Yurts?

I don't know which possibility is more pathetic: that Tucker Carlson is stupid enough to actually believe everything he is saying in this clip; or that he feels no shame at looking this stupid by pretending to believe it.

[Via Media Matters]

CARLSON: Let me just put it this way. Here is my guess, and I know that I'm right. I will bet my car, in fact. Bush will come out, this president when he leaves office, will come out in the next decade or so as a strong advocate on behalf of ending global warming. He will be, he will have an environmentally conscious post presidency --

SIMON: Out of guilt perhaps?

CARLSON: -- like you read about -- no. 'Cause I think those are his true feelings. I mean, the guy has -- you know, he brags about his ranch being -- you know, having a small carbon footprint. I mean, they're very similar. People can't -- it's the same culture.

BOB FRANKEN (online columnist): Well, but they come at it entirely differently. I mean, George W. Bush has come at it as president from the point of view of corporate America, saying that we have to maintain our economy, and we have to figure out some sort of way consistent with that to attack global warming as long as we don't undermine the economy. Al Gore comes at it as, "I've got a slide show here which says that this is priority. We have to do this."

[crosstalk]

CARLSON: Well, I mean, presumably keeping the economy from collapsing is not only good for corporations but also for the people who don't -- so the country doesn't live in poverty.

FRANKEN: But what I'm saying is they're coming at it from entirely different directions.

CARLSON: Yeah. Bush will change. I've been saying this for seven years. Nobody believes me.

SIMON: But Al Gore will suggest that's eight years too late.

CARLSON: Yeah, OK, OK. Well, I think -- I mean, I think Gore would have been a disaster as president. We'd have been living in the Dark Ages. I think he's fundamentally hostile to human civilization. And a phony.

SIMON: Would we be fighting a war in Iraq?

CARLSON: We would likely be not, not be fighting a war in Iraq. We'd also be living yurts in the dark, and that would be maybe almost as bad.

There is just so much to work with here:

• The suggestion that in his post-presidential life, George W. Bush will come out as a passionate global-warming activist


• The suggestion that Bush could possibly care less now about the environment, as evidenced by the fact that he owns a "ranch" in Texas


• Carlson's apparent acceptance of Bush's stance that addressing global warming will harm the American economy


• Carlson's apparent belief that there is some virtue in "maintaining" the economy at the expense of addressing global warming


• The suggestion that an Al Gore presidency, beginning in 2000, would have plunged America into a new Dark Age (whatever that is supposed to mean)

It's time to pull the trigger, MSNBC. End the misery.