On Thursday evening, tens of millions of people rolled their eyes as a corrupt billionaire president told an audience of useful idiots exactly what they wanted to hear. Yes, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin was released, and — oh wait, what did you think I was talking about?
To be fair, I probably should have written about Sona, but at the time of writing, the Saab fighter jets were still having the birds’ nests cleaned out of their exhausts and the TV pundits were snorting a last line of emergency cocaine in the vain hope that it might put just enough of a twinkle in their eye to convince viewers that they cared about any of it.
Besides, life is far too short to spend it listening to the ANC’s latest bedtime story for children, especially when they’re so goddamn dull. At least when I produce fiction, I have the good manners to try to make it interesting.
Perhaps that’s why Tucker Carlson has done so well.
When he takes to the airwaves (or now the internet) to spin his absurd yarns, he does so with the engrossing intensity of a very bad actor chewing the scenery in a dire but somehow hypnotic made-for-TV whodunnit from 1986.
In a single conversation, Carlson pumped pure rocket fuel into the Republicans’ current attempts to cut off money and weapons from Ukraine — punishment, some insist, for Ukraine’s refusal to help Trump dig up dirt on the Bidens
Dead, you say? In the library? With a candlestick? Interesting. And how did the candlestick get into this country? Could it be that there’s an international cabal of Marxist LGBTQ candlestick-smugglers funded by the Biden crime family, hell-bent on removing honest, hardworking American-made candlesticks so that they can unleash their gay atheist agenda on us all? Are they going to take our candles next? Because I can tell you one thing: you’ll have to pry my candle out of my cold dead hands ...
I’m joking, of course. Carlson never sounds that grounded in reality. Still, his career is legendary.
The grandson of a cattle tycoon, and adopted son of an heiress, he will be remembered as the man who was paid between $15m and $20m per year by Rupert Murdoch to host the most-watched show on the most-watched network in a country that is 71% white, where he told his terrified audience that white people were being silenced and sidelined by a rich elite.
Which is why this week’s interview with Putin was less a journalistic assignment than a sponge-bath, where the Cassandra of imaginary persecution rented out his gigantic platform to the embodiment of everything Trumpist America holds dear, from the unapologetic rejection of liberal values to the embrace of fundamentalist Christianity and patriarchal, authoritarian rule.
Still, as sponge-baths go, it carried astonishing clout.
In a single conversation, Carlson pumped pure rocket fuel into the Republicans’ current attempts to cut off money and weapons from Ukraine — punishment, some insist, for Ukraine’s refusal to help Trump dig up dirt on the Bidens — while simultaneously showcasing a leader whose iron grip on his country and uncomplicated 18th century worldview, will have made the weak, fading, compromised and desperately unpopular Joe Biden look even more like a pot plant than he already does.
Yes, you can say what you like about Tucker Carlson, but you have to admit he’s a consummate professional. Not a professional journalist, of course, but definitely a professional something.
And Vladimir Putin and the American evangelical right just got their money’s worth, and then some.
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