Former Ohio Governor John Kasich has taken a big step and endorsed impeachment of Donald Trump, a big step, which will, hopefully, lead to more Republicans moving in that direction.
The horrible news about the abuses of office, and the collaboration of Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General William Barr, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and others in the administration has made the constitutional crisis worse than Watergate and Richard Nixon, and requires action not only in the House of Representatives, but also by Republicans in the US Senate.
To gain 20 or more Republicans to convict Trump still seems like a long shot, but Kasich, one of the few reputable Republicans, hopefully will assist in convincing a “Profile in Courage” by Senators putting the nation ahead of their own personal ambitions and agenda.
We are in uncharted waters, and the future looks extremely scary!
Recently there have been lies about Tulsi Gabbard (“Russian asset,†“Assad apologistâ€) in the mainstream, including “New York Times†and CNN, which show us—when there are particular candidates they do not like and want to sabotage—they become smear merchants.
Jimmy Dore, responding to a CNN segment of a panel which includes Bakari Sellers: “Hey, a sitting U.S. congressperson, and a currently serving major in the armed forces, is working for another country. I [Bakari Sellers] just said it on CNN.â€
A number of this site’s other posters trust—and they embrace—establishment news sources including MSNBC. This video shows why that is a mistake.
https://youtu.be/O_iJsy-bJ-k
Tulsi Gabbard, the controversial, long-shot Democratic 2020 candidate, explained
How Gabbard went from rising star to controversial figure.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/16/18182114/tulsi-gabbard-2020-president-campaign-policies
When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) was first elected to Congress in 2012 amid an ocean of positive press, the Iraq War veteran seemed like a sure thing for a 2020 presidential run. But her 2020 campaign has, so far, been a nearly complete nonstarter — averaging under 1 percent in national polls.
That’s because the onetime progressive star has alienated many of her early supporters over her conservative stances on Islam and foreign wars.
Gabbard initially excited the left because she was an outspoken economic progressive and a veteran who objected to American intervention abroad. She was also the first Hindu member of Congress. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging starâ€; MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow predicted she was “on the fast track to being very famous.â€
But in the following years, Gabbard staked out foreign policy positions that shocked her allies. She joined Republicans in demanding that President Obama use the term “radical Islam.†She was the member of Congress most willing to advocate for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. She dubbed herself a “hawk†on terrorism. Reporters documented worrying ties to anti-LGBTQ groups — including one run by her father — and anti-Muslim Hindu nationalists.
Gabbard has defenses of these positions, some more persuasive than others. She seems to have sincerely changed her mind on LGBTQ issues, defends her position on terrorism as a necessary response to the serious threat from jihadism to the United States, and argues that her outreach to the Syrian government is part of an effort to open up space for a peaceful solution to the conflict.
In 2016, she backed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) insurgent campaign over Hillary Clinton’s. The move isolated her from her friends in the establishment while getting her little traction with the party’s insurgent left, which remained skeptical of her foreign policy.
For 2020, Gabbard has run as an economic and social progressive, similar to Sanders on domestic policy in many respects. Her campaign website calls for “breaking up the big banks†and “healthcare for all.†But the site also foregrounds her views on war and peace, arguing that “Tulsi has been a leading voice fighting to end regime change wars and instead focus our military efforts on defeating the terrorist groups that attacked and declared war on the United States.â€
Yet it’s her policy views on these issues that have put her campaign in a tough place.
Experts, writers, and political figures on both sides of the Democratic Party’s internal divide have told me the result is that a politician once hailed as the future of the party has no natural constituency and few powerful allies. (Gabbard’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) And given that she’s not the only candidate opposing wars of regime change in the 2020 field, it’s hard to see exactly how she breaks through and betters her consistently dismal polling numbers.
The making of a progressive star
For Tulsi Gabbard, politics is a family business. Her mother, Carol Gabbard, was on Hawaii’s State Board of Education; her father, Mike Gabbard, was a political activist and Honolulu City Council member, best known in Hawaii for being one of the state’s leading opponents of LGBTQ equality. He founded an organization called Stop Promoting Homosexuality that opposed not only marriage equality but the very idea of tolerance for homosexuality itself.
“Homosexuality is not normal, not healthy, morally and scripturally wrong,†he said in a 1992 interview, in which he also blamed the spread of AIDS on the repeal of sodomy laws.
Mike Gabbard’s opposition to LGBTQ rights (as well as abortion) seemed to stem from his religious background. Born in American Samoa, he is both Catholic and a member of an obscure offshoot of the Hare Krishna sect called the Science of Identity Foundation. The group’s leader, a self-described guru named Chris Butler, has condemned homosexuality, once arguing that it led to “an increasing number of American women [keeping] dogs for sexual purposes.’â€
Tulsi Gabbard grew up in Butler’s movement, which has faced allegations of cult-like practices. She told the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh that he shaped her Hindu identity, speaking of her “gratitude to him for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me.â€
Her early political career reflected both Butler’s views and her father’s. She worked for her father’s organization, which supported the use of “conversion therapy†to try to turn kids straight. She once blasted “homosexual activists†for trying to “force their values down the throats of the children in our schools.†During her successful run for the Hawaii Legislature in 2002, when she was just 21 years old, she vowed to pass a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage.
Despite her conservative social views — she also opposed abortion — Gabbard was a Democrat, albeit not one likely to succeed on the national stage. But in 2004, she deployed to the Middle East for her National Guard unit, serving as a combat medic in Iraq and a counterterrorism trainer in Kuwait.
