24/7 Tucker

Of course, it's a challenge being me in a world where Tucker Carlson exists. I'm trying to be prudent and keep this crusade from taking over my little world. But my friend BlackdogRed emails news of yet more tuckeritude (and invents, in so doing, the delightful word "gobsmackingworthiness"), to be found at TPMCafe. Tucker, it seems, spouted words of support for state-sponsored terrorism on his little fair and balanced MSNBC show, which has sent me on such a tear of late:

[Tucker]: "Actually, I am objectively pro-France. You know, France blew up the Rainbow Warrior, that Greenpeace ship in Auckland Harbor in the `80s. And I’ve always respected them..."

Stalkers and some unusually careful casual observers may note that this poses a serious problem for me. You see, my friend Sasha blogged recently about the FBI's monitoring of the ACLU and Greenpeace. I responded with a half cheek-tongued comment about it being perfectly cool to monitor Greenpeace and EarthFirst!, and thusly initiated a low-level nuclear exchange with another commenter (with whom I am semi-familiar from other circles).

The major problem, I think, in my conflation of these two very different groups was that I was confused, when I made that comment, about who blew up whom in Auckland; it was, of course, a crime perpetrated by French intelligence against perfectly innocent persons and their perfectly legal property. It was a reprehensible terrorist act and I was quite mistaken in conflating Greenpeace with bad behavior in connection with it.

The nonproblem with my conflation was that EarthFirst! is, in fact, a dipshit terrorist organization (much like French intelligence), and while they didn't sue along with the ACLU and Greenpeace, I'd bet a whole lot that the FBI is watching whatever is left of them, too, and if they're not, they should be watching them just as much as they watch the Aryan Brotherhood and the Klan and any of a million militia blobs and revolutionary incipient terrorist cells of which I am unaware. My non-cheek-tongued point was that Greenpeace is pretty fucking insignificant, especially compared to something important like the ACLU.

I also had some unkind things to say in my further comments about the importance of the environmental movement compared to the eventual likelihood of global cataclysm and mass extinction brought on by, say, widespread volcanic activity or the impacts of giant extraplanetary masses (or both). But that stuff's not important; the Web-acquaintance and I exchanged nukes, and she ended the exchange with a pretty witty and bright retort that left no room for further discussion (and rightly so), and everything's as cool as it's gonna be.

What is important here, now, in this place, is that because I was a careless boob, my own literal words placed me in a very odd position vis a vis the whole Tucker gobsmacking thing. I've decided to take the White House approach and pretend that, for purposes of Tucker's gob, I didn't say what I said, and if I did say it, I was misquoted, and that if I wasn't misquoted, I was under the influence of alien orbital mind control lasers and wasn't responsible for my words. Thus, my opinions and Tucker Carlson's, save those on the color of the sky and the smell of poop and other such mundane things, do not occupy the same space and I am free to carry out my mission of satirically calling for a smacked Tuckergob.

We clear?