Tucker tosses softballs to Iran

“I didn’t ask hard questions because I knew I wouldn’t get an honest answer,” said Tucker Carlson, our edgelord Barbara Walters, in the hype-video run-up to his dull interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. But he didn’t get any honest answers in the interview anyway, so why bother asking in the first place? Carlson doesn’t seem to grasp that America’s geopolitical opponents grant him special access precisely because he won’t ask the hard questions.

Carlson’s interviews are valuable because they give us a glimpse into what it would be like if we had an actual state-run media. Our journalism has its ideological biases. But it’s nothing like allowing the cardboard representative of the Iranian mullahs to say “We want to live in peace and tranquility with everybody.”

The interview, which aired in full today., was a hilarious style of contrasts, with Carlson, looking as fresh as a farmer’s market-bought tomato, sitting on the left in his Bar Mitzvah suit, in his luxury cabin setting with rushing water behind him. Pezeshkian, pale and exhausted, was on the right, tieless, backed by a fraying gold curtain, with a photo of Ayatollah Khamenei on the table beside him.

Pezeshkian started off by saying that “there is this false mentality that Iran seeks a nuclear bomb… we have never been after developing a nuclear bomb. Not in the past, not presently, or in the future. This is in contract to the religious decree, or the fatwa that has been issued by his eminence, the Supreme Leader of the Republic of Iran, that it is religiously forbidden for us to go after a nuclear bomb.” He also said that Iran has been cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency but also insinuated the IAEA was sharing false intelligence with Israel. Sure, Mahmoud.

Tucker let that drop, and also didn’t challenge Pezeshkian when he talked about “atrocities by the Zionist regime in Israel,” claiming that the military commanders that Israel assassinated were “off-duty.” The only follow-up question he asked in the entire 30 minutes was about whether or not Pezeshkian was certain that the Israel government had tried to assassinate him. Absolutely, Pezeshkian said, but God had saved him.

Moving on, Carlson said: “Many Americans are afraid of Iran. And they believe that Iran would like to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon. They see video of Iranians saying ‘Death to America.’ Describing our country as The Great Satan. What is your opinion of that? Should we be afraid of Iran?”

In reply, Pezeshkian gave the most ludicrous answer in the history of answers. First of all, he said, Iran has never invaded any other country in 200 years. Fact check: untrue. It invaded Afghanistan, admittedly in the 19th century, seized some islands from the UAE in 1971, and there were also some incursions into Iraq during the protracted 1980s conflict. Also, there’s the small matter of providing financial and military support to terrorist groups in the last half-century. But Tucker left that alone, and allowed the Iranian President to say, “When they say ‘Death to the United States,’ they don’t mean death to the people of the United States or even to the officials of the United States. They mean death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to insecurity and instability. Have you ever heard of an Iranian killing an American? Have you ever heard that? Or a terrorist that was Iranian and he carried out a terrorist attack against the Americans? No.”

Iran loves America’s people, Pezeshkian told Tucker Carlson, an American person. The mullahs are for peace and tranquility. Any other perspective is just sinister Israeli propaganda. Israel is to blame for everything. He then thanked Tucker “for an opportunity to tell you about what is going on in my mind and in my heart.” The interview ended, followed by a black screen that said, “There were forces in Iran strongly opposed to this interview.” Tucker didn’t explain what those forces were, or why they were opposed. That would have required some hard questions.