How Kevin McCarthy stupidly backed himself into a no-win corner with Tucker Carlson
Kevin McCarthy should have known that by giving all that raw January 6th footage exclusively to Tucker Carlson, he’d alienate the rest of the media because they didn’t get the exclusive, and the media would make a point of turning it into a huge scandal. In spite of spending decades in politics, McCarthy does not seem to understand even the basic realities of how any of this stuff works.
To succeed as a politician these days, you have to work the media. You have to understand that the media makes all of its decisions solely on ratings potential. You have to help give the media its ratings, or else the media will decide to get its ratings at your expense.
As a politician, the cardinal sin is if you do something that blocks the media from being able to pursue ratings at all. Do you know how inept the mainstream media looks for still not having access to the 1/6 footage that a widely discredited clown like Tucker Carlson gets to cherry pick?
And Kevin McCarthy did this to the mainstream media on purpose. The mainstream media created McCarthy. They spent the 2022 election yelling “red wave” to suppress Democratic vote so McCarthy could become Speaker, so the resulting conflict with Democrats would juice ratings. And now, after the entire mainstream media dishonestly conspired to make McCarthy the Speaker, he’s immediately betraying them by handing a big ratings opportunity to just one guy everybody already hates. So the media is done with him. They’d just as soon have some other Republican Speaker now.
If you’re a dummy in charge, you need that instinct that tells you which smart people around you to trust and distrust. McCarthy doesn’t have it. Carlson surely told McCarthy that this footage stunt would help them both – knowing it would help himself but hurt McCarthy.
Now there doesn’t appear to be any easy way out of this for Kevin McCarthy. The media takes this scandal personally and therefore will be inclined to keep it alive. He probably can’t appease the media by just giving them all the raw footage as well, because it was a breach of national security to give it to Carlson to begin with. And if McCarthy tries to blame Carlson for the whole thing, he’ll just be admitting that he’s the kind of doofus who got played by Tucker Carlson and is therefore too stupid to be Speaker of anything.
