Cynical Nation

Tucker Carlson jumped the shark when Hillary made him eat a shoe on national television, and I don't think he's ever recovered. Now the New York Observer is making a big deal over the fact that he's going wobbly over the war:

...[I]t seems Mr. Carlson has had a change of heart recently. While he's still a staunch conservative -- he's anti-abortion, married with four kids -- he's changed his mind about the war in Iraq. "I think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," he said. "It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I'm enraged by it, actually."

Say what? The guy CNN chose to represent the voice of American conservatism only hawked the war, against his own better judgment, because a "smarter" "friend" of his talked him into it? Can a pundit of such national prominence actually be so malleable?

You'd better believe it. Check out this jaw-dropping passage from his recent book. It deals with his reaction to a spurious rape charge that was levied against him by a deranged Kentucky woman:

I went home and went to bed. At three in the morning I woke up feeling completely out of control. Still half asleep, I was suddenly convinced that somehow I must have raped this woman, whoever she was. I must have done it while sleepwalking or during some sort of memory-erasing seizure. She couldn't have made up the whole thing. Maybe I have a brain tumor, I thought. Maybe I'm leading a double life I don't even know about. Maybe I'm going insane.

I got up and walked downstairs. For an hour I sat on the front steps thinking about my life, my wife and my three children, my job, and how it was all going to end because of something terrible I didn't even remember doing. I felt sadder than I had in a long time.

Jesus on a surfboard, can you believe that? The guy doesn't know whether he raped a woman or not. How can he be expected to form a consistent, principled position on the war? Am I the only one who thinks this guy is absolutely pathetic?

I'm not knocking Tucker just because he's turned on the war. I've had misgivings about it myself, and there are many principled war critics whose opinions I respect. Tucker Carlson is not among them. If our fortunes in Iraq were suddenly and dramatically to change for the better, it's too easy to imagine this bow-tied dweeb saying, "Well, I was never really against the war either. I shouldn't have listened to Pat Buchanan. I'll never do that again. Never."