This was, according to her, a transformative experience. During her 2012 campaign for an open seat in the US House, Gabbard supported both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. She explained her change of heart in a December 2011 blog post on her campaign site. It’s worth reading her statement at length:
The contrast between our society and those in the Middle East made me realize that the difference — the reason those societies are so oppressive — is that they are essentially theocracies where the government and government leaders wield the power to both define and then enforce morality.
My experiences in the Middle East eventually led me to reevaluate my view regarding government’s role in our personal lives and decisions.
Slowly, I began to realize that the positions I had held previously regarding the issues of choice and gay marriage were rooted in the same premise held by those in power in the oppressive Middle East regimes I saw — that it is government’s role to define and enforce our personal morality.
Gabbard made a name for herself during the 2012 campaign as a Democrat to watch. The strength of her campaign — she won an upset primary victory after initially trailing by 50 points — and her compelling personal background caught the eye of national Democrats pretty early. That summer, Pelosi tapped her for a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.
She effectively moved beyond her controversial stands on social issues, situating herself as an economic progressive and a critic of the Bush-era wars in the Middle East. The latter was particularly important as she grounded her antiwar arguments in her personal experience witnessing the cost of war. This immunized her from the “soft on terrorism†charges so many Democrats were terrified to court, making her a powerful critic of “nation building†and “wars of choice.â€
Another famous biracial Hawaiian politician, President Barack Obama, endorsed her congressional run. After her victory, Gabbard was given one of five vice chair positions on the Democratic National Committee, a sign of the party’s faith in her. Another rising star, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, told Vogue in 2013 that “she’s one of the leading voices in the party now.â€
Tulsi Gabbard seemed like the perfect Democrat, the kind of politician everyone in the party was excited about. And then she shot herself in the foot.
Gabbard fought Obama — and lost the party
Gabbard’s fall from grace in the Democratic Party came in a peculiar fashion: She picked a series of high-profile fights with the Obama administration over foreign policy.
In 2015, terrorism was arguably the biggest fight in American partisan politics. ISIS had just swept across northern Iraq, seizing control of the country’s second-largest city; the Obama administration had launched a new war in Iraq to roll them back. In January, killers aligned with the Islamic State attacked the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, igniting fears of a global wave of terrorist violence.
Republicans blamed Obama. One of the most common arguments from Republicans in the runup to that year’s midterm election was that Obama refused to say the phrase “radical Islam,†arguing that the president’s commitment to political correctness was preventing him from identifying the root cause of jihadist violence: Islamist theology.
Very few Democrats were willing to echo the Republican arguments on this front. Gabbard was an exception. As early as January 2015, she started going on every cable channel that would have her — including Fox News — and bashing Obama’s policy on terrorism. She sounded indistinguishable from a Republican presidential candidate.
“What is so frustrating … is that our administration refuses to recognize who our enemy is,†she said in a January 2015 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And unless and until that happens, then it’s impossible to come up with a strategy to defeat that enemy. We have to recognize that this is about radical Islam.â€
The problem with this argument, according to both the Obama administration and most terrorism experts, is that “radical Islam†paints with too broad a brush. The term implies that jihadist militants are part of a unified ideological movement rather than a series of discrete groups that are often at war with each other. It’s also insulting to the vast majority of Muslims around the world. President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism team refused to use it for these reasons.
This overwhelming focus on the threat from terrorism culminated in what’s now Gabbard’s most infamous policy position: quasi-support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator responsible for the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the conflict’s worst atrocities.
Gabbard argued, along with a small minority of foreign policy analysts, that the best way to defeat ISIS in Syria was for the US to align itself with Assad’s regime. She argued that the US should cut funding to the rebels fighting Assad, even sponsoring a bill in Congress to cut off US support. In the fall of 2015, when Russia began its bombing campaign in Syria, Gabbard celebrated it as a win for counterterrorism.
In fact, Russian forces were mostly targeting Syrian rebel groups overall rather than al-Qaeda-aligned rebel groups specifically. The goal was not narrow counterterrorism but rather defending a Russian-friendly regime that was (at the time) losing the war.
But there’s an internal logic here, one that the Kremlin itself has argued publicly. If you’re focused solely on the threat from the jihadist elements inside the Syrian opposition to the American homeland to the exclusion of moral concerns about Assad’s regime, then it makes a grim kind of sense to align oneself with the Syrian and Russian governments.
This appears to be how Gabbard, who once described Assad as “brutal,†could support Russia’s intervention on his behalf — even going so far as to unfavorably compare Obama to Putin: Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911, she wrote in a Tweet, dated October 1, 2015 at 12:03 pm
In January 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad personally, catching the Democratic leadership in Congress off guard. After returning to the US, she went on CNN and parroted the regime’s line that there was “no difference†between the mainstream anti-Assad rebels and ISIS.
By this point, Democratic leadership considered her disloyal. “Rep. Gabbard loses me and, I think, many others when she claims to support peaceful values and policies that protect civilians and still engages with and even defends a murderous dictator, Bashar al-Assad,†Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior NSC official in the Obama administration, told me earlier this year. “There is no excuse for this. The hypocrisy of these actions is astonishing. One can be antiwar without being pro-murderous dictator, a fact that seems obvious.â€
When Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in April 2017, Gabbard said she was “skeptical†that Assad was responsible, aligning herself with conspiracy theorists against both US intelligence and the overwhelming majority of independent experts.
Assad was not the only foreign authoritarian Gabbard praised for fighting terrorism. She issued a statement celebrating Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s “great courage and leadership in taking on … extreme Islamist ideology†— despite Sisi taking power in a coup and massacring more than 800 peaceful protesters in a single day.
She also proposed a policy of US special forces raids around the world and even expressed a willingness to authorize torture of terrorism suspects if she were president. She referred to herself in one interview as a “dove†on regime change but a “hawk†on terrorism, neatly summarizing her actual positions.
