The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws - literally | Margaret Sullivan

Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.

Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.

Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws - yes, literal straws - the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris's running mate?

"Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is," Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.

With that setup, he tried to prove his point.

"The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything."

The joke, or whatever it was, didn't really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He's a famously regular guy - America's dad - who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.