I have faithfully traced the downward path of Tucker Carlson into the gutter. It started while he was at Fox News, but the descent has picked up speed since management showed him the door. Now that he supports himself, he is free at last to reveal the inner Tucker.
I am grateful for the company I have found while tracing his descent. It’s tiresome work, but it has to be done. He is an influential figure on the right.
NR has now posted Rich Lowry’s long column “Should we have allied with Hitler?” (behind NR’s paywall) on Carlson’s latest disgrace. Rich’s column reminds me of the scene in The Best Years of Our Lives in which Homer Parrish’s loss of his arms is denigrated in front of fellow vet Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) by the soda fountain customer who earnestly instructs Homer, “We fought the wrong people, that’s all.”
Homer asks him, “Look here, Mister, what are you selling, anyway?” The customer claims not to be selling anything but “plain, old-fashioned Americanism.”
Dana Andrews is working behind the counter as the soda jerk and comes to Homer’s defense. He jumps over the counter to deck the customer. He explains to his boss as he strips off his apron, “Don’t say it, chum. The customer is always right, but this customer wasn’t right.”
I always thought that scene was unrealistic, yet Carlson now brings it to life these many years later. In his column Rich Lowry jumps over the counter to take on Carlson. Here is the opening.
* * * * *
There are different forms of obsession with the Nazis.
Lefties tend to accuse anyone they disagree with of being a Nazi.
Foreign-policy hawks can see every confrontation with an adversary through the prism of how the West grappled with Hitler’s rising threat in the 1930s.
And then there are elements of the right that want us to know that Nazi Germany might have been misunderstood.
Which brings us to Tucker Carlson’s latest foray into World War II revisionism with his podcast guest Dave Collum, the iconoclastic Cornell University chemistry professor who has some thoughts about how we messed up the war.
Carlson agrees with Collum’s contention that we have gotten World War II all wrong, and he lodges no objection when a guest to whom he’s very deferential says that we arguably should have allied with Hitler’s Germany in World War II to fight Stalin.
In this, Tucker is really out-Tuckering himself.
He has gone from nodding along with a guest who maintained that Hitler was misunderstood and killed millions of people as a function of unfortunate circumstances, to giving a fawning interview to someone who muses that we, literally, should have sided with the Nazis.
He doesn’t make it clear when we should have forged this alliance. When Hitler undertook the Anschluss in 1938, the invasion of what was left of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, the next month’s Blitzkrieg in the West, or the Battle of Britain beginning that summer?
All of these might have seemed opportune moments to get on board the Nazi conquest of Europe, although it’s a bit of a problem that during much of this period Hitler was allied with Stalin.
For anti-Soviet purposes, the window of allying with the Nazis would have opened in June 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa.
Put aside the moral question of opportunistically joining an attack that was conceived from the beginning as a war of annihilation, the Nazis at the outset didn’t seem like they needed anyone’s help subduing the Soviets.
Of course, in June 1941, we also weren’t in the war (although we were doing everything we could short of engaging in formal hostilities to help the Brits).
After Pearl Harbor brought us in, there’s still the complicating historical detail that Hitler declared war on us! We could, I suppose, have tried to chalk it up to a misunderstanding and asked him to reconsider….
Rich’s conclusion fits the scene from the movie as well: “This is ignorance and perversity masquerading as brave truth-telling.” Whole thing here.