Gabbard and the left: she can’t replace Bernie
If Gabbard was estranged from the party leadership as a result of her views on terrorism, it was official when she endorsed Sanders over Clinton. Gabbard resigned her position as vice chair of the DNC to do it, a hard break with the party that she claimed was motivated by reservations about Clinton’s foreign policy instincts.
“We can elect a president who will lead us into more interventionist wars of regime change, or we can elect a president who will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity,†she said in a taped endorsement. “The stakes are just too high. That’s why today I’m endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders to be our next president and commander in chief of the United States.â€
Much like Gabbard’s postwar conversion on abortion and LGBTQ rights, this seems both plausible and politically savvy. Her positioning on Syria and fights with the Obama administration had already alienated many people in the party’s more mainstream wing; courting the party’s insurgents seemed like a smart way to build a new base of national support.
In the years since, Gabbard has cultivated this relationship. She has endorsed a $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-all, and the Green New Deal. When she faced a primary challenge in 2018, motivated in part by her Syria position, the pro-Sanders group Our Revolution endorsed her (as did actress Shailene Woodley, an Our Revolution board member). She has a vocal group of online fans from the so-called “anti-imperialist†left, a loose group of writers — like the anti-Israel gadfly Max Blumenthal — who share her position on Syria.
But on the whole, the left isn’t enthusiastic about Gabbard. Some of her harshest critics come not from the party mainstream but rather from the party’s left and democratic socialist flanks.
In 2017, the socialist publication Jacobin published a brutal takedown titled “Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend,†focusing on dispelling the myth of Gabbard as an opponent of America’s wars abroad.
“Gabbard’s almost singular focus on the damage these wars inflict domestically, and her comparative lack of focus on the carnage they wreak in the countries under attack, is troubling,†Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic writes. “It is nationalism in antiwar garb, reinforcing instead of undercutting the toxic rhetoric that treats foreigners as less deserving of dignity than Americans.â€
Reached via email, Marcetic told me he believes many on the American left share his view of Gabbard.
“My sense is there’s a pretty big cohort of the left that distrusts Gabbard,†he said. “Her anti-interventionism isn’t quite as peaceful as she makes it out to be.â€
In January, the Intercept, a left-aligned antiwar outlet, published a deeply reported exposé on Gabbard’s ties to Hindu nationalists. Gabbard has long supported Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an anti-Islam right-winger who had previously been barred from entering the US due to being personally implicated in deadly anti-Muslim riots. In turn, American Hindu supporters of Modi had become some of Gabbard’s biggest donors — including some disturbingly Islamophobic groups.
“Hindu-Americans have supported Gabbard since the start of her political career, and that support has increased substantially since Modi’s election, much of it coming from Hindu nationalists,†Soumya Shankar writes in the Intercept piece. “Dozens of Gabbard’s donors have either expressed strong sympathy with or have ties to the Sangh Parivar — a network of religious, political, paramilitary, and student groups that subscribe to the Hindu supremacist, exclusionary ideology known as Hindutva.â€
These attacks in the left press underscore how divisive a figure she is even among the party’s insurgent wing. It’s hard to see why a faction that was troubled by Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record would be open to someone who had engaged in borderline Islamophobic rhetoric about “radical Islam,†called for escalations in the war on terrorism, and backed anti-Islam populists and dictators abroad.
What’s more, the Bernie camp has a candidate they’d obviously prefer to Gabbard: Bernie. Sanders’s supporters have not defected in any meaningful numbers to Gabbard over the course of the campaign, and there’s no reason to expect they should.
What’s more, Gabbard isn’t even the other major left-identified candidate in the field. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, not Gabbard, has emerged as the other leading candidate competing for the party’s left reaches, even outpacing Sanders in some recent polls. There doesn’t seem to be room for anyone else out there besides Sanders and Warren, who both have better name recognition than Gabbard and lack her particularly encumbering baggage.
So while backing Sanders in 2016 was smart politics on Gabbard’s part, given her declining support in the mainstream, it simply wasn’t enough to overcome the hole she dug herself. Nobody made Gabbard cozy up to Assad or attack Obama for not saying “radical Islamâ€; she wasn’t forced to entertain the idea of bringing back torture or fundraising from hardline Hindu nationalists. These moves clearly weren’t politically clever, and they seem to have cost her allies around the party.
There’s only one clear explanation: Gabbard’s most controversial positions represent her authentic convictions. She deeply believes the US would have been better off helping Assad slaughter Syrian rebels, and that combating terrorism requires saying the magic phrase “radical Islam.†There’s something admirable about a politician expressing their deep convictions even though it’s politically devastating — except in this case, those convictions are morally repellent.
In an interview on CNN announcing her intent to run in 2020, Gabbard said she was running principally to advance her view of foreign policy. “There is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace,†she said.
That also happens to be the main reason her campaign is in such a tough place.
‘ WaPo Publishes Gabbard Smear Piece Filled With Blatant Lies’
By Caitlin Johnstone (08.03.2019)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/08/03/wapo-publishes-gabbard-smear-piece-filled-with-blatant-lies/
The Washington Post, which is wholly owned by a CIA contractor who is reportedly working to control the underlying infrastructure of the global economy, has published a shockingly deceitful smear piece about Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard in the wake of her criticisms of her opponent Kamala Harris’ prosecutorial record during the last Democratic debate.
