I didn’t plan to become First Draft’s Tucker Carlson correspondent, it just turned out that way. He’s the most dangerous Fox News Pest ever: smarter than Hannity, more extreme than Bill-O. Those guys occasionally told the truth. The Mothertucker never does.
Tucker took his act to Hungary this week. I wonder if it has anything to do with this?
Sorry. That joke about the Swanson Frozen Food heir was from hunger, man. It’s a pity that there’s not a Hungry-Man goulash, but that would be too exotic for MAGA palates.
Hungarian strong man Viktor Orban has become the It Dictator for American wingnuts. He’s anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-Soros, and pro-Trump. Frankly, I think his country is in need of Orban renewal…
After the euphoria of the collapse of Communism faded, the former Warsaw Pact countries have been at risk at going from far left to far right dictatorships. The older members of the population are used to being told what to think and there’s nostalgia for more orderly times among many Eastern Europeans. In the case of Hungary, order meant the Soviet invasion to crush the 1956 revolution.
It’s downright bizarre that the Tucker Carlsons of the world are infatuated with crypto-Commies such as Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. I call them that as both are nostalgic for the Cold War and its accoutrements such as the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. I think the Magyar Menace DBA Viktor Orban is ready to erect a Paprika Curtain on the Danube to keep Western cooties out or some such shit.
Right-wing Americans used to groove on anti-Communist dictators such as Somoza, Marcos, and Pinochet. What’s next? The rehabilitation of former leftist Daniel Ortega? It makes as much sense as Putin love.
I, for one, have no Cold War nostalgia whatsoever. Nuclear war never appealed to me somehow. I was one of those liberals who was delighted when Thatcher and Reagan did business with Gorbachev. Perhaps the splotch on his head made him seem more trustworthy than Brezhnev or Andropov. I’m glad that they engaged and that the wall came down.
Another recent development I find vexing is Marxist nostalgia in some quarters on the authoritarian left. I’m not down with that at all. I remember hearing horror stories about the “family” policies of the Greek Communist Party during the 1946-49 Civil War. They thought families were bourgeois, so they opted to destroy them. This policy was a loser with your average Greek who was raised to trust only their own kin.
The world has been turned upside down in the last five years. In the 1990’s, we were told that dictatorship was dead and that free market capitalism was the wave of the future. In the last few years, we were told that democracy is at death’s door and right wing populism is the future. I was skeptical in the Nineties and I still am. Nothing is written.
Back to Tucker and his little buddy Viktor Orban. It’s creepy to watch the Magyar Menace suck up to the Mothertucker as if he were a future Oval One. He’s just a cable news hack with delusions of glory. Of course, former President* Pennywise was just a reality teevee hack when he threw his weave in the ring in 2016. Stay tuned.
The last word goes to Jethro Tull with a song written and recorded before the Iron Curtain was shredded: