NBC's Megyn Kelly has a lot of trouble getting celebrities to come onto her program, but one guy she doesn't have any difficulty bringing back is Russian president Vladimir Putin.

According to Deadline Hollywood:

NBC News reporter and Today Show anchor Megyn Kelly has scored her second interview with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.  The sit-down was announced today at the beginning of the NBC Nightly News broadcast by Lester Holt.

That's the same Putin who just targeted Florida in a demonstration of his country's new nuclear weapon developments.

It has the weird farcical quality of Dennis Rodman making friends with Kim Jong-un.  More to the point, it shows that Kelly is a useful idiot – despite her firm belief that it's absolutely because of her brains.

Think about it: Kelly had Vladimir Putin on her show and showed herself to be in way over her head the first time.  She was unprepared on her facts and was unable to ask any piercing questions in the style she is known for.

Now he wants to come onto her show again?  Instead of on the show of someone with substantial knowledge of Russia and capacity to discuss the issues in some decent depth, as befits a head of state?  Putin has his choice of interviewers in the U.S.  Any one of them would be thrilled to take him – and he picks her?  As if this bottom-ranked anchor is going to be good for his prestige?  The Russians are obsessed with prestige and formalities, so something else is going on.

Vladimir Putin and Megyn Kelly at their first interview in June 2017. www.kremlin.ru / Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Fact is, it's about propaganda, and Kelly, desperate for ratings, is right there to go along.  Deadline Hollywood reported that the interview would  be released in snippets over the course of days, which makes one wonder if there was some problem requiring the interview to be broken up into segments or, more likely, if she is going along with Putin's desire to be placed in front of the American people night after night after night to maximize the attention he gets, which, of course, serves his purposes.  Putin is well known as a manipulator of the desperate, a capacity dating back to his days in the KGB.  He's well versed in the thinking of V.I. Lenin, who, if he didn't coin the phrase "useful idiots" for Westerners who gladly buy the Communist Party line despite the evidence of their own eyes, developed the idea.

And now we have Megyn Kelly, flattering herself that she has really gotten a great "get."  We haven't had many useful idiots in the wake of the Soviet downfall, except around the issue of Cuba and Venezuela in recent years, although the media fawning over Kim Jong-un at the Olympics comes close.  In Kelly, we are seeing it back, and for real.

She ought to wise up.