The article’s author, Josh Rogin, has been a cheerleader for US regime change interventionism in Syria since the very beginning of the conflict in that nation. It is unsurprising, then, that he reacted with orgasmic exuberance when Harris retaliated against Gabbard’s devastating attack by smearing the Hawaii congresswoman as an “Assad apologistâ€, since Gabbard has been arguably the most consistent and high-profile critic of Rogin’s pet war agenda. His article, titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria record shows why she can’t be presidentâ€, is one of the most dishonest articles that I have ever read in a mainstream publication, and the fact that it made it through The Washington Post‘s editors is enough to fully discredit that outlet.
You can read Rogin’s smear piece without giving Jeff Bezos more money by clicking here for an archive. There’s so much dishonesty packed into this one that all I can do is go through it lie-by-lie until I either finish or get tired, so let’s begin:
“Gabbard asserts that the United States (not Assad) is responsible for the death and destruction in Syria, that the Russian airstrikes on civilians are to be praised“
This is just a complete, brazen, whole-cloth lie from Rogin. If you click the hyperlink he alleges supports his claim that Gabbard asserts “Russian airstrikes on civilians are to be praised,†you come to a 2015 tweet by the congresswoman which reads, “Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.â€
[Tulsi Gabbard, 10.01.2015, Twitter: Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.]
Now, you can agree or disagree with Gabbard’s position that the US should be participating in airstrikes against al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria, but there’s no way you can possibly interpret her acceptance of Russia doing so to be anywhere remotely like “praise†for “airstrikes on civiliansâ€. There is simply no way to represent the content of her tweet that way without knowingly lying about what you think it says. The only way Rogin’s claim could be anything resembling truthful would be if “al-Qaeda†and “civilians†meant the same thing. Obviously this is not the case, so Rogin can only be knowingly lying.
“That bias, combined with her long record of defending the Assad regime and parroting its propaganda, form the basis for the assertion Gabbard has ‘embraced and been an apologist for’ Assad, as Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) said Wednesday post-debate on CNN.â€
Gabbard has no record whatsoever of “defending the Assad regimeâ€. This is a lie. There exist copious amounts of quotes by Gabbard opposing US regime change interventionism in Syria and voicing skepticism of the narratives used to promote said interventionism, but there are no quotes anywhere in which she claims Assad is a nice person or that he hasn’t done bad things. If such quotes existed, Rogin would have included them in his smear piece. He did not. All he can do is lie about their existence.
“To repeat: There is no quote in which Tulsi praises, supports, or otherwise ‘apologies for’ Assad,†journalist Michael Tracey recently tweeted with a link to his January article on the subject. “I checked the record a long time ago, and it doesn’t exist. This is just a smear intended to delegitimize diplomatic engagementâ€
“Claiming that politicians are ‘defending’ objectionable rulers they meet with, in pursuit of achieving some alternative to war, is a tired trope that has been frequently used throughout history to discredit diplomatic engagement,†Tracey wrote. “As Gabbard told me in an interview shortly after returning from Syria: ‘The reason why I decided to take this meeting on this trip was because if we profess to care about the Syrian people — if we really truly care about ending their suffering and ending this war — then we should be ready to meet with anyone if there is a chance that that meeting and that conversation could help to bring about an end to this war.’â€
Gabbard has been remarkably consistent in explaining her position that she opposes US regime change interventionism in Syria because US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous. This isn’t “defending†anyone, nor is it “parroting propagandaâ€. It’s an indisputable, thoroughly established fact.
[Michael Tracey, 08.01.2019, Twitter: To repeat: There is no quote in which Tulsi praises, supports, or otherwise “apologies for” Assad. I checked the record a long time ago, and it doesn’t exist. This is just a smear intended to delegitimize diplomatic engagement; Links to a “New York Daily News†piece.]
“Other Democratic candidates have promised to end U.S. military adventurism without making excuses for a mass murderer. It’s neither progressive nor liberal to defend Assad, a fascist, totalitarian psychopath who can never peacefully preside over Syria after what he has done.â€
Again, claiming that Gabbard has done anything at all to “defend Assad†is a lie. If anything Gabbard has been too uncritical of establishment war propaganda narratives, calling Assad “a brutal dictator†who has “used chemical weapons and other weapons against his people.†Gabbard’s sole arguments on the matter have been in opposition to US military interventionism and skepticism of narratives used to support such interventionism, which only an idiot would object to in a post-Iraq invasion world.
Rogin argues that it’s possible to end US military adventurism without defending and making excuses for Assad, yet this is exactly the thing that Tulsi Gabbard has been doing since day one. Which means Rogin doesn’t actually believe it’s ever okay for any presidential candidate to want to end US military adventurism under any circumstances. Which is of course the real driving motivation behind his deceitful smear piece against Gabbard.
“Gabbard never talks about her other trip — to the Turkish-Syrian border with a group of lawmakers in June 2015, when she met with authentic opposition leaders, victims of Assad’s barrel bombs and members of the volunteer rescue brigade known as the White Helmets. Their stories, which don’t support Assad’s narrative, never make it into Gabbard’s speeches on the campaign trail.â€
This one is bizarre. Rogin says this as though Gabbard’s meeting with Assad is something that she brings up “on the campaign trail†rather than something war propagandists like himself bring up and force her to respond to. The fact that those propagandists never bring up Gabbard’s meetings with the Syrian opposition is an indictment of their bias, not hers. The mental gymnastics required to make Gabbard’s meetings with all sides of the Syrian conflict feel more pro-Assad rather than less deserve an Olympic gold medal.
Obviously Gabbard having met with all sides is indicative of an absence of favoritism, not the presence of it. The fact that she didn’t come away from her meetings with empire-allied opposition forces with the opinion that the US should help storm Damascus doesn’t mean she supports any particular side.
