Government

Tucker Carlson’s Uninformed Screed Over John Fetterman’s Tattoos Makes Me Want More Tattoos

Fetterman has tattoos. So what? That doesn’t have much to do with his fitness for office.

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Tucker Carlson

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Most people already know that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is the worst. He pushed it to a new level when he recently went on a rant about likeable Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s tattoos.

If you haven’t been following this race, Fetterman was formerly the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and he then became Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor. He looks and acts like a normal dude, and people seem to like that. He also has tattoos, which doesn’t have much to do with his fitness for office.

Fetterman is now running to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate. His opponent is Trump-endorsed celebrity medical charlatan Mehmet Oz, who lives in Pennsylvania only on a weird rich person technicality and who calls veggie trays crudités.

Of course, anything could happen come November. But so far, Fetterman has been consistently outperforming Oz in the polls.

Cue Carlson. No idea what’s really going on? Check. Uninformed opinion that alienates a huge chunk of the population? Check. Pandering to his decrepit fan base by trying to balkanize the American electorate? Check.

Referring to Fetterman, Carlson said on his show a few days ago, “All your stupid little fake tattoos, it’s a costume, of course. Duh, it’s not real.”

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Tucker Carlson never knows what he’s talking about. In this case, it sounds like he thinks Fetterman is sitting in the green room before interviews rubbing temporary tattoos onto his arms.

What Carlson is probably actually getting at, however, is his stupid opinion that somehow Fetterman hasn’t got the street cred to have tattoos, like being an outlaw biker is a prerequisite to applying ink to the skin, and as though a bow-tied Fox News host who couldn’t grow a respectable beard if he was sleeping face down in a vat of Rogaine is the ultimate arbiter of badass manliness.

Fetterman quickly pointed out that he has some pretty good reasons for his tattoos. “I have nine dates tattooed on my right forearm,” wrote Fetterman in an op-ed. “Each one is a day on which someone died violently in Braddock, Pennsylvania, while I was mayor… . They remind me of why I am here and why I’m doing this.”

Which, damn, is a pretty good reason to have your tattoos.

But, hey, you don’t need even a good reason to have tattoos. I have a friend from high school who literally has the phrase “Your name” tattooed on his derriere so that, in his younger days anyway, he could go up to people in bars and say, “I’ll bet you a beer that I have your name tattooed on my ass.” And I think that guy would make a great public servant.

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Anyway, it’s fairly obvious what Carlson was doing. The average Fox News viewer is about 70 years old, and many older Americans tend to not have, or like, tattoos. They should probably reevaluate that position considering that Ötzi the Iceman, a guy who lived 5,300 years ago and was found thawing out of a glacier in 1991, was covered with 61 tattoos. Historically speaking, tattooing your skin seems to be one of the most traditional and conventionally conservative things a person can do.

At any rate, the number of Americans who have tattoos is increasing, especially for younger Americans. Even conservative-leaning pollster Rasmussen reports that close to half of Americans under 40 have tattoos.

And hey, I’m one of them. I’m not going to bother explaining my tattoos to you — maybe we’ll get into it someday when we’re sitting in a hot tub together. Until then, I can tell you that many, many of my similarly aged colleagues are also tattooed and are similarly annoyed by the remaining stodginess in the legal profession and in society at large when it comes to getting ink. Believe it or not, no one I know even had to get permission from Carlson before going into a tattoo studio either.

If you want to get a tattoo, get one. Don’t worry about what Carlson or anyone else has to say about it. In fact, knowing that Carlson dislikes Fetterman’s tattoos only has me itching all the more for some new body art.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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