Instead, Carlson used Wednesday's show to wave the flag not for the U.S. or its suffering ally Ukraine, but for Putin. Questioning why we should hate the autocratic and isolated Russian ruler, the "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host discounted Ukraine as “a pure client state of the United States State Department.”
That same evening, Ingraham blamed the conflict on the “weakness and the incompetence” of the Biden administration, a position echoed by a number of Republican elected officials, and called Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky's desperate appeal for Putin to stop the attack a “pathetic display." You read that correctly. She was mocking a last-ditch effort to save lives and country.
Characterizing the Russian advance as a "border dispute," Carlson preferred to lay blame on the opposition: Democrats had conditioned folks "to hate Putin," he said, going so far as to urge his viewers to rethink their feelings about good ol' Vlad: "Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?"