Tucker blasts ‘moron community’ of critics slamming speakership holdouts, includes Fox News colleagues

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday blasted the “moron community” of mainly left-wing and establishment Republican critics who’ve been making a big deal over House Republicans’ inability to choose a speaker.

Indeed, to hear the critics tell it, the fact that House Republicans have been debating for days over whether Kevin McCarthy should or shouldn’t be speaker is a disaster of epic proportions and an indictment of the Republican Party.

But speaking on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the eponymous host argued that the ongoing debate isn’t actually a bad thing. It’s instead exactly what democracy should look and sound like.

Listen:

“We’re all supposed to be highly upset, outraged, appalled, on the verge of tears about the fact that some of his colleagues are trying to make it hard for Kevin McCarthy to become the speaker of the House. Very upset. But why exactly is it so upsetting? It should be hard to become speaker of the House in this country. Very hard,” he said.

“This is what democracy looks like when you get up close. I want one thing. You want another thing. We schedule a vote to see who gets it, or in this case, 11 votes,” he added.

Turning to the critics, Carlson then played a montage of them talking trash about the Republican Party. The critics included the likes of Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, James Carville, Ryan Zinke, Charlie Sykes, and others.

“You couldn’t construct a narrative that combines the elements of extremism, election denialism and incompetence more perfectly than the last 12 hours on the Republican side in the House,” MSNBC’s Wallace said, as an example.

One establishment Republican critic, Fox News’ own Ben Domenech, even compared McCarthy’s detractors to terrorists, saying, “The way that they’ve gone about trying to achieve these demands has resulted in essentially this terrorist standoff between them and the overwhelming majority of people in their conference.”

Responding to the critics, Carlson mocked them.

“The failure to make it super easy and simple for Kevin McCarthy is ‘extremism,’ declares Nicolle Wallace. It’s just ’embarrassing,’ says Ryan Zinke. It’s ‘pornography,’ says another. Poor old Charlie Sykes got so upset watching the proceedings that he compared a vote in Congress to an exploding hand grenade,” he said.

“Then another one of the buffoons in the clip you just saw went further and called the whole thing ‘terrorism,’ which is the remorseless use of violence against a civilian population to effect a political goal. So Chip Roy is Osama bin Laden now. Hunt him down in his cave,” he added about fellow Fox News colleague Ben Domenech.

Turning to the holdouts, Carlson then argued that they’re just trying to ensure that the best guy — and only the best guy — gets the job as speaker. And unfortunately, he added, McCarthy simply may not be that guy.

“The one thing that every politician has in common, every one of them, is every one of them wants to win elections. That’s the goal. And honestly, by that measure, Kevin McCarthy has underwhelmed. The red wave that we were all promised, remember that? It didn’t materialize last fall. The midterms were a crushing disappointment,” he said.

“Kevin McCarthy was the head Republican in the House when that happened. That debacle happened and he shares responsibility for it. That’s true. But you’d never know that from listening to Republican leaders in Washington. They don’t talk about it. They’ve never atoned. They have no plan to change,” he added.

Why? Because they’d rather just “ignore what happened” and “move on as if everything is fine,” the Fox News host explained. But everything clearly isn’t fine.

“If there’s one thing that Washington hates, on a bipartisan basis, it’s accountability. And unfortunately, the Republican Party is no different in that. No one is ever punished for failure or ever forced to explain how those failures happen. And as a result of that lack of accountability, no one ever improves. Everybody just keeps getting rewarded for producing the same disasters,” Carlson continued.

“Think about that. If you raised your kids like that, they’d be in prison. So maybe the main thing that’s making people mad is that Republican voters see the same people in charge producing the same mediocre results, paying a lot more attention to lobbyists than to them. That’s not democracy. Actually, it’s the opposite of democracy. And watching this drives them insane,” he added.

He further noted that this isn’t personal. It’s instead about fighting back against “the system that keeps promoting Kevin McCarthy for turning in a subpar performance.”

And, of course, it’s about inspiring McCarthy to be the best man he can be.

“Here’s the critical thing to know. If he does become speaker, by the time he becomes speaker, Kevin McCarthy will have learned a lot. Kevin McCarthy will have publicly acknowledged his failures. He will have been forced to face the people he has disappointed both within the Congress and outside of it. And he will have promised to change,” the Fox News host explained.

“So here we will have suffering, accountability and repentance. Those are not bad things. No. Those are the best things. Those are the wrenching life experiences that turn the mediocre into decent people. And Kevin McCarthy never would have done any of that unless he was forced to. None of us will ever do any of that unless we’re forced to,” Carlson concluded.

Vivek Saxena

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