Yes, you read the title correctly: TUCKER CARLSON nailed a crucial point in providing his analysis of the State of the Union speech.

After the flip, I'll tell you why.  So you know, however, I am not a big huge fan of Tucker Carlson's but I don't hate him, either.  He is not, in my opinion, one of the blindly supportive pro-Bush pro-Republican talking heads ala Sean Hannity.  His criticisms of his own party and of Bush, therefore, carry some weight with me.

Specifics below the fold.

I am a Democrat first and a dutiful member of the Bush regime opposition.  As such, I watched the SOTU address on Tuesday night.  I watched Tim Kaine's rebuttal.  I followed the various open threads here and read all the excellent rebuttals  over at Think Progress (I have excerpted their rebuttals and have posted them over at my blog if you're interested - link here).  I watched all the sometimes blathering and occasionally interesting media analysis after-the-fact.  Exhausted, I gave up and went up to bed a bit before midnight eastern time.  I had MSNBC on as I got into bed - content to watch for a while, I started to fall asleep.  Somewhere in that not-asleep but not-awake state, I heard Tucker Carlson's commentary and it was dead on.

MATTHEWS:  Tucker, you`re (sic) thoughts on the speech tonight.  We haven`t gotten to you yet.

TUCKER CARLSON, HOST, MSNBC`S "THE SITUATION":  Well, you know, I love the fact that Bush is proud of America.  I think it`s--the problem with some of his adversaries, I think, they`re instinctively embarrassed of a lot of things America does.  And Bush isn`t.  I mean, he is just proud of the country and that`s really appealing.

Where I part with Bush and where I think he (sic) policies become really problematic is when he becomes proud of spreading democracy abroad and makes that kind of the end of, you know, the purpose of America.  And democracy is a mechanism.  It`s a means.  It`s not an end, right?

And so, when Bush gets up and says, you know, "Democracy is good for its own sake."  And then the next sentence says, you know, "Hamas need to disarm."  He doesn`t see the contradiction between the two.

Democracy produced Hamas, right?  And so, you know, I`m not an Isolationist, but I think that`s troubling and inconsistent.

My emphasis added.  Democracy is an enabler of some ultimate representative goal, not the goal itself.  So... obvious.  Yet there isn't a lot being made of that or the glaring inconsistency in the Bush administration's stance towards, specifically, Hamas and Iran.  It gets better:

CARLSON:  Hold on and I`ll tell you why I felt that way.  Bush could...

MATTHEWS:  ... whatever his name is.  The guy from--I did memorize the pronunciation.  I`ve lost it now, the one that`s heading up Iran.  He was elected.

CARLSON:  Well, that`s exactly--I mean, look, when tonight--and I`m not [knocking] democracy obviously, you know.  It`s a marvelous system, however...

SCARBOROUGH:  Oh, Tucker, you know you all.

CARLSON:  Democracy reflects the nature of the people who participate in it.  Stable cultures produce stable governments.

When Bush gets up and he says to the people of Iran, look, you know, "We want you to determine your future and we`re good with whatever you determine, but that doesn`t include your nuclear program."

Let`s be totally honest.  The president`s job is to protect America and protect American interests.  It`s not to make other cultures or other nations happy or prosperous.  It`s to protect this culture and this nation and I just wish he would say that.  That`s my complaint.

SCARBOROUGH:  You know, before the war--and I agree completely with Tucker.  I was just joking with him.  Before the war, you know, we`re all talking about democracies in the Middle East and everybody got angry when Turkey opposed us going into Iraq...

MATTHEWS:  Right.

SCARBOROUGH:  ...A democracy of sort in the Middle East.  And it just shows time and time again you`ve got to be careful what you wish for because it`s going to come back and bite you.

Again, my emphasis added.  I came fully awake enough to be impressed with the comments, given their source.  When I woke up Wednesday morning I figured I had misheard - thus the delay in posting this diary.  I was waiting for the transcript.

Indeed, we're fomenting "Democracy" but not in the form we envisioned.  In this we actually weaken the power of Democracy across-the-board... Democracy imposed, and imposed on cultures unprepared to deal with democratic trappings yields some lesser and often dangerous hybrid.  That, I believe, is the simple truth of Carlson's observation.  And the cost of these sort-of-Democracies, in addition to the overall devaluation of democratic systems generally, is proving to be human lives - American, Iraqi, Iranian, Israeli, Palestinian...

Aside, I wonder if anyone whispered to the President that Iran is a Democracy (he included Iran on a list of countries that was not).  I also wonder if anyone in the media and/or the Democratic party will string these simple facts into a truth that underscores the singular arrogance and imcompetence of the administration of George W. Bush.  We have to hit him on security and foreign policy and this, I think, is our stepping-off point.

posted by RenaRF at 2:17 PM 4 comments