Tucker, Tucker, pants on fire

The Fox News prime-time distortionist, Tucker Carlson, is at it again — pushing the lies that U.S. forces are actively engaging Russian troops in combat in Ukraine.

“Briefing slides prepared by the U.S. government,” he said, “began to show up, among other places, on Twitter. And the slides show in fact this is not Ukraine’s war. It’s our war. The United States is a direct combatant in a war against Russia. As we speak, American soldiers are fighting Russian soldiers.”

American soldiers are fighting Russia soldiers.

Wow! That is news.

And then Carlson showed the slides, because this is television, a visual medium. And showing the slides would help prove that what he was saying was true, unlike his previous unverified “reporting” that the U.S. and Russia were in a “war.” Not a proxy war, or an indirect war, but a real shooting war. He said it many times.

But wait!

Carlson did not show the slides that he mentioned, that were all over the place, he said. 

I may not be the best digital researcher, but I went to Twitter and found no slides. I went to Google and typed in a query about U.S. and Russian troops going at it. 

What I found were many stories of why the U.S. and NATO are not sending troops there. Along with one story that talked of a U.S. special forces unit advising Ukrainian troops, which did not surprise me, but who were not engaging in combat. The U.S. has admitted we have Marines in Ukraine — to guard our embassy. And they are not in combat.

I could find nothing from any source that said otherwise. If you can find info from a legitimate source — not QAnon — let me know. 

If it were true, Americans would have the right to know. But in today’s day and age, if Americans were involved in combat, someone would be posting pictures, as happened at the Abu Ghraib prison, remember, where  U.S. guards abused prisoners.

There are few things that are secret today.

This war, declared Carlson, “is a crime,” because it wasn’t declared by Congress. Then, somehow, he was off on a tangent about Jeffrey Epstein’s millions, who left pipe bombs on Capitol Hill on 1-6, and who killed JFK.

Misdirection is an old trick of Carlson’s. So is propaganda.

Thursday night he talked about a Pentagon briefing at which the right questions weren’t asked by the press, he said, and said he viewers could “go pull a transcript.”

A journalist would have shown the transcript, or at least posted it on their website, so people could see for themselves. Same thing for the mystery slides. But Carlson has lied so many times before he no longer has the benefit of the doubt.

But then I remembered Carlson is not a journalist. He is not to be believed. In a lawsuit (filed long before the current Dominion Voting company case), and leaning heavily on Fox lawyers arguments,  U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil said this:  The “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ “

Got that? Not stating facts. “Exaggeration,” big fat lies, what’s the dif?

The guy is a charlatan, a disgrace, a liar, a Putin stooge. 

In the Dominion case, discovery showed that he and other Fox hosts were putting people on camera to make a case for Trump’s rigged election claims that the hosts didn’t even believe.

The worst thing is that many in Carlson’s audience believe him. That is terrifying.