We’ve all heard the phrase damning with faint praise, which is the use of insincere or half-hearted praise to indicate that someone doesn’t deserve praise at all. The idea is, if you’re supposed to be praising someone, to do such a lousy job that you leave the listener asking: Is that the best you can do? Is that the nicest thing you can say?
I wonder if something like the reverse of that — praising with faint damnation — might be going on with the steady stream of behind-the-scenes featuring Tucker Carlson that are being ‘leaked,’ presumably to justify the recent cancellation of his show by Fox News.
With each new video, I find myself asking: Is that the best you can do? Is that the worst video you can find?
The impression one gets is that if there are years of such footage to comb through, and the most damning thing anyone can find is a joke about whether women have pillow fights in the women’s room… this guy must be a saint.
The more of these videos I see, the more I find myself thinking that Tucker is the kind of guy I’d like to have as a friend and certainly the kind of guy whose thoughts about what’s going on in the world I would like to hear.
Is it possible that Tucker himself is the one leaking them? I’m having trouble coming up with an explanation that makes more sense than that one.
