Tucker Carlson: Smoking in children’s cartoons is a ‘symbol of freedom and masculinity’

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/tucker-carlson-smoking-in-childrens-cartoons-is-a-symbol-of-freedom-and-masculinity/



Tucker Carlson: Smoking in children’s cartoons is a ‘symbol of freedom and masculinity’
David Edwards
21 Sep 2014

The hosts of Fox & Friends on Sunday expressed outraged that male comic book characters were being “wussified,” and that an effort was being made not to “sexualize” female characters.

Last week, leaked photos from the studios of animator Genndy Tartakovsky showed what the updated CGI-animated Popeye would look like.

“Without the iconic anchor tattoo and the smoking pipe!” Fox News host Clayton Morris announced on Sunday. “Are they wussifying Popeye?”

“Of course, they’re wussifying,” co-host Tucker Carlson agreed. “Nothing is scarier to a modern liberal than tobacco. If Popeye were driving around giving the morning after (birth control) pill to fourth graders, that would be totally fine.”

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Note to Tucker: You cannot out-Gohmert Gohmert. Louie is in a class of his own.

[rurallib]

1. show us you're a man Tuck. Start smoking. Heavily, please

Three to five packs a day should show some manliness.

[SheilaT]

2. I'm currently reading a book, with a 2012 copyright date,

whose main character is an 87 year old retired detective who smokes. Okay, so he was a soldier in WWII (part of the story) and so of course he smokes, and I'm not so stupid as to think all smokers die before they can get seriously old. But what I'm finding totally bothersome is that he lights up EVERYWHERE, including inside a hospital and a church at a funeral. I think the author is intending the smoking everywhere behavior to serve as a marker for how independent and take-no-guff-from-anyone kind of guy he is.

But it makes no sense. Hospitals all banned smoking decades ago. Lighting up inside any house of worship was simply never done, in least in my memory. I'd find it more interesting and believable if this guy simply scurried around occasionally to find a place where he can smoke, and perhaps rail all the while against those fools who've banned it everywhere.

In a similar way to the book I'm referencing, all too often in movies someone will light up a cigarette and refuse to put it out, even when told there's no smoking allowed there. It's invariably portrayed as something both charming and establishing that character as being an individual who simply won't knuckle under to those wimpy people who don't smoke themselves.

What I'm getting at is not the same as thinking people shouldn't smoke in the first place -- even though I'm a pretty vocal anti-smoker myself. But it's the refusal to follow rules that's held up as adorable. If a novelist or a movie maker wants to show how tough and manly and individualistic a character is, surely there are other ways to do it.

And for what it's worth, Tucker Carlson is a smoker.