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This is Fighting Words, a weekly newsletter about what got me steamed this week. Let’s dive in.

Item one: Tucker Carlson crosses a Rubicon

Carlson is almost not worth commenting on, but he went a little far this week, even for him. The Washington Post:

Carlson said it was “obvious” that “getting Ukraine to join NATO was the key to inciting war with Russia.” He noted that Vice President Harris was sent to Europe as Russia massed troops on Ukraine’s borders and that she said, “I appreciate and admire President [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s desire to join NATO.”

“‘Up yours, Vladimir Putin,’” Carlson summarized. “‘Go ahead and invade Ukraine.’ And of course Vladimir Putin did that just days later. So the invasion was no surprise to the Biden administration. They knew that would happen. That was the point of the exercise.”

Carlson then turned to his favored rhetorical trick of treating his conspiratorial supposition—that the United States wanted this war—as established fact as he pivoted to related questions: “Why in the world would the United States intentionally seek war with Russia? How could we possibly benefit from that war?”

That’s the old Carlson, and Fox News in general, trick, well caught and described by the Post’s Aaron Blake: Speak of the Fox conspiracy as if it is fact. Why do the Democrats hate America? Why do liberals want your children to have forced gender-reassignment surgery by the time they’re 14? And so on and so on. It’s nice to see it so directly called out.

It’s obvious that Carlson is just going to have to get more and more outrageous as this war goes on. One has to wonder what’s in store—and whether there’s ever going to be a red line that he crosses even with that ravenous audience.

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Item two: Trump v. Trump

As Daniel Strauss reported in TNR this week, Donald Trump shifted from his original Putin-is-a-genius-for-invading-Ukraine stance to wanting to “bomb the shit” out of Russia (with planes disguised as Chinese craft—ha ha, isn’t he clever). Does this show that Trump had a change of heart? Bullshit. It shows that Trump obviously saw that his “genius” remark was doing him damage.

Remember: The single truest thing ever said about Trump was this, pointed out by the late, great investigative journalist Wayne Barrett as Trump was mounting the national stage: Trump says whatever he needs to say to get through the next 10 minutes. With respect to the bombing comment, he was speaking to big GOP donors. He knew this was what they wanted to hear. So he said it. Period. He obviously still thinks Putin is a genius, still admires him, and will still be his best friend if he makes it back to the White House.

Later in the week, Trump got very weird. Read the exchange below. He was on a podcast and was asked about the war. This is really what he said:

Host: What do you see happening next then? ’Cause it seems like the tensions are high. How does this all end? Is this going to be like a long-term thing? How do you see it unfolding?

Trump: Well, and I said this a long time ago, if this happens, we are playing right into their hands. Green energy. The windmills. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes. And yet the environmentalists love the windmills. And I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills. And I had them way down. But the windmills are the most expensive energy you can have. And they don’t work. And by the way, they last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place, nobody ever takes them down. They just go on to the next piece of prairie or land and destroy that.

Of course. Why didn’t anyone else think of that? He also went on to congratulate himself for congratulating Angela Merkel on cutting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal with Russia—the deal current Chancellor Olaf Scholz has courageously rescinded.

Item three: No, Mike Pence is not reasonable

Finally, just in case you’ve been feeling soft on Mike Pence lately, don’t. He just flew to Israel to meet with far-right politicians. How far right, you ask?

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel used to be followers of Meir Kahane, whose views and rhetoric were so extreme that his party got banned from the Knesset. Ben-Gvir used to have a picture of Baruch Goldstein, the settler who burst into a Hebron mosque and massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers, hanging in his living room. I’ve been to Goldstein’s grave, by the way (and no, not to honor him, just to see it). You know the Jewish tradition, which you may recall from Schindler’s List, of laying small stones on top of a grave? Goldstein’s grave, in that city that shows arguably the ugliest face of the occupation, was covered with stones.

What’s Pence doing hanging with people like this? I know the whole Christian dispensationalist thing. But honestly. And if you’re Jewish, remember that if Judgment Day comes, Pence doesn’t plan on taking you with him.

Quiz time!

As I noted last week, we’ve shifted into the phase of having a weekly quiz on a topic that a generally intelligent person ought to know a thing or two about. Struck by a mood of perhaps overgenerosity and inspired by what seem to me certain ill-advised attempts to ban Russian artists from performing as a way of punishing Putin, I thought that it might be good this week to look at Russian culture to remind ourselves that, as much as we deplore the dictator and his invasion, Russia ain’t all bad.

