All Tuckered Out

Since Tucker Carlson left the Fox News network he has spent a fair amount of time hanging out with conspiracy theorists and fringe whacko types.  The absence of a producer hasn’t helped, nor has his limited intellect, which became more apparent when he lost the support of a large team of researchers and writers.  So when he headed off to Russia to interview one Vladimar Putin, to some extent I expected the worst.  Part of me thinks it best to not give Putin any attention, to treat to an old-fashioned “shunning”, since being ignored is the thing that upsets hims most, but journalists should report on whatever they want to, so people giving Tucker a hard time should lighten up.    In the right context, revealing for the world just what this evil person is like has benefits.  And the context is to ensure that readers or viewers get the actual facts, which they certainly won’t hear from Putin.

I am happy to report that Tucker exceeded my low expectations, although not by a lot.  First, I give him a ton of credit for pushing on the return of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter seized by Putin solely for leverage against the US.  I also was encouraged by Carlson’s failure to overtly pander to Putin, as he has done with others he interviews.  I thought it was pretty smart as well to allow Putin to ramble off on his delusional world view.  But Tucker’s assessment of the interview in comments afterwards displayed his complete lack of any understanding of recent or long-term Russian history.  The Russian mentality is fundamentally a grievance one–we are underappreciated and misunderstood, and Putin certainly reflects that.

Carlson said that Putin and Russia have no expansionist aim, that Russia is a huge country, it has no need to get more territory.  That is simply laughable.  The size of a country generally has little to do with its expansionist aims; it appears to be human nature to want what others have, and the bigger you are, the more resources you have to support expansionism.  For all of modern history, certainly back to Czarist times, Russia has constantly invaded neighbors and attempted to expand, as well as being invaded.  This expansionist mentality has gone east as well as towards Europe and to the South.  Russia has fought with Japan and those few Americans, Tucker likely not being one, who learned any actual history in school, may recall that Russia established settlements on the west coast of North America and “owned” Alaska at one time.

In more recent times, Russia “colonized” multiple independent European nations following the second world war and kept those countries under Russian control by force and brutality.  The Poles have better memories than Tucker as well–prior to Hitler’s invasion of Russia, he and Stalin had a pact under which they split Poland in half and Russia kept all of Poland as a satellite until just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  So yeah, Tucker, Poland has every reason to be leery of Putin and Russia.   Some of us are old enough to recall the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

And Putin has repeatedly written and spoken about his delusional desire to recreate the Soviet Union and a greater Russia.  Just as Hitler did in regard to ethnic Germans, he uses the presence of supposed Russian-speaking people anywhere as a justification to invade and protect them.  And Tucker might want to check his very recent history, in the last decade, Putin has invaded or used force in multiple countries to exert control, not just in Ukraine.   Tucker might want to read up on Georgia and Moldova, for example.

Carlson needs to get a lot more cynical as well as better-versed in history.  Just as the war in Afghanistan severely depleted Russian military capabilities and damaged its economy, so is the war in the Ukraine.  There is no better or cheaper way to destabilize the barbaric Putin regime than by arming Ukraine to the hilt.  Ships are being sunk, tanks and artillery destroyed, the cream of the Russian military has been butchered, now military factories and energy facilities inside Russia are being hit and damaged.  An objective assessment would be that this is great for the world, without direct military involvement, Putin is being to be shown to have a extremely incapable military that needs help from Iran and North Korea, of all places, and his capability to conduct further expansionism is being reduced to rubble.

I am confident that eventually Congress will approve more aid to Ukraine.  It would be good to see that conflict, as any armed conflict, end, but only on terms that give Ukraine the entire country back, as the Russians agreed when the Soviet Union dissolved.  And it will be even better to see Putin gone from the world scene; we have enough delusional butchers as it is.