“Gabbard’s candidacy should be taken very seriously — not because she has a significant chance of being president, but because her narrative on Syria is deeply incorrect, immoral and un-American. If it were adopted by her party and the country, it would lead the United States down a perilous moral and strategic path.â€
Saying a “narrative†can be “un-American†is a fairly straightforward admission that you are authoring propaganda. Unless you believe your nation has one authorized set of narratives, a narrative can’t be “un-Americanâ€. This is as close as you’ll ever get to an admission from Rogin that US power structures work to control the dominant narratives about world events, and that he helps them do it. To such a person, opposition to your narrative control agendas would be seen as the antithesis of the group you identify with.
The US empire has an extensive and well-documented history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to initiate military conflicts which advantage it. To continue to deny this after Iraq is either willful ignorance or propaganda.
The fact that Rogin adds “strategic path†to his argument nullifies his claim that his position has anything to do with morality. If your foreign policy concern is with strategic leverage, you will naturally try to interpret anything which advances that strategic path as the moral choice.
[Caitlin Johnstone, 09.04.2018, Twitter: Friendly reminder that we know for 100% certain the US and its allies plotted to create a violent uprising in Syria exactly as it unfolded in 2011. Links to a Medium piece.]
“Listening to Gabbard, one might think the United States initiated the Syrian conflict by arming terrorists for a regime-change war that has resulted in untold suffering.â€
This is exactly what happened. The US armed extremist militants with the goal of effecting regime change, and before Russia intervened they almost succeeded. According to the former Prime Minister of Qatar, the US and its allies were involved in this behavior from the very beginning of the conflict in 2011. Here is a link to an article full of primary source documents showing that the US and its allies had been scheming since well before 2011 to provoke a civil war in Syria with the goal of regime change. They did exactly what they planned to do, which is exactly the thing Rogin claims they did not do.
But Gabbard never even takes her analysis this far. She simply says the US should not get involved in another US regime change war, because it shouldn’t.
“Responding to Harris, Gabbard called Assad’s atrocities ‘detractions,’ [sic] before eventually saying she doesn’t dispute that he’s guilty of torture and murder. That’s a slight improvement from her previous protestations that there was not enough evidence.â€
Rogin falsely implies here that Gabbard only just began accusing Assad of war crimes, and that she only did so in response to new pressure resulting from Harris’ criticism. As noted earlier, this is false; Gabbard has been harshly critical of Assad.
“Gabbard then quickly accused President Trump of aiding al-Qaeda in Idlib. ‘That does sound like a talking point of the Assad regime,’ CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. He could have just said she is wrong.â€
Even the US State Department has acknowledged that Idlib is an al-Qaeda stronghold, and the Trump administration has taken aggressive moves to prevent the Assad coalition from launching a full-scale campaign to reclaim the territory. Claiming that this did not happen is a lie per even the accepted narratives of the US political/media class.
[Dan Cohen, 08.01.2019, Twitter: What @TulsiGabbard says here is true. Trump insists on keeping al-Qaeda (what CNN calls “rebelsâ€) in power in Idlib province in northern Syria. If you believe Trump says so for humanitarian reasons, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.]
“Gabbard’s 2017 trip was financed and run by members of a Lebanese socialist-nationalist party that works closely with the Assad regime.â€
Former US Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who accompanied Gabbard on this trip, dismissed this accusation as “so much horseshit I can’t believe it.†All parties involved have denied this narrative, which Rogin has played a pivotal role in promoting from the very beginning and to which he has been forced to make multiple embarrassing corrections.
“Gabbard’s plan to overtly side with Assad and Russia while they commit crimes against humanity would be a strategic disaster, a gift to the extremists and a betrayal of decades of U.S. commitments to stand up to mass atrocities. Democratic voters who believe in liberalism and truth must reject not only her candidacy but also her attempt to disguise moral bankruptcy as a progressive value.â€
Another lie; Gabbard has no such plan. Opposing US regime change interventionism isn’t “siding†with anybody, it’s just not supporting a thing that is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful.
Rogin’s closing admonishment to reject not just Gabbard but her skepticism of US war narratives is yet another admission that he’s concerned with narrative control here, not with truth and not even really with a US presidential candidate.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and shameless war propagandists like Josh Rogin are the attack dogs of establishment narrative control.
Steve Bannon and his ilk like her. That’s reason enough for me not to like her.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-conservative-media-and-the-far-right-love-tulsi-gabbard-for-president
It’s not just mainstream media warning against her. The Jacobin, a socialist publication, which is left-wing, warns she’s not to be trusted.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/tulsi-gabbard-president-sanders-democratic-party
‘Colbert Smears Tulsi Gabbard To Her Face While Telling Zero Jokes’
By Caitlin Johnstone (03.13.2019)
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/colbert-smears-tulsi-gabbard-to-her-face-while-telling-zero-jokes-5cb9ec26ac8b
Hawaii Congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where instead of the light, jokey banter about politics and who she is as a person that Democratic presidential candidates normally encounter on late night comedy programs, the show’s host solemnly ran down a list of textbook beltway smears against Gabbard and made her defend them in front of his audience.
Normally when a Democratic Party-aligned politician appears on such a show, you can expect jokes about how stupid Trump is and how badly they’re going to beat the Republicans, how they’re going to help ordinary Americans, and maybe some friendly back-and-forth about where they grew up or something. Colbert had no time to waste on such things, however, because this was not an interview with a normal Democratic Party-aligned politician: this was a politician who has been loudly and consistently criticizing US foreign policy.
After briefly asking his guest who she is and why she’s running for president, Colbert jumped right into it by immediately bringing up Syria and Assad, the primary line of attack employed against Gabbard by establishment propagandists in American mainstream media.
Colbert: Do you think the Iraq war was worth it?
Gabbard: No.