1.	This great Russian novelist died of pneumonia in a railway station at age 82. Just before, he had left his family and home, determined to do “what old men of my age usually do: leaving worldly life to spend the last days of my life in solitude and quiet”; some time before that, his worldview had changed to such a degree that he called one of his two most famous works “an abomination that no longer exists for me.” A. Fyodor Dostoyevsky B. Georgy Malenkov C. Leo Tolstoy
2.	Speaking of Dostoyesvky, he was plagued for many years by what addiction, until he just quit one day cold turkey? A. Gambling B. Morphine C. Sex
3.	Russian children are taught to recite these poetic lines: “Moscow … How many strains are fusing / in that one sound, for Russian hearts! / What store of riches it imparts!”—sometimes without knowing that they are from which beloved epic poem? A. Chekhov’s “The Butterfly” B. Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” C. Lermontov’s “Borodino”
4.	She danced in the Ballets Russes under Diaghilev and was the first famous ballerina to star in her own world tour. A. Marina Semyonova B. Anna Pavlova C. Svetlana Nijinsky
5.	This early twentieth-century artist was known for paintings that he called “prouns” (rhymes roughly with croon, not noun), which were abstract geometric works that were his main foray into the visual language of Russian Suprematism. A. El Lissitzky B. Kazimir Malevich C. Vladimir Tatlin
6.	This composer’s towering reputation remains unmarred by the fact that he lived out his life in the Soviet Union and, while experiencing difficulties with the regime here and there, later in life joined the Communist Party and in 1961 dedicated his Twelfth Symphony to Lenin. A. Alexander Scriabin B. Sergei Prokofiev C. Dmitri Shostakovich

Answers next week. Meanwhile, here is last week’s quiz, and the answers:

Answers to last week’s questions:

1.	This artist and photographer of the early twentieth century was famous for both his photographs and what he called “photograms,” which were camera-less negative shadow images of collections of everyday objects. A. Man Ray B. Henri Cartier-Bresson C. Aristide Briand Answer: A, Man Ray. Cartier-Bresson is famous for his Paris photographs. Briand was a French politician!
2.	Which of these people was not one of the famous Life magazine photographers of its golden age? A. Carl Mydans B. Margaret Bourke-White C. Pete Souza D. Alfred Eisentstaedt Answer: C, Souza. He was the Obama White House photographer.
3.	Joe Rosenthal was the name of the photog who took the famous Iwo Jima photo. For whom did he work? A. The Associated Press B. The Department of Defense C. The Baltimore Sun Answer: A, the AP, although I dearly wish for sentimental reasons that it had been C.
4.	Martin Luther King Jr. said to photographer James “Spider” Martin: “Spider, we could have marched, we could have protested forever, but if it weren’t for guys like you it would have been for nothing. The whole world saw your pictures. That’s why the Voting Rights Act was passed.” What event did Martin photograph? A. The March on Washington B. Bull Connor turning his spray hoses and dogs on Black children C. “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the Selma-to-Montgomery March Answer: C, Bloody Sunday. This was a tough one maybe, but the tip-off was that the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, which was the year of the Alabama march. The March on Washington and the Bull Connor episode were both earlier, in 1963.
5.	The artist Sally Mann’s photographs in the 1990s got her denounced by Pat Robertson—while The New Republic pronounced a book of these images to be “one of the great photograph books of our time.” What was her subject? A. Older men and younger women in intimate poses B. Older men and younger men in intimate poses C. Her own children in various poses in the nude Answer: C, her own children. Massive controversy at the time that anyone who was around then should have remembered. Unsurprisingly, I’m with TNR, not Pat Robertson.
6.	Annie Liebowitz, who over three decades had photographed various rock and rollers and rebels and Hollywood celebrities, shocked many of her fans in the early 2000s by photographing: A. Saddam Hussein B. The leading officials of the Bush administration C. Jeffrey Epstein Answer: B, Bush & co. What a scandale at the time!
7.	The photography staff of Reuters won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for their photos of: A. Donald Trump rallies B. Hong Kong protesters C. Exhausted E.R. nurses and doctors Answer: B, Hong Kong. Probably the toughest one, as C was a very plausible fake answer.

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