1.) Carlson explains to Van Susteren how quotation marks work — The other day, TheDC’s Jeff Poor wrote a story about Mike Tyson going on an ESPN-affiliated radio station and saying some really vile things about Sarah Palin. Now Palin’s biggest fans are very angry at Tyson for saying it, and at ESPN for allowing it on their air. Er, wait, no, they’re actually mad at… The Daily Caller! In a classic case of blaming the messenger, many of Palin’s most ardent supporters are furious at TheDC for daring to report on a public figure’s outlandish statements about another public figure, on public airwaves. Suddenly a quote is considered an endorsement, and by reporting on Tyson’s hate speech, TheDC is somehow complicit. Leading the charge was Greta Van Susteren, who’s been calling Tucker Carlson names and making baseless allegations about his motives, while insisting she’s his friend. Weird, huh? Which brings us up to last night, when she was nice enough to invite Tucker on her show to yell at him for 7 minutes. He led off by attempting to explain to her the practice of journalism: “We wrote a news story about Mike Tyson’s attack, verbal attack, on Sarah Palin. Mike Tyson is a convicted rapist, and he used sexually violent and threatening language to describe Gov. Palin. Our view was that if he had said those words about any other woman in public life — if he’d said them about Hillary Clinton, if he’d said them about the First Lady, if he’d said them about Madeleine Albright — they’d be on the front page of the New York Times. But because it was Sarah Palin he was attacking, they would be ignored by news outlets that don’t like Sarah Palin. And I felt that was wrong, that this happened, that we had to hold it up to public view, and that Mike Tyson ought to suffer the consequences for what he said. Somehow, you — and I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn’t read the piece — assumed that we were somehow making this attack on Sarah Palin. Which is the opposite, in fact, of what we were doing.” And so of course, Van Susteren ignored all that and instead called him a liar and a smut-peddler and various other things. All for reporting on the words of a guy who Van Susteren has had on her own show as recently as last April, and who she seemed to get along with just fine. When she was grilling Tyson with tough questions like, “Why do you like pigeons?”, it’s unclear why she didn’t preface it with, “By the way, you’re a convicted rapist and you make me sick.” If Mike Tyson is irrelevant and nobody cares what he has to say about anything, as some Palin supporters are insisting, why did Greta Van Susteren have him on her show? Why was she friendlier to the demented rapist than to someone she calls a friend who reported that rapist’s ugly, hateful words? Just wondering.
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3. Gingers spiked — Are you a redhead? Do you have sperm you’d like to sell? Too bad! TheDC’s Laura Donovan reports: “Ole Schou, director of the world’s largest sperm bank, Cryos International, recently told Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet that demand for red-haired children is far lower than the number of carrot-tops donating sperm. ‘There are too many redheads in relation to demand,’ Schou explained to the publication. ‘I do not think you choose a redhead, unless the partner – for example, the sterile male – has red hair, or because the lone woman has a preference for redheads. And that’s perhaps not so many, especially in the latter case.'” It’s a sad end for what has been, until now, a fun and lucrative hobby for Carrot Top.
4.) Today’s words of wisdom from Greta Van Susteren’s Twitter feed — “Well that didn’t go well …”
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