2:07:18 video

Watching Tucker Carlson at work interviewing Vlad Grozny in his Kremlin lair is quite an experience. Tucker is 54 years old and still downright pretty. You kind of marvel that he is apparently straight. And, bow tie or four-in-hand, you have to give it to him, he makes an excellent tie. St. George School clearly grounds its graduates in at least some of the important fundamentals.

But when we watch Tucker go up against Vladimir Putin, the current Grand Duke of the Empire of Muscovy, self-made Tsar, and stone cold killer, we are bound to feel some astonishment at just how far out of his depth Tucker is.

Watching Putin delivering that lengthy and self-flattering version of the history of the Muscovite Despotism to the gapingly naive and historically clueless Tucker was more than a little sad and sent me struggling for a comparison case of the innocent bourgeois herbivore conversing with the monster predator who is, just for now, managing to refrain from making him into an amuse bouche.

One pictures Tucker as another Bilbo sitting and interviewing the Dragon Smaug about his current dwarf policies and his friction with the Rivertown. Or as Jonathan Harker listening to Count Dracula boast of his descent from Attila the Hun and victories over the Turk. I kept waiting to hear the howling of wolves nearby briefly interrupt the conversation, and expecting Putin to remark: “The Children of the Night! What music they make!”

But neither Bilbo nor Jonathan Harker were anywhere nearly as oblivious to the real nature of their interlocutor. Nor did either publish his own account, failing as Tucker Carlson does, to comment on the disingenuity of the Big Bad Wolf complaining of the possible installation of guard dogs at the neighboring sheep flock as an example of aggression against himself.

I suppose though that, had Tucker pointed out the irony of Putin’s demands that Ukraine “denazify” by banning praise of, or memorials to, various Ukrainian nationalists like Stepan Bandera who sided with Germany against Russia in WWII, when Putin’s Russia has never itself actually de-Bolshevized or repudiated the memory of the communists guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity on an even larger scale than Nazi Germany’s, in that event, poor Tucker might very possibly have found himself getting arrested like Even Gershkovich, charged with spying, and frog-marched to the Lubyanka or simply bumped off like Yevgeny Prigozhin and so many of the others who dared to offend Putin.

Interviewing monsters is a tricky business. One doesn’t want to die obviously, but one should also have reservations about lending aid and support.