Colbert: Do you think that our involvement in Syria has been worth it?
Gabbard: No.
Colbert: Do you think that ISIS could have been defeated without our involvement and without our support of the local troops there?
Gabbard: There are two things we need to address in Syria. One is a regime change war that was first launched by the United States in 2011, covertly, led by the CIA. That is a regime change war that has continued over the years, that has increased the suffering of the Syrian people, and strengthened groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, because the CIA was using American taxpayer dollars to provide arms and training and equipment to these terrorist groups to get them to overthrow the government. So that is a regime change war that we should not have been engaging.
Colbert: So, but if it is someone like Bashar al-Assad, who gasses his own people, or who engages in war crimes against his own people, should the United States not be involved?
Gabbard: The United States should not be intervening to overthrow these dictators and these regimes that we don’t like, like Assad, like Saddam Hussein, like Gaddafi, and like Kim Jong Un. There are bad people in the world, but history has shown us that every time the United States goes in and topples these dictators we don’t like, trying to end up like the world’s police, we end up increasing the suffering of the people in these countries. We end up increasing the loss of life, but American lives and the lives of people in these countries. We end up undermining our own security, what to speak of the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s spent on these wars that we need to be using right here at home.
Like I said, this is not a normal presidential candidate. How often do you see a guest appear on a network late night talk show and talk about the CIA arming terrorists in Syria and the fact that US military interventionism is completely disastrous? It just doesn’t happen. You can understand, then, why empire propagandist Stephen Colbert spent the rest of the interview informing his TV audience that Tulsi Gabbard is dangerous and poisonous.
[Caitlin Johnstone, 03.12.2019, Twitter: This was unwatchable. Colbert just went down the list of scripted Gabbard smears (Assad, David Duke) then sermonized about how US military intervention is a force for good in this world. All without telling a single joke. Late night “comedy” shows are propaganda for livestock.]
Colbert: You got some heat for meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Do you not consider him a war criminal? Why did you meet with that man?
Gabbard: In the pursuit of peace and security. If we are not willing to meet with adversaries, potential adversaries, in the pursuit of peace and security, the only alternative is more war. That’s why I took that meeting with Assad. In pursuit of peace and security.
Colbert: Do you believe he is a war criminal? Do you believe he gassed his own people or committed atrocities against his own people?
Gabbard: Yes. Reports have shown that that’s a fact.
Colbert: So you believe the intelligence agencies on that. Because I heard that you did not necessarily believe those reports.
The reason I call Colbert a propagandist and not simply a liberal empire loyalist who happens to have been elevated by billionaire media is because these are carefully constructed narratives that he is reciting, and they weren’t constructed by him.
Trying to make it look to the audience as though Gabbard is in some way loyal to Assad has been a high-priority agenda of the mainstream media ever since she announced her presidential candidacy. We saw it in her recent appearance on The View, where John McCain’s sociopathic daughter called her an “Assad apologist†and demanded that Gabbard call Assad an enemy of the United States. We saw it in her recent CNN town hall, where a consultant who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign was presented as an ordinary audience member to help CNN’s Dana Bash paint Gabbard’s skepticism of intelligence reports about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government as something that is weird and suspicious, instead of the only sane position in a post-Iraq invasion world. We saw it in her appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last month, where the entire panel piled on her in outrage that she wouldn’t call Assad an enemy of the United States. It’s such a common propaganda talking point that the New York Times’ Bari Weiss famously made a laughingstock of herself by repeating it as self-evident truth on The Joe Rogan Experience without having the faintest clue what specific facts it was meant to refer to, just because she’d heard establishment pundits saying it so much.
This is an organized smear by the mass media attempting to marry Gabbard in the eyes of the public to a Middle Eastern leader whom the propagandists have already sold as a child-murdering monster, and Colbert is participating in it here just as much as the serious news media talking heads are. It’s been frustrating to watch Gabbard fold to this smear campaign by acting like it’s an established fact that Assad “gases his own people†and not the hotly contested empire-serving narrative she knows it is. Gabbard is being targeted by this smear because she challenges US political orthodoxy on military violence (the glue which holds the empire together), so no amount of capitulation will keep them from trying to prevent the public from trusting her words.
[Rania Khalek, 02.06.2019, Twitter: The journalist interrogating Tulsi seems to believe that US forces in Syria are fighting Assad. Tulsi corrects her, says those troops were deployed there to fight ISIS. These people don’t even know what’s happening in the places they want the US to occupy. Links to a MSNBC interview.]
“I don’t know whether America should be the policemen of the world,†Colbert said after Gabbard defended her position.
“It is my opinion that we should not be,†Gabbard replied, causing Colbert to launch into a stuffy, embarrassing sermon on the virtues of interventionism and US hegemony that would make Bill Kristol blush.
“If we are not, though, nature abhors a vacuum, and if we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum. And we will step away from the world stage in a significant way that might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world in my opinion. Would you agree with that?â€
Again, this is a comedy show.
Gabbard explained that in order to be a force for good in the world the United States has to actually do good, which means not raining fire upon every nation it dislikes all the time. Colbert responded by reading off his blue index card to repeat yet another tired anti-Gabbard smear.
“You’ve gotten some fans in the Trump supporter world: David Duke, Steve Bannon, and, uh, Matt, uh, Gaetz, is that his name? Matt Gaetz? What do you make of how much they like you?â€
This one is particularly vile, partly because Gabbard has repeatedly and unequivocally denounced David Duke, who has a long-established and well-known history of injecting himself into the drama of high-profile conversations in order to maintain the illusion of relevance, and partly because it’s a completely irrelevant point that is brought up solely for the purpose of marrying Tulsi Gabbard’s name to a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Colbert only brought this up (and made Newsweek totally squee) because he wanted to assist in that marrying. The fact that there are distasteful ideologies which also happen to oppose US interventionism for their own reasons does not change the undeniable fact that US military interventionism is consistently disastrous and never helpful and robs the US public of resources that are rightfully theirs.
[Caitlin Johnston links a YouTube video, “ Colbert audience cheers Comey firing, before he corrects themâ€.]
This interview was easily Colbert’s most blatant establishment rim job I’ve ever seen, surpassing even the time he corrected his own audience when they cheered at James Comey’s firing to explain to them that Comey is a good guy now and they’re meant to like him. Colbert’s show is blatant propaganda for human livestock, and the fact that this is what American “comedy†shows look like now is nauseating.
When Tulsi Gabbard first announced her candidacy I predicted that she’d have the narrative control engineers scrambling all over themselves to kill her message, and it’s been even more spectacular than I imagined. I don’t agree with everything she says and does, but by damn this woman is shaking up the establishment narrative matrix more than anybody else right now. She’s certainly keeping it interesting.
Getting to the topic of Kasich. Glad to see him standing up against the Orange Monster.
‘The Ramped Up Smear Campaign Against Hawai’i’s Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’
“Is There a Coordinated, Orchestrated Campaign to Derail Gabbard?â€
By Jon Woodhouse (01.16.2019)
https://mauiindependent.org/the-ramped-up-smear-campaign-against-hawaiis-congresswoman-tulsi-gabbard/
Within days of Tulsi Gabbard announcing her plan to run for president last week, a smear campaign moved into high gear. It’s almost as if there’s a coordinated, orchestrated campaign to derail her as so called progressive medial outlets have unleashed a torrent of attacks.
Clinton booster and DNC chairman emeritus unleashed the latest verbal assault on January 17 on CNN’s New Day show. The Hill headlined its coverage: “Howard Dean to CNN: All Dem candidates qualified to be president except Tulsi Gabbard.†After telling CNN that he thought centrist Democrat Joe Biden was “a good guy,†he bad-mouthed Gabbard, saying, “I don’t think she knows what she’s doing and she’s not qualified.â€
[Quote: “The Democratic Party establishment has feared Gabbard’s growing influence and attacked her relentlessly ever since she refused to toe the oligarch party line and backed Bernie over Hillary in 2016.â€]
Liberal sites like The Intercept and Honolulu’s Civil Beat have all joined in the assault, while Rolling Stone quickly published a critique by a pro-Hillary, former Newsweek journalist proclaiming – “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign May Be Over Before It started.†A subhead claimed, “The congresswoman from Hawaii’s past is filled with anti-LGBTQ activism, calls for bombing Syria and endorsing torture.â€
Critical comments on the RS article highlighted the obvious bias – “The irony of course is how pro Hillary this reporter has been in the past. Complete Hillbot idolization,†noted one. “And yet, this ridiculous pay for play reporter is digging up dirt and slamming Tulsi on an issue that has been addressed over and over.â€
Another comment simply called out RS – “Nice smearing.â€
The liberal news site Vox waded in asserting “How Gabbard went from rising star to pariah.†Littered with falsehoods their article suggested: “It’s a collapse that speaks to the broader arc of Gabbard’s career so far, a story of squandered potential that feels like a Greek tragedy.â€
Vanity Fair jumped in on the attack with an article sub-head – “The Democratic candidate’s perplexing, Bannonesque foreign policy and passivity toward Assad may make her radioactive. And then there is the homophobia.†It includes the usual distortions and innuendo.
Many of these articles spout similar false talking points, that she’s a bigoted homophobic, Islamophobic, torture supporter, who loves authoritarian leaders – never mind the actual truth.
Even though Gabbard recently apologized for her anti-gay stance which she took during her twenties and has supported same-sex marriage since 2012 and was endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT lobby, the web has been alight with anti-Gabbard homophobia postings.
[Quote: “ Gabbard’s congressional record of voting for LGBT bills in congress is the identical ‘100% support’ as every other Democrat who is exploring a 2020 presidential bid.â€]
On January 17 Tulsi released a video explaining how she had been basically raised in a fundamentalist family and over time came to realize her doctrinaire beliefs were wrong. “In my past I said and believed things that were wrong and they hurt people,†she said. “I regret the role I played in causing pain. I grew up in a socially conservative household and was raised to believe marriage should only be between a man and a woman. My father fought against gay rights in Hawaii and I defended him. My views have changed significantly since then. I will continue to fight for LGBTQ rights.â€
Addressing that faulty Islamophobic perception a Facebook poster commented – “I am proud to be an American Muslim for Tulsi Gabbard and I will continue to emphasize that she is NOT Islamophobic.â€
The current smear campaign is described in a Medium article headlined – “Tulsi is a Rising Star Despite Lies From Biased Media.â€
The article alleges that eBay billionaire publisher Pierre Omidyar, “continues his smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard through his personally funded media projects The Intercept and Honolulu Civil Beat, as well as having his reporters submit articles to left-leaning media outlets.â€
Omidyar has donated more than $30 million to the Clinton Global Initiative and was a major funder of Hillary’s presidential campaign.
