Tammy Duckworth Tears Into ‘Desperate’ Tucker Carlson in Brutal NYTimes Op-Ed: He ‘Doesn’t Know What Patriotism Is’
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) torched Tucker Carlson in a New York Times op-ed Thursday night after a very public back-and-forth Fox News primetime host spent the week attacking Duckworth’s patriotism while calling her a “coward” and “moron.”
In her piece, entitled “Tucker Carlson Doesn’t Know What Patriotism Is,” Duckworth, a former United States helicopter pilot who lost both of her legs in combat, said Carlson’s motives to attack her were fueled by getting “America’s attention to be on anything other than Donald Trump’s failure to lead our nation.”
Duckworth writes:
Their goal isn’t to make — or keep — America great. It’s to keep Mr. Trump in power, whatever the cost.
It’s better for Mr. Trump to have you focused on whether an Asian-American woman is sufficiently American than to have you mourning the 130,000 Americans killed by a virus he claimed would disappear in February. It’s better for his campaign to distract Americans with whether a combat veteran is sufficiently patriotic than for people to recall that this failed commander in chief has still apparently done nothing about reports of Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.
Carlson and Duckworth’s back-and-forth started over the removal of a statue of George Washington when Duckworth called for a “national dialogue.” After Duckworth turned down an offer to come onto Carlson’s show on July 7, following her criticism of the Fox host a day prior on CNN, Carlson called her a “deeply silly and unimpressive person.”
“I will not debate you until first you admit you are completely wrong,” Carlson said Tuesday. “Keep in mind, Tammy Duckworth is not a child, at least not technically, she is a sitting United States senator often described as a hero. Yet Duckworth is too afraid to defend her own statements on a cable TV show. What a coward.”
In Duckworth’s op-ed, she called Carlson “insecure” and his vision of America “hateful,” also arguing that Carlson and the president twisted her words. She writes:
Setting aside the fact that the right wing’s right to lie about me is one of the rights I fought to defend, let me be clear: I don’t want George Washington’s statue to be pulled down any more than I want the Purple Heart that he established to be ripped off my chest. I never said that I did.
But while I would risk my own safety to protect a statue of his from harm, I’ll fight to my last breath to defend every American’s freedom to have his or her own opinion about Washington’s flawed history.
