Carlson ripped President Donald Trump’s hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton for pushing for war with Iran.
“War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it is always good business,” he said Friday on his show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Carlson leans toward a non-interventionist viewpoint when it comes to using U.S. military force around the globe, and reportedly was one of the advisers who urged Trump not to use military force against Iran.
Carlson’s sense of relief at the news that President Donald Trump had called off the retaliatory airstrike against Iran was nearly palpable during his show Friday. “Bombing Iran would have ended [Trump’s] political career in a minute. There’d be no chance of reelection after that,” he said.
Not a fan
On his Friday program, Carlson played a clip of a 2018 appearance by Bolton in which the two disagreed on foreign policy. Carlson then noted that Bolton had supported the Obama administration’s overthrow of the Qaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 and had been a driving force behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003.
“We killed hundreds of thousands of people, lost thousands of our own troops, spent more than $1 trillion, all to eliminate a WMD threat that, despite John Bolton’s assurances, never existed in the first place,” Carlson said.
“Bolton is glad we did all of that, really happy about it. That’s demented. Normal people don’t talk like that. There’s nothing normal about John Bolton,” he added.
“Bureaucratic tapeworm”
Carlson then played a clip of Bolton speaking at a “Free Iran” event in 2017, where Bolton told a cheering audience, “I had said for over 10 years since coming to these events that the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the Mullah’s regime in Tehran. … And that is why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran. Thank you very much.”
Carlson said, “In other words, last night has been in the works for years. John Bolton is a kind of bureaucratic tapeworm. Try as you might, you can’t expel him. He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering, but critically, somehow, never suffering himself.”
“His life really is Washington in a nutshell. Blunder into obvious catastrophes, again and again, refuse to admit blame, and then demand more of the same,” Carlson continued.
“That’s the John Bolton life-cycle. In between administration jobs, there are always cushy think-tank posts, paid speaking gigs, cable news contracts. War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it is always good business,” he added.
Watch the whole clip below:
