On Wednesday I returned to not just the Number One cable-news show, not just the Number One show in all of cable TV, but latterly the top show in all primetime TV, the ratings phenomenon "Tucker Carlson Tonight".
Tucker and I started with Joe Biden playing "Despacito" on his cellphone to an Hispanic audience and then mulled more generally the desperate relationship between politicians and pop stars over recent decades:
The incident Steyn called 'the gold standard' of pandering was a 1998 encounter between Gore and grunge artist Courtney Love in which the Tennessee Democrat claimed to be a 'big fan' of hers.
To her credit, Courtney, the founder and lead singer of Hole, was having none of it. "Yeah, right," she sneered. "Name a song."
As any campaign consultant can tell you, the Politician's First Rule of Holes is: When you're in one, stop digging. Al Gore introduced us to a Second Rule: When you're with one, stop pretending to dig her.
Alas, ersatz hipness has become the order of the day. I pine for the good old days when pop stars were iconoclastic enough not to go along with it. Click below to watch:
You can see the full hour of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" here. I congratulate Tucker on achieving his spectacular ratings success - none of which has anything to do with me, as I've mostly been off the air and far away these last six months.
If you prefer me in non-visual formats, please tune in tomorrow, Friday, for the weekend edition of The Mark Steyn Show - or catch up, if you've yet to hear it, with my latest Tale for Our Time, The Prisoner of Windsor.
The Mark Steyn Show and Tales for Our Time are made with the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club. You can find more details about our Club here - and we also have a great gift membership.
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I can't sign nor can I understand sign language, but I find it much easier to understand a Joe Biden speech when I look at the sign language interpreter and not listen to him.
Sinatra was good, but I witnessed this in an English nightclub:
Male 'player' : "How do you like your eggs in the morning ?"
Female: "Not fertilized - Piss Off!"
I didn't know it until just now but arcane Sinatra stories is exactly why I'm a Steyn Club member. Thanks for making my day brighter, Mark.
Since the 1956 DNC convention was televised, I wonder if there is footage of Frank acting like Frank. I have searched around so far but have not been able to locate anything. Anybody seen it?
Could not find any video online. Rayburn was the chair of the 1956 convention, where LBJ suffered an humiliating defeat to Adlai Stevenson in his bid to be the Democratic candidate. According to an article in the Desert Sun, a newspaper in Palm Springs, May 8, 1957, Rayburn asked Sinatra to sing: The Yellow Rose of Texas, at the convention, and Sinatra rebuked him saying: take the hand off the suit, creep. The incident was reported in Look magazine. Sinatra sued Look magazine for over two million dollars for libel. No idea what the court ultimately ruled in the law suit. But if Sinatra was supporting Adlai Stevenson, being asked to sing a Texas song might well have caused him to flip out, or maybe Sinatra was not into folk songs. As a Canadian, I really shouldn't venture into American history, so please forgive me if I am just stating the obvious. But I can say, if Justin Trudeau had been there he surely would have obliged Rayburn, and sung it with black face and all.
One thing I hope readers of Steyn and watchers of Tucker understand, is if the Republicans do not keep all the Senators and even win the house, we are going to have an IMPEACHMENT in February.
Marginal Senators like Snowe and others need to be voted in, not because we love them but because we cannot do without them.
Soros and crew have been working hard on the Senate and House races to turn the entire Congress.
Olympia Snowe is gone. You're thinking of Susan Collins but I get your point.
You are correct it is Collins I am thinking of, silly me.
The Politicians Second Rule of Holes guarantees another year of MSC membership.
"Hands off the threads, creep." That's the line all girls should have for dates they don't like. The Sinatra story is a riot. I wished I'd heard it long ago.
Leftist politicians seem to struggle to relate to working class Americans and other ordinary people. Didn't hilary clinton once say to an aide that they needed to get some normal people in the 'crowd' around her so she could demonstrate how she relates to them? Leftists would be comically pathetic if they weren't so perfidiously destructive.
"Leftists would be comically pathetic if they weren't so perfidiously destructive."
That totally falls under the category of things I wish I would have said.
Thanks! :)
Hey, how about some content warning before showing pictures of Gropey McSuckface on TV? I haven't that many lip-locks since Joey Chestnut's last defense of his hot dog eating title. Eewwww!!!!
I second the motion.
"Gropey McSuckface?" Love it.
I can see it now:
So Gropey McSuckface McHarris McBean
Put together a very peculiar machine
And he traveled all over the Kingdom of Woke
With Trusty Teleprompter through which he spoke
"Hope aboard, man!" he cringed croaked and sighed
with his Nifty Hair-Snifter right there at his side
And so in went all the loudmouths who lived then in Woke
And when they came out they were silent when Gropey did grope.
At the time I called 2016 the Yertle the Turtle election, wonder what 2020 will be...
Into which went all the loudmouths from Kingdom of Woke
And they came out all silent when McSuckface groped
Sorry about that, don't know what happened with that repeat line.
I love Courtney.
Even more cringe-worthy than Al Gore's 1998 encounter with grunge artist Courtney Love in which the Tennessee Democrat claimed to be a 'big fan' of hers, is the slobbering of Ireland's gay Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar in the letter he wrote by hand and had delivered in Dublin in 2018 to Kylie Minogue, every gay man's sweetheart.
QUOTE
"Dear Kylie, just wanted to drop you a short note in advance of the concert in Dublin.
"If you like, I'd love to welcome you to Ireland personally."
"I am really looking forward to it. Am a huge fan!"
"I understand you are staying in the Merrion Hotel which is just across the street from my office in Government Buildings.
"If you like, I'd love to welcome you to Ireland personally.
Leo (Taoiseach)"
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/04/01/leo-varadkar-wrote-fan-letter-kylie-minogue/
Joe fiddles Despacito while America's cities burn. I was at my local sporting goods store and the shooting department looked like Mother Hubbard's cupboard with limits on ammunition purchases. I'm not sure if the DNC appreciates that their current position as history's greatest shotgun salesman may not play well at the polls in November