Huh?
Putin’s despotism cannot be “irrelevant” to a moral, economic, geo-political, diplomatic or military analysis of the US obligation to provide assistance to the Ukrainians in a defensive war which Putin started.
If Tucker Carlson wants to say that Putin’s takeover of Ukraine is none of America’s business - that we have no legal obligation to Ukraine or no national interest in helping Ukraine preserve its sovereignty against Russia - then he should make that case, without incoherent moral judgments about pimp Zelensky or Ukraine as a rogue nation. I have yet to see him address the relationship between the US and the Russian Federation (Putin), the international order, the necessity for America’s superpower to a “balance of power”, a tri-polar world (China, Russia, the US), what American national interests are and how they can possibly just stop at its boundaries. I have yet to see him take a serious look at the international economic and political consequences for America in allowing Putin to expand the Russian Federation. Enabling Putin was a major achievement of Obama-ism.
The statement, “the US should not be pouring money down a bottomless pit of war while we are trillions in debt, and facing not only financial, but civilizational collapse at home” does not establish a case that the US has no interest in the outcome of the war. There is no attempt to evaluate the economic and “civilizational” costs of enabling Putin’s despotic imperialism. I have yet to see an argument explaining how America’s turning inward to focus on it own “civilizational collapse” will either prevent further collapse or restore the Republic to civil health.
The civilizational collapse is a global phenomenon, and the ideology corrupting governance world-wide is corrupting the Constitution. But it is through constitutional procedure that the American civilization must be restored. (Unless you are advocating counter-revolution) The corrupting ideology manifests itself locally in myriad way - BLM riots, critical justice, race and gender theory, tranny story- time, DEI, climate rules, electoral manipulation, abuse of office, politicization of the bureaucracy, demoralizing and weakening of the army, expanding government control of the economy, the national debt, inflation, censorship. Turning back the ideological tide from every institution - federal, state, local, corporate, public and private - will take a lot more than voting for politicians who will vote against sending American aid to Ukraine’s defense in the coming election.
Tucker is working to heat up Republican voters to get behind candidates for political office who promise to stop authorizing aid for Ukraine so that those aid funds will be redeployed to fix domestic ills. Tucker likes to think that aid funds for Ukraine’s defense of its borders can be use to control America’s borders. In practical political terms, Tucker is reducing - ad absurdum - the Ukraine war to a budget item. How far will the aid funds go towards building the wall, reducing the debt, curbing inflation, reassuring bank depositors, bailing out banks or generally fixing the government created-distortions of the market? Our economic troubles are inextricably linked with our (Obama’s) global energy policies. Aid to Ukraine has always been calibrated with the foreign policy posture towards Russia (Putin). Obama accommodated Putin’s despotic imperialism and aid to Ukrainian was non-lethal.
What does Tucker think a faction of no-aid-to-Ukraine Republicans can do to rectify America through the budget process? The new brooms he wants to see elected cannot clean up the financial, economic, civilizational mess through the instrumentality of their budget vote (yes, no, present or abstention). Does Tucker envisage their holding up budget, debt-ceiling raises and government-funding bills unless aid to Ukraine is stopped? What if legislative extortion can only manage to bring about a budget that reduces but does not eliminate aid? (The likeliest scenario). What would Tucker want a President DeSantis or Trump or Biden to do, sign or veto the budget? (There is no line-item veto). It is nonsense to think that budget politics define America’s vital national interests and with the right tweaking, the national budget can turn back woke ideology. Discretionary spending is a small and decreasing percentage of the total budget. The legislature’s powers (the “power of the purse”, the power to declare war, the power of oversight of the agencies) are weak and getting weaker, even if a party can be elected with a veto-proof majority.
To restore civilizational health to America, the first order of business would be to reverse the Democrat perversion of Constitutional power checks and balances to create a one-party state. The budget process is a small cog in the machinery of those checks and balances. It is not the lever by which we can move the nation. The one-party state is a stepping stone to the one-world regulatory state modeled on China. We are less likely to reverse that process by ignoring the Ukraine war, pretending that we have no interests in the power of Russia and China and the intentions of Putin and Xi are irrelevant.
That is why I say Tucker is offering no serious political point of view. He is rabble-rousing his audience to make himself and his show matter in the election campaign. I admire him for using his platform to seek justice for individual victims of official abuse or neglect (the Jan 6th protesters, East Palestine residents.) His bringing official scandals to the attention of his viewers that are ignored or falsified by the leftwing press and social media is praiseworthy. I do not need UFOs to be brought to my attention - especially to make that case of some sort of government conspiracy to suppress the mysterious “truth” of possible extraterrestrial, possibly alien, possibly hostile, but definitely superior technologically, intelligence. Government suppression of the truth of mysterious objects flying around, is not on the same level as suppression of the truth of viruses floating around. An explicit agenda among woke globalists to profit from climate-change fear-mongering is not the same as a secret conspiracy among woke Western leaders to profit from (expand their social control over populations) provoking a real World War 3. Tucker seems incapable of making sensible distinctions, and he relies on his followers not making them either.
You do not make a distinction between Zelensky’s “fighting for his life” or Ukraine’s fighting for its sovereignty against Russia, and "our [who? Republicans? Americans?] fighting for our life against our own government [Biden administration? Deep State?]. Why? To keep yourself in lock-step with Tucker?