But cheerful genocide! Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Tucker Carlson, in an interview on Fox News, has revealed his position on Iran. He’s against it — as in, the entire country:

I think we are the only country with the moral authority […] sufficient to do that. [The U.S. is] the only country that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world. I do think, I’m sure I’m the lone voice in saying this, that Iran deserves to be annihilated. I think they’re lunatics. I think they’re evil.

It’s fair to use terms like “lunatics” and “evil” to describe Iran’s government, in part because of the oppression it inflicts upon the Iranian people. But annihilating Iran doesn’t mean killing its leading government officials. It means annihilating the population of that country.

It’s also worth pondering just what Carlson means when he says that the United States is the only country with the moral authority to annihilate Iran, because we’re the only country “that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world.” You can have a long argument about whether the United States seeks hegemony in the world, and what exactly you mean by that term. But there’s only one country that can even arguably be described as seeking hegemony in the world, and it’s us. Carlson seems to be saying not only that we’re not seeking hegemony in the world, which is defensible, but that every other country is. I’m having a hard time coming up with a definition of “seeks hegemony in the world” that excludes the United States but includes Luxembourg.

Does he mean this? Who knows? He’s certainly smart enough to grasp the inanity of what he is saying, but his lack of interest is pretty obvious from the casualness in which he calls for the destruction of an entire country.