Tucker Loves Putin

A long long time ago when the year was 2017, I entered a foreign Trump caricature contest hosted by the House of Cartoon. Another cartoonist asked me to enter and there wasn’t an entry fee, so I submitted which didn’t take any time at all. I entered a cartoon comparing Donald Trump to Hitler. After I was one of the cartoonists awarded a “citation,” I saw that the contest was staged by Iran. I quickly and publicly renounced my “award” because while I was fine with criticizing Trump and the United States, I felt Iran was using me to attack my nation. I quickly got out.

Iran is a nation hostile to the United States where a free press doesn’t exist. Journalists, including political cartoonists, are routinely rounded up in that nation and sent to prison and sometimes, given a death sentence. Who is Iran to talk about free speech or free speech?

I may be just a goofball cartoonist who draws funny pictures but I still have ethics, scruples, and dignity. Tucker Carlson does not.

Tucker Carlson visited Moscow this week and interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin. It will air tonight at tuckersucksputinsballs.com around 6 p.m. Eastern time. This will be Putin’s first interview with a Western media outlet since he illegally invaded Ukraine. And that’s the problem.

My conservative friend Tom Stiglich drew a cartoon defending Tucker and calling the critics hypocrites because journalists have interviewed bad guys before. He draws a comparison with Peter Bergen interviewing Osama bin Laden in 1997. With all due respect to Tom, he doesn’t understand the issue or worse, he’s being dishonest. Tom believes the issue is about interviewing Putin. No, the issue is Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin. If you’re a political cartoonist, you should have a basic understanding of how journalism works. Multiple media outlets have requested an interview with Putin. Tucker has even lied and claimed he’s the first to ask, so even before we get to watch the interview, Tucker has lied about it.

Rivers, the “anonymous” cartoonist, also drew a cartoon defending Tucker. With zero respect for Rivers, because he’s a coward working anonymously when nobody’s going to come after him for promoting debunked conspiracy theories in Canada, he’s making a false equivalence. He defends Tucker by claiming Google, Snopes, Politifact, and Media Matters are all biased and corrupt media outlets. In addition to being an ethics-free coward whose work is distributed by an ethics-free syndicate, Rivers is a lying conspiracy theory-promoting Putin-loving gaslighting moron.

Even if the outlets Rivers mentioned operated like Breitbart, Newsmax, Fox News, One America News, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, Red State, Sinclair Broadcasting, Town Hall, Washington Free Beacon, The Washington Times, CNSNews, or Tucker Carlson, it wouldn’t justify the bad outlets. But Rivers, again, is a liar. Snopes, Politifact, and Media Matters are trusted outlets. If they get something wrong, they correct it. They research and provide a huge public service by debunking lies and confirming facts. Just because an asshat like Rivers doesn’t like facts doesn’t make these outlets unreliable. Also, Google is not a news outlet. They have Google in Canada, right?

It should also be pointed out that every article on Snopes, Media Matters, and Politifact is signed. There’s nothing anonymous about these sites because, unlike Rivers, they work within the boundaries of journalism ethics. Rivers has no business lecturing anyone about journalism while working as an anonymous cowardly fuck. The only outlets that publish Rivers are those that do not give a rat’s ass about how journalism ethics apply to political cartoonists…like Politico.

The problem with Tucker interviewing Putin is that Tucker, like Stiglich and Rivers, is a Putin fanboy. He’s a Putin cheerleader. While in Moscow, he’ll probably sample traditional Russian delicacies such as beef stroganoff, borscht, pirozhki, solyanka, blini, okroshka, and Putin’s ball sack.

Wall Street Journal correspondent, Evan Gershkovich has been imprisoned by Russia for the past ten months on false espionage charges. Other journalists in Russia have been thrown off buildings, poisoned, arrested, and made to disappear. Tucker will not face any of these dangers as he once did a segment on his former show on Fox News about why should he hate Putin.

You can expect that every question Tucker asks will be preapproved by the Russian state. This isn’t just a betrayal to democracy, but also to everyone who’s been persecuted in Russia for trying to tell the truth. This is a betrayal of journalism.

Tucker is against further funding for Ukraine and this interview comes while Congress is debating future aid for Ukraine. Tucker’s interview is designed to serve Putin, build his support in Congress and among the MAGA movement. People who don’t like facts, democracy, truth, or journalism will love this interview. This interview will be new ammo for everyone who helps push Putin’s lies, like Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Donald Trump.

A spokesgoon for Putin said that Western newspapers and television networks “cannot boast of attempts to even look impartial in terms of covering what is happening” and that “there is no desire to communicate with such media.” He said that Tucker takes a position that “contrasts the position of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media.” That means Tucker says what they want to hear. Remember, Putin initially claimed he invaded Ukraine to clear it of Nazis.

Tucker is a big star in Russia and the government promotes him on its state-run “news” broadcasts. No news is reported in Russia without being sanctioned by the state first.

The interview will air on Tucker’s channel on X and he says Elon Musk promised “not to suppress or block this interview.” Why would he? Elon is a Russian fanboy just as much as Tucker is. He’s used his satellites to prevent Ukraine from defending itself from Russia. X is restricted in Russia for hosting “false information” about the war in Ukraine which is all sorts of irony and hypocrisy for Putin-loving MAGAts. While they claim the former Twitter regime suppressed “free speech” by removing lies, conspiracy theories, and photos of Hunter Biden’s dingdong provided by Rudy Giuliani, they’ll all champion this interview on X without criticizing Russia’s restrictions on the platform. MAGAts are too stupid to see their own hypocrisy.

Tucker Carlson is not a journalist. He promotes lies and conspiracy theories. He provided a platform to election deniers when he worked at Fox News, who eventually fired him for lying. Do you know how bad of a liar you have to be to be fired from Fox News? It’s like the time propagandist cartoonist Ben Garrison was disinvited from the Trump White House summit with fake journalists because he was too racist.

Tucker’s interview with Vladimir Putin is not journalism. It’s Russian state-sanctioned bullshit.

Music note: I listened to The Clash.

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