Say What? Tucker Carlson Said What?

Are the rats deserting the sinking ship?

FOX News rightwing shill, Tucker Carlson, has lowered the lumber on - wait for it - Donald J. Trump.

In a ranging interview with a Swiss newspaper, Die Weltwoche, Carlson  has slammed Trump saying he's just not "capable."

Asked if he thought Trump had kept his promises, Carlson replied with an abrupt "no."

His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund planned parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn't done any of those things. There are a lot of reasons for that, but since I finished writing the book, I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that. 

I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It's a huge country, but that was not a staple of political debate at all. 

When asked what he thought Trump had achieved, another zinger.

Not much. Not much. Much less than he should have. I've come to believe he's not capable of it.

...you really have to understand how it works and you have to be very focused on getting it done, and he knows very little about the legislative process, hasn't learned anything, hasn't and surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn't done all the things you need to do so. It's mostly his fault that he hasn't achieved those things. I'm not in charge of Trump.

On America's emerging aristocracy.

I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to be wise. I'm not arguing for populism, actually. I'm arguing against populism. Populism is what you get when your leaders fail. In a democracy, the population says this is terrible and they elect someone like Trump.

...The world of affluence and the high level of education and among-- I grew up in a town called La Jolla, California in the south. It was a very affluent town and then I moved as a kid to Georgetown here in Washington. I've been here my whole life. I've always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class, and it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis. 

If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west, you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing. They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster. Rural America, America outside three or four cities is really falling apart. I thought if you're running the country, you should have a sense of that. I remember thinking to myself, nobody I know has any idea that this is happening an hour away. That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy... You become Venezuela.

On Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and her socialist cohort, Carlson said, "That's the future."

On the prospects of a second American revolution:

I don't think that we're anywhere near an outbreak of civil war, armed violence between two sides for a bunch of different reasons... Testosterone levels are so low and marijuana use is so high that I think the population is probably too ... What you don't have, prerequisite fall revolution, violent revolution, is a large group of young people who are comfortable with violence and we don't have that. Maybe that will change. I hope it doesn't. I don't want violence for violence. I appall violence, but I just don't see that happening. What I see happening most likely is a kind of gradual separation of the states. 

If you look at the polling on the subject, classically, traditionally, Americans had antique racial attitudes. If you say, “Would you be okay with your daughter marrying outside her race?” Most Americans, if they're being honest, would say, “no, I'm not okay with that. I'm not for that.” Now the polling shows people are much more comfortable with a child marrying someone of a different race than they are marrying someone of a different political persuasion. 

“I'd rather my daughter married someone who's Hispanic than liberal”, someone might say. That is one measure. There are many measures, but that's one measure of how politically divided we are and I just think that over time, people will self-segregate. It's a continental country. It's a very large piece of land and you could see where certain states just become very, very different. Like if you're Conservative, are you really going to live in California in 10 years? Probably not.

Personally, I would welcome a new, perhaps dual, political entity to the south. A separation of the states, red and blue. Most of our neighbours, including the Pacific coast and the important part of the Atlantic coast, would be much more like-minded than the America that now confronts us. While we're all in for a battering in the decades ahead, the Slave States, the south generally and the "flyover" states, a.k.a. the Heartland are in for a particularly arduous time. Let the Gullibillies have them much along the lines in Chuck Thompson's "Better Off Without 'Em."