We expect to refer you to Tucker Carlson...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020

...who seems to be out of his mind: Back in the day, in the comedy context, we would have filed our experience of the past few hours under this award-winning premise:

"Once you start keeping track of your frequent flier miles, you'll never do anything else."

Putting it a different way—we've been trying to return a defective product to Amazon. In certain circumstances, that can be amazingly hard to do.

Once you start trying to do it, all other mental focus inevitably flies away. You will lose track of everything else you've been thinking about.

(In the old days, it was like that with frequent flier miles. The changes in rules were so constant that, once you decided to play that game, you would never do anything else. Or so the premise went.)

Now, regarding Tucker Carlson:

On the one hand, watching his show in recent weeks has involved a frequent descent into something which looks like insanity. There's a huge amount of name-calling and insult, with constant omniscient ascriptions of motive.

The motives are almost always amazingly bad. Democratic politicians want to control you, full stop. That, and only that, explains why they do the various things they do, why they say the things they say.

Or so you're told by Carlson, night after night after night.

Today, through a link from Norm Ornstein's piece at the Atlantic, we finally saw a certain Politico report from July 2.

We'd heard vague references to that report: It says there's a lot of buzz about Tucker running for president in 2024.

People even say that Tucker would be the Republican front-runner! Here's how the essay started:

THOMPSON (7/2/20): Tucker Carlson’s audience is booming—and so is chatter that the popular Fox News host will parlay his TV perch into a run for president in 2024.

Republican strategists, conservative commentators, and former Trump campaign and administration officials are buzzing about Carlson as the next-generation leader of Donald Trump’s movement—with many believing he would be an immediate frontrunner in a Republican primary.

This could explain why Carlson seems so crazy so much of the time.

Most nights when we look in on his show, we keep thinking that he can't possibly be as dumb as he seems to be a great deal of the time. Imaginably, that report could explain why he says a lot of the things he says.

Watching Carlson's show each night is a side trip into the land of the crazy and/or the very dumb. On the brighter side of the equation, you can't be watching Anderson Cooper when you're watching Tucker Carlson!

Also, you'll be exposed to certain things you'd never see on CNN or MSNBC. So it was on Tuesday night, after the most recent videotape of the death of George Floyd became available.

Chris Cuomo had played some of the tape the night before. We thought his performance was utterly heinous. So too for the conduct of his guest, Joey Jackson.

Watching Carlson, we saw very different parts of the newly released videotape. We also heard a lot of nonsense, but some of what we saw and heard that night struck us as quite instructive.

We thought we'd discuss this topic today, but we got dragged away to Brain Drain Land as we tried to return our defective product. Tomorrow, we may try to tell you what we saw. On the other hand, what's the use?

Cooper has become completely unwatchable; Carlson seems to be nuts, or at least is pretending to be. Our warring tribes are both quite mad, but here's the nature of tribal conflict:

Tribes can only see the madness as it exists Over There. The madness within a person's own tribe will typically be invisible.

On Tuesday night, Carlson spoke with an "independent journalist" named Michael Tracey. We were struck by the very vague introduction Tracey received.

Later, as we googled around, the reason may have come clear. On balance, Tracey is a man of the left! We thought his presentation that night was worth reviewing, unless you're completely in love with the current approved tales of our own "liberal" tribe.

Carlson behaves like he's dumb as a rock. The human formerly known as Anderson Cooper disappeared some time ago.

So it goes when the loathing engendered by tribal warfare prevails. Our species' history has commonly run on this rocket fuel, and it runs on this fuel today.

Tomorrow, we'll try to tell you what we saw on Carlson's show Tuesday night. Sadly, though, our attempt to return the defective product hasn't yet been resolved.

Long ago, at a certain point, we stopped keeping track of our flier miles. We realized that, once you start doing that, you will do nothing else...