Tucker And Air Force Amy

by digby

Most of you know that I loathe Tucker Faye Carlson (as the good Roger Ailes calls him) and I’m also not a particular fan of Ron Paul, who mostly seems to be a Rorschach test for the politically disaffected. But put the two of them together and you get an entertaining and thought provoking little piece about one of the many political phenomenons of the 2008 campaign.

Carlson’s best moment in journalism was his interview with George W. Bush in 2000 where, unlike the vast amount of psycho-babble you see in modern campaign reporting, we saw an actual window into the man’s character with that chilling anecdote about how Junior responded to a convicted killer begging to be spared the executioner. So maybe Carlson is just a bitchy little twit in person but has some redeeming qualities as a political feature reporter (with an editor.) He does have an eye for details.

The piece on Paul doesn’t truly answer the questions about what makes his quixotic campaign tick, but it offers some very interesting little observations like the fact that his biggest applause line on the stump is about the unconstitutionality of the Federal Reserve. It’s not your average hot button issue, that’s for sure.

But it does have an interesting pedigree, which Carlson fails to probe in his piece. That’s not surprising. He was obviously distracted by certain denizens of Pahrump Nevada (the locale of one of the speeches he attends) who are employees of his “friend” Dennis Hof, the owner of the moonlight Bunny Ranch (and star of HBO’s “Cathouse.”) What Carlson missed was the fact that Pahrump is a rural town in the middle of the Western desert where there are a fair number of people with affiliations with the right wing Posse Comitatus groups who have railed about the Federal Reserve for years. I’m not saying his followers actually know much about the details, although some probably do. But it’s worth noting that this stuff sounds like a dogwhistle to a Western militia style “libertarianism” that isn’t in the least bit benign.

Dave Neiwert has written a lot about this, as you all know. But it should be of more than a passing interest to mainstream journalists who are writing about Ron Paul that his biggest applause lines are echoes of an underground right wing radicalism that’s coming up to the surface. I don’t know what it means, but it’s usually not a good sign.

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