Sometimes a column features such unmitigated, unmerited nastiness that it requires an answer for the record. Such is the case with the latest outpouring of poison from the pen of veteran pundit Margaret Carlson, who manages in just one column to spread gratuitous calumny in myriad, unrelated directions.
The putative target for Carlson’s ire was vice president Mike Pence’s decision to stay at President Trump’s resort in Doonbeg, Ireland rather than in Dublin, 180 miles away, where Pence was to meet with Irish leaders. Pence’s decision was indeed misguided, but it was hardly worthy of Carlson’s level of bile.
Pence has a cousin who lives in Doonbeg, and his great-grandmother grew up there. Recent history is replete with presidents and vice presidents paying homage to family roots while on official business abroad. Unless Carlson erupted against the expenses incurred for purely “fun” trips taken by Michelle Obama and daughters, she should spare us her protestations that “the taxpayer will pay dearly” for Pence’s family pilgrimage.
The legitimate gripe is not that Pence stayed so far from Dublin, but that he sojourned at Trump’s property. By now, this habit of administration officials has become so noteworthy as to rightly raise questions. It looks as if Trump is profiteering from his presidency, or at least trying to do so. That’s bad. The administration should adopt a general rule against it.
Yet Carlson overreacts absurdly. She treats a bad but legal decision as if it is a “scandal” of near-epic proportions. Her closing line says that Pence now has “left the hapless league of Dan Quayle for the swamp of Spiro Agnew.”
Really? Agnew resigned from office after pleading “no contest” on charges of taking bribes. If Carlson has evidence that Pence is on the take, she should bring it forward, because she is the only one. Even if Pence is guilty of a sickening obeisance to his boss, that’s hardly the invidious corruption that Carlson pretends to see in this case.
Sometimes columnists hyperventilate. They engage in hyperbole. If that is all Carlson had done, she would have constructed just a poorly reasoned column, rather than an assault on decency.
But in addition to smearing Pence by comparing him to Agnew, Carlson vented spleen in numerous other ways against Pence, against Pence’s wife Karen, against former vice president Dick Cheney, against Calvin Coolidge (how did Coolidge “disgrace the office” of vice president?), against Evangelical faith in multiple ways, against education secretary Betsy DeVos and for-profit colleges and even an important American founder, Elbridge Gerry.
Cheney, in Carlson’s worse-than-snarky telling, “disgraced the office” and “started a war.” (Tell that to George W. Bush.) Evangelicals like Pence are “Bible thumping.” The Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana, modeled on the federal one introduced by Chuck Schumer and Ted Kennedy, was nothing but “discrimination against LGBTQ” showing Pence’s “antipathy to gays.”
DeVos, a woman whose charitable endeavors for education and the arts (tens of millions of dollars’ worth) have given untold opportunities to underprivileged children, is denigrated by Carlson’s saying the reason she took the job as education secretary was “so she could protect all those Trump University-like for-profit scams.” Never mind that the for-profit college industry provides services important enough that the Urban League has defended the role they play in the education system.
And so on. Rather than being content with criticizing Pence for his Doonbeg judgment, Carlson has lashed out in all directions as if in a contest to see how venomous she could be towards as many conservatives as possible, even if they have nothing to do with her supposed topic at hand.
Constructive political commentary, this isn’t. Civil discourse requires better.
