Adam Kinzinger Trashes Tucker Carlson For Enabling Putin

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Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) is fed up with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who — both before and after the current war between Russia and Ukraine began — has rhetorically propped up Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prior to the present conflict, Carlson characterized Democrats as a greater threat to Americans than Putin and justified the Russian regime’s concerns about Ukraine joining NATO — hollow concerns that have been among the smokescreens provided by Putin and his cronies for the assault on Ukraine. More recently, Carlson said that observers “can be sure that Russian soldiers have committed atrocities in Ukraine,” citing the numerous pieces of photographic evidence — although he implicitly suggested some could be fake, remarking “some number of them must be real.” Carlson added that Americans “can also be dead certain the war is not… a childish tale of good versus evil.”

Kinzinger singled out that last quote in a call-out of Carlson that he recently shared. An image that the Congressman posted pairs Carlson’s quote deriding the idea that the war represents “good versus evil” with images of violence on civilians in Ukraine by Russian personnel. The truth of the matter is sobering, not some kind of call for clever contrarianism, as Carlson would have it. Check out a pair of Kinzinger’s posts targeting Carlson below:

Screenshot-2022-04-10-10.55.16-AM Adam Kinzinger Trashes Tucker Carlson For Enabling Putin Military Politics Social Media Top Stories

Screenshot-2022-04-10-10.55.45-AM Adam Kinzinger Trashes Tucker Carlson For Enabling Putin Military Politics Social Media Top Stories

Carlson justified his equivocation regarding the war in Ukraine by pointing to video footage that appears to reveal captured Russian troops killed by Ukrainian soldiers. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba recently stated in reference to the video that the “Ukrainian army observes the rules of warfare. There might be isolated incidents of the violation of these rules, and they will be definitely investigated.” Kuleba also broadly spoke of the horrors suffered by Ukraine’s population throughout the course of the war, although he made clear that he was not attempting to justify any war crimes, which is what the deaths depicted in that video could constitute. The simple fact is that there’s a clear distinction between the Ukrainian handling of these issues and Russia’s approach. Russian forces have struck civilians for weeks on-end, killing thousands — the Ukrainian military has not. Incidents involving Ukrainian personnel that — unlike similar incidents involving Russian troops — don’t reflect Ukraine’s official strategies for the conflict do not somehow condemn the whole country and make its struggle any less clearly in the right. And that shouldn’t be complicated.

Carlson also appears to have flat-out lied about the Ukrainian government’s approach to the deaths depicted in that video footage. Carlson claimed that “Ukraine’s defense ministry later boasted about these killings, calling them precise work.” What actually occurred, it seems, is that Ukraine’s defense ministry spoke positively of a Ukrainian ambush on a Russian convoy — the video appears to show details of what happened around that ambush, but not the bulk of what went on. As best can be told, Ukraine’s defense ministry praised the strategic victory reached by the related fighting, which was, it would seem, within the so-called laws of war — “Ukraine’s Defense Ministry also tweeted about the destruction of the Russian convoy,” The New York Times said, a description that seemingly doesn’t incorporate any deaths of captured troops that came after. The Ukrainian government didn’t “boast” about related but separate killings in the aftermath, according to available details.