Tucker Carlson has had a banner week. After criticizing the Biden-injected military for focusing on maternity flight suits and critical race theory instead of defeating Chinese aggression, the media and Democrats have gnashed their teeth to dust in response. Part of that consternation has come in the form of completely misrepresenting what Tucker said, which is par for the course.

(see Tucker Carlson Causes a Great Triggering After Lambasting Our Woke Military, but He’s Dead On)

For posterity, here’s the original segment, and below it, some of my commentary on the matter.

Some of this stuff seems harmless enough. Are hairstyles, for example, really going to make or break military preparedness? Probably not. Yet, other aspects like Biden bragging about elevating generals, not for their accomplishments, but for their gender, do seem suspect and likely to cause problems. An enemy such as China simply doesn’t care how woke you are. They care about whether you can provide a bulwark to their aggression or not. If you can’t, they will take advantage in devastating ways…

…Tucker’s criticism was couched in the fact that China is simultaneously undertaking an initiative to make its military more masculine, which is the exact opposite path America is currently taking. While we are obsessed with meaningless battles about hairstyles and white privilege, the Chinese managed to build the world’s largest naval force, and it’s actually a capable one.

Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who has gotten into it with Tucker before, decided to respond in the dumbest way possible. She took to Twitter to post a decades-old video of Tucker doing “Dancing With the Stars” and proclaiming that women were out there hunting Al Qaeda, so he should just shut his stupid mouth.

F*ck Tucker Carlson. While he was practicing his two-step, America’s female warriors were hunting down Al Qaeda and proving the strength of America’s women.

Happy belated International Women’s Day to everyone but Tucker, who even I can dance better than. pic.twitter.com/E4wchht9lA

— Tammy Duckworth (@TammyforIL) March 11, 2021

2006 was a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure women weren’t participating in raids on Al Qaeda back then. The push for front-line service has only happened in the last decade. Maybe I’m wrong about that? That doesn’t mean the service of women isn’t valuable, because it is. But virtue-signaling and false framing are not real arguments.

Regardless, Tucker never claimed that women don’t provide value to the military. Rather, he riffed on the idea that we shouldn’t be wasting resources on maternity flight suits and pushing critical race theory, while China builds the largest, most capable Navy in the world. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that pregnant women have never, in fact, hunted down Al Qaeda, M4 in hand.

Further, and I’ll try not to offend too many people here by saying this, if your response to Tucker’s criticism is to bring up women supposedly hunting down a rag-tag band of religious extremists living in the caves, you’ve already missed his point. The entire premise of his original commentary was that we are not focusing on China, a far bigger threat than anything we’ve faced since the Soviet Union. If our future threats were only going to be terrorists with busted AK variants, Tucker’s critique might be overwrought; but are pregnant women going to fly CAP over Taiwan after China makes their move? Will woke generals more concerned with diversity and “equity” than building the best fighting force on earth be capable of thwarting a Chinese attack in the South China Sea?

You can disagree with Tucker’s critique, but that’s absolutely what he meant. He reiterated his point, including slapping Duckworth down again, last night.

Duckworth, being so immensely triggered, kept going, though. In the process, she gave the game away.

Help me remind hacks like Tucker how capable our female warriors are. https://t.co/vHHSqnDizv

— Tammy Duckworth (@TammyforIL) March 12, 2021

In the end, it was just another fundraising plea because, despite her service, Duckworth is nothing but a shameless politician at this point. She gets no special protection from criticism, nor does she get to levy it without response. All Americans have the right to criticize the politicization of the military, period.