In a three-part piece arguing against the various U.S. populist and isolationist movements of the past century, starting with the movement to stay out of World War I, and continuing to World War II, Cold War, Middle East, etc.,  Thaddeus G. McCotter argues that the best way for our leaders to “garner public support for foreign policy is to tell the truth.” Except for one thing:

Question: How do you know when a politician is lying? Answer: when his lips are moving.

When a leader wants to start a war or gift his supporters with a new government program, he will say anything in order to start his war or pass his program.

Meanwhile our liberal friends were all worried about Tucker Carlson’s trip to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin.

Because? Because they are afraid that Putin would lie to Carlson? That he would launch a Narrative that would end the Ukraine War short of total victory for Zelenskyy? That Carlson would score a major coup in his post-FoxNews career and boost himself into the top tier of journalism?

President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the platform of “he kept us out of war” and then promptly sent the doughboys to the trenches in France so that Doris Day would be able to star in On Moonlight Bay.

As for FDR and the runup to World War II, well, never mind.

So of course Vladimir Putin was full of lies in his two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson on February 6, as emigré Russian businessmen Mikhail Khodorkovsky bellowed in a twelve-part X-post.

And you know that the interview was a Bad Thing, because our liberal friends are busy fact-checking Putin’s statements.

But when a politician -- whether Wilson or FDR or Obama or Biden or even Putin -- makes a speech or sits for an interview, the question is: what is the Narrative? What is the politician trying to put over on us?

I don’t know about you, but I am interested in hearing what any headline politician has to say. My question is: what is he lying about, and why?

For instance, the world is wondering whether President Biden’s trainwreck press conference in the wake of his non-indictment for mishandling vital regime secrets was a cunning and sophisticated attempt by his handlers to dump the president before the 2024 election.

Alternatively, the question in the minds of experts across the world may be whether Biden’s handlers are now so far gone into incompetence that they forgot to keep the White House basement locked. If Biden is the most incompetent president since Jimmy Carter, imagine how incompetent the people he hired must be.

Enough of Biden. My take on the Carlson-Putin interview is:

Whatabout the Huns and our pal Attila? How come Putin’s Year Zero is not 370 CE when the Huns swarmed into Europe to rape and pillage? And where was NATO when we really needed it?

I was particularly interested in Putin’s references to the Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austrian Empire and the significance of the Dnieper River between Russia and Europe. Take Lviv (or Lvov) in today’s Ukraine. It used to be in Galicia, part of the Austrian Empire. And when libertarian saint Ludwig von Mises was born there in 1881 it was called Lemberg.

Putin didn’t mention the Jews. But the area he was discussing was exactly where the Jews of Eastern Europe were concentrated before the Late Unpleasantness in the mid-20th century. On the “Jewish Population Maps” there were many cities in the area where Jews were 50% or more of the population before the Russian pogroms and Hitler’s Final Solution.

Putin practically said that the Poles in 1939 were playing both ends against the middle with Germany and the Soviet Union. Our U.S./European Narrative is, of course, that the Poles were helpless victims caught in a vice between the Nazis and the Commies. I wonder, what will “historians agree” about Poland and 1939 in the New York Times in 2039?

And Putin played the Nazi card when he accused the Ukraine regime of tolerating neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine. I thought that our liberal friends had exclusive use of the Nazi card.

Here’s the thing, dear liberal friends. Whenever I detect a liberal Narrative on some issue, I always tend to think that the opposite must be true. So, if you liberal experts in the New York Times all agree on something -- like Putin -- I immediately start to wonder: “What’s the angle here? What is it that liberals don’t want me to know?”

Another thing: do you think our liberal friends actually believe their own lies? I think they do. See, one of the functions of a religious service is the believers to repeat, every Sunday, God’s Sacred Narrative. Kinda like mostly peaceful protestors reciting mostly peaceful slogans at the latest mostly peaceful protest.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Gage Skidmore