Tucker Carlson’s war on the facts

Update: On his 2/24 show, Carlson admitted Putin was the aggressor.

Let’s start with Tucker Carlson, who knows he’ll never win an Edward R. Murrow award, so has set his sights on the Lenin Award. We will also end with him.

There’s a lot of confusion about what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, but Carlson has been Putin’s pet poodle forever.

Almost nightly he rails against (unnamed) “neoconservatives” and others who are “calling for war” against Russia.

(For a brief, pre-war explainer, check the Philadelphia Inquirer’s  well-sourced Trudy Rubin.

I have yet to hear anyone in the Biden administration “call for war.” Just the opposite. They do call for economic and other sanctions, but people like Carlson and others push the lie that the U.S. will send troops to defend Ukraine. We will not, and we have said so. Repeatedly.

Wednesday night Carlson used the graphic “War Machine” when talking about the U.S., when it is obvious to a bat that the “war machine” has a “Made in Russia” label. 

He talked about “Joe Biden’s adventurism in Eastern Europe” as if the U.S. and NATO were the perpetrators of aggression. 

Carlson seems to have swallowed Putin’s argument that because Ukraine was once part of the Soviet Union, it is always  part of Russia.

If he believes that, he ought to get his heine back to the United Kingdom, where I believe his roots are. Using Putin logic, the U.S. always belongs to the Native Americans, so they can take it back.

And Mexico gets Texas, of course. 

It seems like the bow ties Tucker wore since his days in exclusive boarding schools has cut off the flow of blood to his brain. 

The response of the Free World will be economic and diplomatic. No Western troops will join the battle of Ukraine. 

If Putin crosses into a NATO country, that’s a different matter. That could be World War III. 

In his last HBO show Bill Maher made an unusual pirouette. 

In the first half of his show, the leftist comic basically said he doesn’t know anything about Ukraine and doesn’t care and turned a blind eye to the despotic Russian bear that was preparing to swallow Ukraine, bite by bite. 

In Maher’s view, it’s none of our business, and maybe NATO should end. (Reminder to Maher: You are agreeing with President Donald J. Trump.)

Maher does not operate on a genius level, as revealed by this fallacy.

There hasn’t been a war in Europe since 1945, he asked, so why do we need NATO?

There has been no war because of NATO, which was created to put a brake on Soviet expansion. The USSR is gone, but it’s largest chunk, Russia, exists and is acting exactly like it’s predecessor, with Putin lacking only a handlebar mustache to be Josef Stalin. 

In the second half of his show, Maher attacked despotic China for how it treats its Uygers, as if that were our business, in Maher’s mind. He went on and on about “autocratic” China, quite contrary to his view of autocratic Russia.

Odd.

Last week, in dismissing the growing crisis and commenting on the Ukraine crisis and President Joe Biden’s sanctions response, Fox’s Greg Gutfeld asked why Biden doesn’t just pick up the phone and call Putin.

Biden had done exactly that a few days earlier.

A fact that seemed to escape Gutfeld’s attention.

Back to Tucker, who said Ukraine was not a democracy, was corrupt, had financed Hunter Biden and perhaps Joe and cracked down on the freedom of the press.

Since Carlson went to all those high-end schools, he must have learned not to take the sins of the previous Ukrainian government and pretend the current  government was guilty.

In reality, President Volodymyr Zelensky  is a reformer who ran against the previous corrupt government, he was elected and then — by democratic election — won control of the parliament.

While the Columbia Journalism Review reports Zelensky has a “tense relationship” with the press, the crackdown of journalists comes from guess who — Russia, Carlson’s pretend home.

Those are the facts you don’t get from Carlson.