Rachel Marsden Must Have Turned Fox Down

I’ve been saying Megyn Kelly’s departure from Fox News would be good for the network, provided they chose her replacement well. It’s very easy to do what she does. There are millions of people who could do it if given a chance.

This morning I saw that they had given the job to Tucker Carlson. I now see Kelly’s departure as a disaster.

This is exactly the kind of move I used to complain about when I was trying to achieve some level of fame as a conservative blogger: conservatives have an inner circle of mediocre people they protect and promote, and if you’re outside the circle, it doesn’t matter if you’re Albert Einstein crossed with Winston Churchill crossed with P.J. O’Rourke. You are not going to get a chance.

Tucker Carlson seems like a nice boy, but he has almost no talent. He’s bad at what he does. He’s not unusually smart. He’s not witty or funny. He’s not perceptive. He has never said anything quotable, and that’s a real problem for a would-be pundit. He’s like Mary Katharine Ham in a suit.

I wonder if the Fox brass bothered to check Carlson’s resume. He has failed twice, and he has never succeeded. His show Crossfire was cancelled, and he had an MSNBC show which failed. Why would you hire someone who already had two swings at the ball? Investing is all about momentum. You don’t invest in something that isn’t succeeding already. Carlson, who is approaching 50, has a very long track record which proves people don’t want to watch him. Didn’t anyone notice?

I guess they really wanted to save 25 million dollars.

The sad thing is that he’s not bad enough to kill a program, so he’ll probably last on Fox, like the orange car at a dealership no one wants to buy. Too good to fire; too weak to succeed. Greta van Susteren was not very good at what she did, but she was good enough to survive, so her time spot remained clogged and wasted for years. Carlson will end up in the same boat.

I’m trying to think of an insider they could have promoted. Greg Gutfeld is smart and talented, but he’s immature and gets on people’s nerves. He doesn’t have gravitas. People can’t respect him.

Now I’m stuck. I can’t think of anyone but Gutfeld.

They need someone with Ann Coulter’s intelligence and Bill O’Reilly’s ability to handle guests. There is probably a blogger or Youtuber out there who could do it, but we will never get to see that person, because if anything happens to Carlson, Fox will go through its entire Christmas party invitation list before talking to anyone new.

Laura Ingraham is smart, but people don’t like her.

I had a weird experience this week, and it dovetails nicely with this subject. I watched a far-left Youtube vlogger, and I enjoyed it. I don’t know how that happened. His name is Jimmy Dore. He’s a comedian who appeared with a group of vloggers who call themselves the Young Turks. Their vlog is as boring as death, but he’s entertaining and smart. I don’t know how he ended up on the left. Childhood trauma, I guess. He’s Irish. Maybe he’s another casualty of cruel Catholic school nuns.

He has been hammering liberals for buying and promoting the “Russians hacked the election” story with no proof. It’s very pleasant to watch. Anyway, he’s really good, and like Conan O’Brien, he shows there is untapped talent out there, if you’re willing to look outside of your ten best friends.

Remember how O’Brien got his job? Everyone said NBC was nuts, hiring a writer who had never worked on-camera. Look how that panned out. If O’Brien had worked for Fox, he would still be in the mailroom, waiting for his gold watch. “Conan…Mr. Carlson says you forgot to use soy milk in his cappuccino! We won’t be needing you in the studio any more. Here’s your old toilet brush.”

The left has people like Colbert and Stewart–real talents–and the right gets Tucker Carlson. And we had plenty of alternatives. It’s a self-inflicted wound. Thank God Neil Cavuto doesn’t have a bipolar son who needs a job, or we wouldn’t even have Carlson.

I checked to see who’s on CNN at 9 p.m., and it’s Anderson Cooper. He starts at 8 p.m. I don’t know how anyone can stand two hours of that, but it’s true. I wonder how Carlson will do against him. I don’t know how Megyn Kelly has done. Well. I know she has done well. I just don’t know how well. I am too lazy to look. My guess is that O’Reilly will feed Carlson enough viewers to keep him on the air.

I don’t care much about this story, but I do find it interesting. I don’t watch Fox or any other TV news station. I see little bits of the news from time to time. Just enough to be disappointed!

Yeah, I’m being not a team player again. Once again, my tiny blog will be responsible for a Fox failure. They should send someone to assassinate me. If they had done that a few years ago, their comedy show would have been a huge hit. Because quality isn’t the problem. The problem is people like me, pointing out the obvious. My power is intoxicating. Behold my blog and tremble!

On the up side, Bill O’Reilly must be the happiest man alive today. Whatever he was worth to Fox last week, it has doubled now.

Maybe they’ll fire him and hire Jiminy Glick.

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Here’s a great question. If they absolutely had to hire from within, why didn’t they consider Andy Levy? He’s as good as Gutfeld, plus he has the ability to be taken seriously.

Is he dead? I don’t keep up.