-door campaign is simply to provide access to it for people who may not have had the opportunity.
Chip Roy almost certainly knows all of this, but there’s nothing in this world that we won’t fight a dumb culture war over. So since “the left” or “the government” or whatever the hell wants people to get the vaccine, people like Chip Roy must oppose it.
To put it bluntly, there’s no reason to wear a mask for these idiots. Although “social distancing” might be recommended just because they’re an absolute chore to be around.
Hate to Say I Told You So
So on Wednesday I speculated that J.D. Vance would have to start indulging in Donald Trump’s wacky “stolen election” conspiracies if he wanted to get Trump’s endorsement in the primary. Well, in an interview with Time magazine that was published Wednesday afternoon, he went there:
[Vance] won’t say the 2020 election was stolen, exactly, but contends it was “unfair.” “I think Josh Hawley did the right thing,” he says of the Senator’s objection to certifying electoral votes on Jan. 6. Nor does he think Trump deserved to be impeached over the insurrection. “There were some bad apples on Jan. 6, very clearly, but most of the people there were actually super peaceful,” he says of a riot that left five dead and more than 100 police officers injured.
Well that didn’t take long.
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Wednesday’s answer:
Category: Science
Clue: Formed from volcanic matter, basalt is classified as this type of rock.
Igneous
Today’s clue:
Category: -ologies
Clue: In the architectural sense, ecclesiology deals with the building of these.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My daughter has somehow developed a British accent. I first noticed it when she pronounced “glasses” as “glah-ses.” But now it’s showing up in words like “bathroom” — “bah-froom.” I dunno if my wife is letting her watch Bridgerton or what.