Last week Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Here’s the lengthy transcript.) The usual suspects on the Left went after him for it. CNN’s Chris Wallace & company compared Carlson to World War II’s Japanese propagandist Tokyo Rose. Hillary Clinton called him a “useful idiot.” Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (on whom more later) attacked Carlson as a “traitor.” The White House had preemptively condemned the interview.

But even some conservative outlets disapproved. The Telegraph accused Carlson of fostering Putin’s “historical fan-fiction.” Tucker’s old employer, Fox News, tried to ignore the whole thing. It ran one story on the interview, never even mentioned him in the headline, and buried his involvement down at paragraph four. (Here’s a pithy recap of other major media treatment.) Kudos to FNC’s Greg Gutfeld for outspokenly defending his old colleague.

Dozens of takes on this 120+ minute “conversation” (mostly a Putin monologue) have already been done. Probably the most fair-and-balanced was by this site’s Jason Jones and John Zmirak. Allow me to do a somewhat different analysis, as follows. I have tried previously to lay out the world as Putin sees it. With Carlson, he elaborated on those broad positions, in eight major points.