We may be on the brink of a catastrophe with North Korea but Fox News wouldn’t let a thing like that deter it from using the crisis to discredit the Russia investigation involving Dear Leader Donald Trump.
On Tucker Carlson Tonight, guest host Laura Ingraham ridiculously argued in a commentary that because China is the key to containing North Korea, we need to hate China more and stop concerning ourselves with Russia. As if, as her later guest suggested, the U.S. can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
INGRAHAM: It’s telling that so many of Washington’s new-found Russophobes seem to have little problem, by the way, with the communist regime in China. Russia, not China, my friends, is the real foe, they say. Well, let’s compare. Hacking into our government computer systems? Well, Russia did that. Yeah, but so did China.
Remember, just a few years ago, China stole sensitive background-check files of 50 million federal employees which seems a bit worse than maybe nabbing some embarrassing DNC emails.
Of course, the issue with the Russia probe is not the hacking of “some embarrassing DNC emails.” It’s that country’s interference in our election and the question of whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. And, as it happens, Fox’s own Charles Krauthammer has called Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a group of Russians who promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton “deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor” and yes, “collusion.” That meeting, during the presidential campaign, also included then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Surely Ingraham is smart enough and well-informed enough to know this.
But she continued by attacking China’s human rights abuses, as if hating China the most means Russia is not so bad. Yet, she didn’t say a word about Trump’s embrace of Phillipine President Rodrigo Duterte, a man with his own hideous human rights abuses.
She also complained about China’s “theft of our intellectual property and other trade violations.”
That was all she needed to demand that people be less concerned with Russia so that we can be more concerned with China:
INGRAHAM: So don’t you think we should spend less time attacking Russia and acting like we’re living in the 1985 film Red Dawn and maybe spend some more time thinking about what happens to our own freedom and prosperity if someday soon China supplants the U.S. as the world’s dominant economic and military power?
It’s time to face the hard facts: The only country that can change North Korea’s behavior is China. And until we get more leverage over China? Our ability to change the dynamic with North Korea will be extremely limited.
Ingraham was so busy using China to downplay the seriousness of the Russia investigation, she never actually said what we should do to change the dynamic with China.
Watch the sleight-of-hand below, from the August 8, 2017 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
