The most brutal takedowns of Tucker Carlson's thoughts on women in combat

A time-honored parlor game for political pundits is to expose the glaring hypocrisies of their opponents with pithy zingers, a tradition that has flourished in the 140-character universe of Twitter. The boilerplate is something like this: Party A is demanding X, but when the issue is Y, Party A demands the opposite! A liberal-friendly example:

And a conservative one, referring to President Obama's inaugural address:

These devastating juxtapositions have not, of course, led either side to reexamine its positions or forge a more conciliatory path forward. However, they at least possess the virtue of making a modicum of sense. It's hard to say the same of a recent attempt in the genre by Tucker Carlson, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Daily Caller. In response to the news that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta would lift a ban on women in combat, a subject upon which people can reasonably disagree, Carlson fired off this tweet:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Critics, of course, pounced. Some have lectured Carlson as if he were a child…

…questioned his manhood...

…and attacked his sartorial pretensions.

Jonathan Chait at New York compared Carlson's powers of analogy to those of Lindsay Bluth, not exactly the brightest member of the Bluth family in Arrested Deveopment:

And Comedy Central's Indecision blog fears what else may be on Carlson's mind:

There's plenty more — even from Carlson, who is pretty clearly in no mood to back down. Here's his follow-up: