In the wake of the cancellation of “Crossfire,” there’s been a lot of piling on. As you might guess, I will shed no tears at the demise of a show that helped pioneer the food-fight style of political debate. But the show was on in the afternoon for the last couple of years after being superseded by “Hannity & Colmes” and “The O’Reilly Factor.” Its cancellation is no great victory for civil discourse on television. So let’s not get carried away.

And, following Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, I will add a word in defense of Tucker Carlson, whose departure from CNN has been mixed up with news of the cancellation. As Sullivan points out, Carlson “is a rare, intellectually independent conservative” who has withstood the intense pressure in DC to follow the party line. He wrote a controversial piece for Talk about George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential primaries and came out against the war in Iraq, among other heresies. The format of “Crossfire” forced him into the standard left-right box, but if you watched the show carefully over the last couple of years you might have noticed that while Carlson was extremely critical of guests from the left (often rightly so), he didn’t tout orthodox views of Bush, the war, etc. like almost every other conservative on television. And as Kaus points out, his PBS show is not exactly a shoutfest, though Carlson does challenge his guests.

Anyway, he’s a very smart guy who was once regarded as one of the most promising and talented print journalists in Washington. I hope he finds a better format, and a boss that will treat him with more class than Jonathan Klein.

(Disclosure: I once had lunch with Carlson, and he wrote a nice blurb for All the President’s Spin.)