On Carlson, I have 'No Tucks left to give' and smokers are a dying breed

Red Meat For Mushy Moderates

Carlson with conservative media influencer Charlie Kirk in 2018. - Gage Skidmore, Wikipedia

So much to write about and so little time.

Much as has been made of the two big firings on cable news: Tucker Carlson at Fox News and Don Lemon at CNN. Here is my relatively brief take and then I’ll move on to more important matters.

The firing of both hosts was on some level predictable (misogynist Lemon lacked talent and was simply awful), though I must say that Carlson’s departure was more of a surprise. Carlson had amassed a far greater following than Lemon. He was the highest rated prime-time host on cable and was reportedly making $20 million per year while most recently pulling in 3.2 million viewers a night, which is a lot by cable news standards. As repugnant as he was to progressives, Carlson was actually very good at what he did, which was to stroke every erogenous zone of Trump Nation and its endless list of grievances.

Much of the initial speculation centered on Carlson’s dismissal being the inevitable result of the $787.5 million defamation settlement between Fox’s parent company and Dominion Voting Systems (Carlson being one of the biggest offenders in spreading lies about the company’s role in the 2020 presidential election).

Turns out, according to reporting by the New York Times:

Private messages sent by Mr. Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive and crude remarks that went beyond the inflammatory, often racist comments of his prime-time show and anything disclosed in the lead-up to the trial.

Among the crude remarks were those containing the so-called “C word,” a vulgar epithet typically hurled at women to demean them. Funny how in North America the word is considered among the most vile in the English language. But if you go to the U.K., not so much. When I was a drama student in a Canadian university, my acting instructor, the late Bernie Hopkins, was British and so were several of my fellow aspiring thespians. They used the word freely (though mostly when they were tipsy), much to the horror of the Canucks and Yanks anywhere within earshot.

At any rate, the Murdochs had had enough of him and decided it was time to do something about the Tucker problem. I know Carlson a little bit through a mutual friend. The friend wrote Carlson many years ago and recommended me as a writer for a new website Carlson was starting, The Daily Caller.

At that time, the Caller was a mainstream conservative site. Donald Trump was the host of Celebrity Apprentice and was otherwise best known for suggesting President Obama was born in Kenya. And in 2010, Carlson was not quite the right-wing darling he is today. Only in 2016, when he became a star at Fox, would he become an agent of radicalization for the seething masses.

Carlson and I discovered we had the same high school math teacher, Alan “Porky” Clark, albeit at different schools — Carlson at St. George’s; yours truly at St. Mark’s. Here’s a big surprise: when I saw the affable Porky at a St. Mark’s reunion many years ago, he told me Tucker was bright but had problems with impulse control, mostly in the form of blurting out insults and exhibiting unceasing arrogance.

Of Porky, Carlson told me, “He despised me, and often said so.” That really says something because Porky, a beloved football coach famous for being one of the last coaches in the Independent School League to deploy the single-wing offense, was nothing if not a gentleman.

At any rate, Carlson and I dickered back and forth and could not agree on suitable compensation, so I never experienced the pleasure of working for the man. But if I had, and Tucker had used the C word, I would have shrugged. Thanks to my exalted but potty-mouthed British acting coach, I got used to that word a long time ago.

As Charlie Sykes quipped recently, I have “zero Tucks left to give.”

P.S. I really have nothing to say about Lemon. He just plain sucked. Perhaps insincerely, he professed to be “stunned” at his dismissal. Really? Lemon had been walking on hot coals for years. I’ve also been fired, Don. And no, I was not stunned when it happened.

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I was happy to read in my always-interesting Axios morning email that, as of last year, smoking in the United States had declined even more than I thought it had. When I was born 65 years ago, nearly half of adult Americans smoked tobacco. That percentage is now down to 11. A word of caution: Young adults are more likely to smoke e-cigarettes and marijuana than tobacco, according to Gallup, which conducted the study cited by Axios.

Graph courtesy Axios, data from Gallup

Aside from the obvious health benefits to Americans who have kicked the habit — and presumably spared their offspring the burden of acquiring the same deadly compulsion — I’m personally delighted at the minor role smoking plays in most of our lives.

When I think back to my childhood and youth, I am flooded with memories of smoking — most of them unpleasant. My recollection is that smoke was everywhere and no one even questioned it. People smoked not only in restaurants and office buildings, but in hospitals, airplanes, elevators — literally anywhere.

I recall once sitting in a bar in Newport, Vermont, while in college in the 70s. The smoke was so thick that it burned my eyes. My father, a teacher who never smoked, used to send his suit jackets to the dry cleaners and when he brought them home, they looked great. But the man who owned the dry cleaners in South Dallas smoked like a chimney himself and smelled like a dirty ash tray. Trouble was, so did the “clean” jackets dad picked up. It bothered dad to no end, but what could he do?

Thank goodness those days are over …

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The image below links to a radio hit I did yesterday with Paul Pacelli at WICC-AM600 in Bridgeport. We talked about my latest column for CTNewsJunkie, where I weighed in on a Connecticut state senator who was staunchly opposed to cannabis legalization but changed his mind enough to later invest in a marijuana cultivation operation, Twitter wars waged between affordable housing advocates and their opponents, and a string of violent incidents that has convinced me of the need for a limited bear hunting season.