Burnt Orange Report

Tuesday's with Tucker Carlson: Minor complaints on a rather well-run PBS show

By Nathan Nance

Guest post by Nate Nance

I don't know if it's because I'm excited about seeing Tucker with his own hour-long show on MSNBC or because I'm too pissed about other things, but I've been letting Tucker off easy lately with his PBS show. So this is going to be another post of just mild complaints about a conservative commentator that I consider my arch-enemy.

Tucker's First Up segment featured former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. I've read Suskind's Price of Loyalty too many times to not like O'Neill, but he is in favor of private accounts (and he was CEO of Alcoa, a very bad thing if you're a Texan). He and Bow Tie Boy had a five-minute discussion about what kind of private account system O'Neill would like to see. They talked about guaranteed million dollar annuities for everybody and all too soon time was up. I say too soon because they never got around to addressing the actual debate over whether or not to go with some half-assed partial plan like Bush wants or to keep the old system solvent. It was just a really long discussion of "wouldn't it be great if everyone had a million dollars when they retire?"

His Plus 2 segment wasn't any better. To discuss Gonzales' confirmation as AG, Tucker brought in nut-job extraordinaire David Frum and Katrina vanden Heuval. Frum did something that Gonzales was criticized for not doing, defending torture in certain circumstances. My liberalism won't let me get passed moral absolutism on certain things, like "torture is wrong". But Frum's conservatism does no such thing. But my main beef is not with Frum. He makes himself irrelevant very easily. Vanden Heuval is my problem. I've seen her go on two different shows the past week and call Alberto Gonzales "Antonio Gonzales". Each time there is an awkward silence by the other people because they don't want to be rude and point out she has no idea who she's even talking about.

Katrina is just a bad spokesperson for the Left. She always seems like she doesn't have a full grasp of whatever it is she is supposed to be discussing. Plus, me being a fairly liberal person, I always feel llike she might be taking things a bit too far. When she is explaining something, I really don't think she is speaking for the majority of us in the Democratic party.

Tucker, you have got to get some better people on the show. Heck, I'll go on the show to discuss things with you. Just quit putting vanden Heuval in for the liberals. I don't want her representing us anymore than you would want a crazy guy like David "I invented axis of evil" Frum representing your views.

The show ended with a piece on animals who ran away to higher ground just before the tsunami hit the coast of the Indian Ocean. I'm sure psychic animals is interesting to someone, but I really didn't feel like learning some stupid, inane fact about Indian elephants. So I turned the channel.

This is a guest post from Nathan Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk for the Waco Tribune-Herald and writer/editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. He can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com.