Many watchers thought that Tucker Carlson’s interview of Tsar Putin was boring. Some thought it was outrageous: “It brings war, genocide, and fascism.” An old friend of Lithuanian descent found it mostly amusing: “Preppie Mouse Interviews Big Bad Wolf.”
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.
Nonetheless, “bow tie or four-in-hand, you have to give it to [Tucker], he makes an excellent tie. St. George School clearly grounds its graduates in at least some of the important fundamentals.”
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