Last Friday, I saw some pretty funny stuff on the close captioning at my gym, thanks to good old Tucker Carlson, one of the true intellectual giants of the right. He was trying to do corporatist spin in favor of Wal-Mart, and ended up sounding foolish. I had to wait until today to get the transcript, but it was more than worth the wait.

Here is the setup, which has some unintentional humor of its own:

CARLSON: Can we just—I don‘t—Since we‘re talking about the destruction of western civilization, I want to touch briefly on the Edwards for president campaign, which has had something of a shakeup.

MAY: Great segue.

CARLSON: It is great segue. You know in your heart it is true. I like John Edwards and I feel sorry for him, never more than now.

WOLFFE: He is a man with great hair.

But, it gets better:

CARLSON: Thank you. In the final days of his campaign, he has brought in really his base. That is kind of fervid haters online. He has brought in two guys from the anti-Wal-Mart effort, wake-up Wal-Mart. Now, let me ask a macro question here. Wal-Mart is one of the biggest employers in the United States. It‘s the biggest store in the world. Why hate Wal-Mart? It almost seems like Wal-Mart is hated because it‘s a symbol of America. I guess I don‘t get that.

I laughed for so long after seeing this and again after reading it. The whole quote is a hoot. The part claiming Wal-Mart as “a symbol of America” is hysterical on its face, but gets even more loopy when one remembers that Wal-Mart mostly sells foreign goods. Oops!

“WOLFFE,” the guy doing the corporate media's talking point on John Edwards' hair, is identified as “Newsweek‘s Senior White House Correspondent Richard Wolffe.” Wolffe sucks up to Wal-Mart as well, but not in as amusing of a fashion.

WOLFFE: It‘s a pure play for the labor vote, which is just about the only piece of his constituency that he has left. But what the Clintons understood, not just because they were from Arkansas, was that if you‘re going to go for those rural, traditionally Democratic communities, which John Edwards previously was going for, you don‘t just take the labor side of it. They love Wal-Mart because of the cheap prices.

The part about rural people loving Wal-Mart because of the prices sounds almost like a commercial for the ultra-corporation. However, it is insulting and inaccurate. Rural people shop at Wal-Mart in part because that company drove so many of its competitors out of business by using monopolistic practices. Many rural people (and other people) are stuck with shopping at Wal-Mart because they cannot afford to shop at other stores.

Some of the ways that Wal-Mart contributes to keeping people too poor to shop elsewhere:

1) Driving small businesses out of business.
2) Keeping its employees' wages horribly low. This not only limits their shopping options, it also hinders economic development in the communities surrounding Wal-Marts.
3) Exporting US manufacturing jobs abroad.

This incident of shameless butt-kissing of Wal-Mart (They were basically panhandling Wal-Mart to advertise in Newsweek and on Tucker's show.) demonstrates that media bias isn't just due to concentration of ownership, though that certainly is a serious issue. Advertiser pressure also leads networks to inundate us with right-wing, corporate propaganda in the guise of news.

Wolffe, like most Wal-Mart defenders, is seriously awful. But, at least silly, little Tucker provides us with some comic relief.