The New Republic, "Pimp by Ride by Tucker Carlson" 12/23/07

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=83665295-1de6-4571-af9c-0a90f6d1fde0

Media Outlet:
*Old Media
*National

Content:
*Tucker follows around Ron Paul to see why people support Paul
*Paul's viewpoints

Tone:
*Starts off with a lot of negative assumptions about Paul, gradually grows a little more positive

Claims:
*I'll just put a quote here out of place "Either the Ron Paul movement is more sophisticated than most journalists understand, or a lot of Paul supporters are eccentric bordering on bonkers."

Quote(s):
"Stylistically, a Paul speech is about as colorful as a tax return. He is the only politician I've ever seen who doesn't draw energy from the audience; his tone is as flat at the conclusion as it was at the beginning. There are no jokes. There's no warm-up, no shout-out to local luminaries in the room, no inspiring vignettes about ordinary Americans doing their best in the face of this or that bad thing. In fact, there are virtually none of the usual political clichés in a Paul speech. Children may be our future, but Ron Paul isn't admitting it in public."

"Paul never outshines his message, which is unchanging: Let adults make their own choices; liberty works. For a unified theory of everything, it's pretty simple. And Paul sincerely believes it.Most Republicans, of course, profess to believe it too. But only Paul has introduced a bill to legalize unpasteurized milk. Give yourself five minutes and see if you can think of a more countercultural idea than that. Most people assume that the whole reason we have a government is to make sure the milk gets pasteurized. It takes some stones to argue otherwise, especially if nobody's paying you to do it. "

My thoughts:
A must read. Tucker's writes surprisingly well. As a television commentator I don't know like him much, what kind of ass wears a bow tie? Seriously. But like Paul, there's more to him then meets the eye. Tucker's tone about Paul gradually changes from skeptical to almost being a Paul supporter. Go read this, like now.

However, just as I have my biases, so does Tucker. It's difficult to imagine Tucker calling a whorehouse out of the blue, just to ask the owner to bring some prostitutes over to Paul's campaign to be anything more than an amateur attempt at sabotage.