Tucker Carlson: right-wing brat

By Richard K. Barry 

I don't think leading figures from the right-wing noise machine necessarily had a meeting to decide on a strategy to attempt to brand Barack Obama's presidency as illegitimate, but they might as well have. They started with the laughable claim that he wasn't even born in the United States and therefore isn't eligible to be president. They moved on to arguments that he has governed in a manner inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution, implying he is "stealing" the country. You know, they want their country back. They have called him a European socialist suggesting his economic policies are un-American. In other words, they have kept up a narrative that Obama doesn't deserve the usual respect accorded the office because the office shouldn't be his.

Should we be surprised that some hack from Tucker Carlson's website went to the White House to heckle President Obama in the middle of a press conference? You know Carlson, the dweeb with the bowtie who runs The Daily Caller, also known as the brat Jon Stewart destroyed on Crossfire some years back, which led to Carlson's unemployment. More recently Carlson has aspired to be Andrew Breitbart but couldn't even achieve that level of journalistic filth.

Some staffer at The Daily Caller, a guy by the name of Neil Munro, a name we will all forget in a day or two, heckled President Obama as he delivered remarks in the White House's Rose Garden about a shift in immigration policy, which is this: 

A policy change from the Obama administration will stop deporting younger illegal immigrants — who came to the U.S. as children "and have since led law-abiding lives" — and grant them work permits. The move will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have feared deportation.

That's interesting and, most seem to think, a good move by Obama, though not everyone. Munro's concern is apparently

connected to comments the President made in March of 2011, in which he ruled out using an executive order to change immigration policy, even though no executive order was used for the current policy change. 

That's fine. Ask your question the way everyone else does. Play nice with the other kids. But not Munro, who barked out questions right in the middle of Obama's comments in an attempt to reduce the exchange to the level of a common barroom argument.

Munro's behaviour is simply a continuation of attempts to deny President Obama the respect that goes with the office. The right have attempted to make this about the question itself and holding the President to account, though that's absurd.

No great surprise here. The right-wing is simply continuing to claim, through this latest example of rudeness and unprofessionalism, that Obama's presidency is illegitimate.

I guess we should at least give these guys an "A" for consistency.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)