Two Dead (So Far) In GOP Murder-Suicide Event

Tough Tucker questions allowed Mike Pence and Asa Hutchinson to self-immolate

The Blaze TV is hosting an interview event in Iowa with all the GOP presidential candidates, except for Donald Trump, who won’t participate. You can watch it live on Twitter here. And, you can watch the clips they post. Or you can watch it live on TuckerCarlson.com

It’s incredible to see that the presidential campaigns of Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former VP Mike Pence go up in smoke after sitting down with interviewer Tucker Carlson.

Granted, nobody but Mrs. Hutchinson would bother voting for Asa in a primary contest, but still, this sealed the deal. Hutchinson got into it with Carlson over the Arkansas governor’s veto of a bill that would have banned transsexual transitioning for children in that state. You can read about the exchange here. You can watch the video by clicking the link here; it’s to the tweet below:

Hutchinson (R-Walmart) actually said that this isn’t a serious issue, child medical transition. Is he mad? That is immediately disqualifying for any Republican presidential candidate.

Mike Pence, though, really took a poison pill. This is an incredible thing to watch (it’s a link to the tweet below, which has live video):

Carlson said to him that America is falling apart in so many ways, but it seems like what he’s really worried about is that Ukraine, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map, has enough tanks. “Where is the concern for America in that?” Carlson asked.

“That’s not my concern,” Pence actually said — then launched into bromides about how he’s running for president because Joe Biden weakened America, blah blah blah.

Unbelievable. You’d never know that Mike Pence is a seasoned politician who has been both a governor, a Congressman, and vice president of the United States. “That’s not my concern” is his political epitaph.

Pence’s answer on religious liberty and Ukraine was damaging too, but not really for the reason it seems like on the surface. Here’s the link to this tweet below, with the video embedded.

The context: Pence is a big Ukraine war hawk, and also a big backer of religious liberty. Tucker Carlson asked him what he makes of the fact that the Zelensky government has been persecuting some Christians in Ukraine. Pence said he went to Kyiv, talked to the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, who told him it wasn’t going on, that only a few priests who collaborated with Russia have been targeted by the government.

That’s not true. This background piece from The American Conservative gives you the information you need to understand the incredibly complex mixture of history, nationalism, and religion behind the Orthodox church situation in Ukraine. The tl;dr version is that there was an internal schism in Ukraine, which didn’t get very far until a few years ago, when the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople granted independent status to the breakaway church. It is by no means clear that the EP had the authority to do that. Many Ukrainian Orthodox don’t believe he did, and stayed loyal to the church tied to the Russian Orthodox church, as most of the world’s Orthodox churches are (Orthodox ecclesiology is hard to explain.) If Zelensky is going after clergy who are materially helping the Russians, then it’s hard to blame him in wartime. But he’s doing much more than that.

Pence knows nothing about how Orthodox churches are governed canonically, which is fine — nobody in the US who is not Orthodox cares, or has reason to care. But Tucker is right: Pence went to Ukraine, spoke to a single Orthodox leader — the one aligned with the government — heard what the Zelensky government wanted him to hear, and decided that there was no religious persecution in Ukraine. This is important because it reveals how little prominent American politicians know about the intricacies of these vicious disputes in a foreign country whose war we have involved ourselves in. Before the US invaded Iraq, how many people in Washington really understood the whole Sunni-Shia divide there, and how the tribal system there worked? Damn few, and they allowed the US to get played by clever expats like Ahmed Chalabi, who knew how to manipulate Americans.

I doubt he really damaged his campaign, but Sen. Tim Scott is a non-starter with me after his answers about Ukraine (watch the clip from the tweet below here). Scott said, plausibly, that we shouldn’t get involved in war with Russia, but we should protect our “vital” national security interests. OK. But then he says that Russia is our greatest national security threat. Oh? Not China? What on earth is he talking about. And then comes the we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here chestnut:

“When we degrade the Russian military, we make sure our homefront is safer…”

Scott then, cloddishly, goes on to identify the “rising Axis Of Evil: Russia, China, and Iran,” and says the US should “break that to pieces before it gets started.” But Russia has only turned to China and Iran because it needs help in waging the war against NATO’s proxy, Ukraine! Tucker Carlson points out that Russia and China weren’t allied until after the war started, and then Sen. Scott just wings it. He’s a clueless hawk. And he even used the b.s. David Frum cartoonish phrase “Axis of Evil” that helped the Bush Administration drag America into the catastrophic Iraq War of choice.

I just watched Nikki Haley’s interview, and she did much better than I thought she would. She’s a standard Republican, of course, but she might have learned from seeing the disaster of the Hutchinson and Pence interviews, because she was pretty slick. But I do think Tucker went relatively easy on her — no foreign policy questions? No questions on Ukraine? She’s a Ukraine hawk, you know.

OK, bedtime in Budapest. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are still to come, but I’m too sleepy to stay up for it. I’ll end on this, with a strong agree: