Tucker Carlson Corners Ted Cruz on Iran and Squishes Him Like a Bug

This is wild, man. Close your eyes and try to hear it in Mehdi Hasan’s voice and the fact-based aggression and indignation feels familiar. I need to be clear that I am not setting up a future “I do not in fact, have to give it to ISIL” post here. Just because someone knows how to do journalism does not make them a journalist. If anything, the main takeaway from this 90 seconds of complete and utter domination is how it serves as a brutal rebuke of all mainstream media, proving that Tucker freaking Carlson knows how to do their jobs better than they ever have by simply asking follow up questions, a common journalistic practice that is completely alien to most of our mainstream media.

Tucker Carlson has been great at one thing his entire career spanning from MSNBC to CNN to Fox News now to the right-wing podcast bro-verse alongside Gavin Newsom, and it is being a chameleon. He tried to make a name for himself in respectable media with a bowtie demonstrating he was the fanciest lad of all, and it worked for a bit on CNN until Jon Stewart punted him into the ionosphere on live TV. Then he decided his magic bowtie was destined to be MSNBC’s Alan Colmes, and he helped launch Rachel Maddow’s career to superstardom where she was one of his regularly featured guests on his rotating panel. Fun fact: he also anchored MSNBC’s daily post-event coverage for the 2006 Olympics. Carlson’s pivot to being an unhinged right-wing lunatic is still a relatively new turn in his long and storied media career.

The thing to remember about Tucker Carlson is he’s not Sean Hannity. He’s not one of these schmuck radio shock jocks throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. He is the thinking man’s liar. The bowtie always gave Carlson away as more cerebral—not because the bowtie communicated that he was serious, but that he was serious about portraying himself as a Very Serious fancy boy. When people peacock for you, you should listen because they’re about to teach you some things about them, and Carlson has always communicated himself to be a guy sticking his finger in the wind to see which way it’s blowing.

When compassionate conservatism was en vogue (yes kids, the Republicans actually used to talk about themselves in these terms all the way back in the before times in 2001), Carlson followed that trend. When Republican misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan put the writing on the wall, Carlson followed that to the pending Obama network and covered the Olympics to kill time before the inevitable happened. When the Obama backlash mounted, where was Carlson? Spouting rancid conspiracy theories on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News while becoming Trump’s biggest cheerleader. Tucker Carlson is one of American media’s great weathervanes.

It’s instructive to which Trump’s own influence has created the monster that Carlson now wields. Again, in the before times in 2016 when Bushes and Clintons still ruled the land, Trump found it convenient to hit a bank shot from W. to his brother on Iraq, carving out an acceptance for anti-war talking points in the very pro-war GOP.

Donald the Dove is a headline that could only be printed in the New York Times, and another mind-blowing aspect of our political world where there truly are no rules is that one Maureen Dowd column is responsible for a vastly disproportionate view of Trump being an anti-war politician. He’s not, he’s just anti-him fighting in war.

But there is a genuine anti-war fervor within the GOP, because there is a genuine anti-war fervor across the entire country, and Trump has always understood this as demonstrated by his repeated lies about how he was supposedly against the Iraq War. The utter failure of the global war on terror to do anything other than terrorize the rest of the world has changed how Americans look at international intervention. Like all public measures of distrust, this really began in Vietnam where the notion that our government may be lying to us altered our views of it, but it accelerated in Iraq.

War is hell, as the famed saying goes. My grandfather fought in World War II, and he never talked about it. It’s not glamorous, despite the right-wing’s insistence on making that Hollywood portrayal of it their entire personality. It’s traumatizing, and it’s good that we as Americans, in a true bipartisan fashion in a way the blood-soaked Beltway would never agree on, have come to the conclusion that adventurism in foreign wars should be avoided at all costs.

There is obviously not as big an anti-war constituency in the GOP as there are among Independents or Democrats, and polling bears this out, but there is a very sizeable portion, enough to get one of Trump’s chief sycophants in Marjorie Taylor Greene to defect to the Tucker Carlson school for frontrunning narratives. Principle is not a word that should ever be used with these people, but they do understand power and its shifting nature, and there is a huge portion of the GOP standing firm against Trump on the notion that any war with Iran is sure to lead to disaster.

It obviously makes for strange bedfellows, but hey we’re going to try to abolish ICE with Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol someday, so we’re way through the looking glass at this point. You do not, in fact, have to hand it to Tucker Carlson, but you do have to understand how conscious a decision it is for him–and any other mainstream media careerists like him–to do or not do journalism. He annihilated Ted Cruz to a degree I don’t think is even possible for a show like the Very Serious Meet the Press to do. Their business model does not allow them to unload on a lying guest they would like to come back again, but Carlson is just here to watch the world burn. If someone wants to wage war on a country they couldn’t point out on a map, that’s not his problem, and humiliating them is good for his trolling brand. This isn’t his first rodeo, and Iran is several orders of magnitude more difficult a war to fight than Iraq was. It’s such an obviously bad decision to go to war with Iran that Tucker Carlson is already laying the groundwork for his next pivot to harness the inevitable backlash for his own personal gain.