It continued: “Periodicals that are financially supported by Pierre Omidyar have published multiple articles blatantly smearing Tulsi through bigoted attacks and deliberate misrepresentations of her positions and policies.â€
Many readers shocked at The Intercept’s obvious bias posted comments like, “Sloppy, misleading hit-piece,†and “Another lazy reporter making controversial comments without backing their accusations up with facts,†and, “This article is terrible, Hinduphobic and racist.â€
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald explained on TV this week why she is being vilified. “Democrats hate her,†he said. “Washington hates people who are kind of independent minded and critical thinkers.â€
The establishment echo chambers attempt to paint her as a right winger has expanded despite virtually every position and vote Gabbard has made as Hawai’i’s highly popular Congresswoman (she won re-election with 77% of the vote last year). Gabbard, a combat vet from Iraq, has nonetheless been a vocal critic of that calamitous war. She supports abortion rights, Wall Street reform, decriminalization of marijuana, and Medicare for All. She has refused PAC money and has opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well as the Trump arms deal with the Saudis.
She has taken heat for criticizing President Obama because he refused to refer to radical Islamic terrorists, and for praising Egypt’s el Sisi (it was for his commitment to take on ISIS), even though she also met with leaders of the Christian Coptic Church on the same Egypt trip.
She’s been hammered over Syria and for meeting with Assad, and speaking out against American-imposed regime change in that nation. She’s called Assad a “brutal dictator.â€
She was also criticized for questioning who was responsible for a chemical gas attack, noting that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on faulty intelligence, and that the war was a huge mistake.
Among the experts who also expressed skepticism that the Syrian government was responsible were former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, MIT professor Theodore Postol (a former Pentagon missile expert), investigative Israeli journalist Uri Avneri, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh.
An outspoken critic of regime change (she tweeted today about Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton’s desire to invade Iran – “John Bolton’s long standing desire for regime change in Iran must be called out and shut downâ€), in addressing the Russian disinformation campaign on American elections, she offered an intelligent, nuanced perspective.
“The United States has been doing this for a very long time in countries around the world, both overtly and covertly, through these kinds of disinformation campaigns,†said Gabbard. “Not even counting like the regime change wars, like we’re going to take you out.â€
“I think it is very hypocritical for us to be discussing this issue as a country without actually being honest about how this goes both ways. So, yes, we need to stop these other foreign countries—and Russia’s not the only one; there are others—from trying to influence the American people and our elections. We also need to stop doing the same thing in other countries.â€
Her Hindu religious affiliation has prompted a disturbing Hinduphobic bias that she is Islamophobic. A myopic New York Magazine article in November by a well-known anti-Gabbard critic was replete with falsehoods, half-truths, and baseless rumors.
An earlier article in Paste Magazine, by the same author, Eon Higgins, ludicrously claimed: “But a deeper look at Gabbard’s political career shows that she is devoted to attaining power and to the perpetuation of extremist, fringe ideology. She adopts and sheds extremist positions at will, but one thing remains constant: her consistent embrace of hard-right politics.â€
That Hindu affiliation has led to consequent criticism of Gabbard’s ties with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (like in the VF article), the elected head of the largest democracy in the world.
No mention though that Obama was friendly with Modi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with him (she thanked him for India continuing to host His Holiness the Dalai Lama ), as did Bill and Hillary (she praised Modi’s environmental commitment, “the world is counting on India’s leadership on climate change.â€), but that doesn’t fit the smear Gabbard campaign.
The Vanity Fair article neglected to cite a 2015 Time magazine profile where President Obama enthusiastically praised Modi – “He’s laid out an ambitious vision to reduce extreme poverty, improve education, empower women and girls and unleash India’s true economic potential while confronting climate change.â€
The lies in the media also include a widely spread assertion that she met with then president-elect Trump to discuss a possible position in the Trump administration. The truth – Trump asked the Iraq War veteran to meet with him to share her views on Syria.
No fan of President Trump, she recently called him out in a tweet as “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,†for announcing the U.S.’s continuing support of Saudi Arabia, and has condemned his rollback of environmental regulations which has put “the health and safety of Americans at risk.â€
As for being pro-torture. She reported, “let’s say, in an hour, a nuclear bomb or an attack will go off unless this information was found, I believe if I were the president of the United States that I would do everything in my power to keep the American people safe.â€
The problem, torture doesn’t work. Former FBI agent and interrogator Ali Soufan, says the use of torture has not prevented, “one single terrorist attack†in the U.S. Soufan found that coercive techniques make detainees tell you what you want to hear, whether it is true or not.
A Veterans Today post just summed up why she has been the brunt of Democrat establishment hostility since announcing her candidacy. “Tulsi Gabbard, who has over the years given the Neocons and war machine heart attacks, is running for president in 2020. Obviously this is not a comfortable position for the Deep State and the Neocons, the people who have spent trillions upon trillions of tax dollars in the Middle East destroying lives and livelihood. So far she is the best presidential candidate for 2020.â€
[Quote: “If beating Trump in 2020 is the primary concern of many voters, they might do well to disregard the mainstream pundits and take a second look at Gabbard’s electability. Because the very thing that scares the hell out of the Democratic establishment is the exact quality that the all important ‘swing’ voters (who gravitate toward perceived outsiders) will like the most about Tulsi Gabbard’s: her courageous independence.â€]
Who knows whether her campaign will survive the negative media onslaught? As one writer noted, “The more we lift her up, the harder the propaganda machine will have to work to push her back down.â€
We’ll close with this recent Tulsi quote which reflects the influence of Hawaiian culture – “Aloha means having deep, heartfelt respect and love for each other and our country. When we love, we care, when we care, we take action. Living aloha means putting service before self.â€
Leia wrote: Getting to the topic of Kasich. Glad to see him standing up against the Orange Monster.
———————————-
The other chickens— Republicans need to do the same thing. Trump is ruining our democracy.
Responding to Rustbelt Democrat’s link to “The Daily Beastâ€:
“The Daily Beast is owned by IAC, and Chelsea Clinton sits on their board of directors.†—Joshua Duane Bell (02.21.2016, Medium.com)
https://medium.com/@jashobell/the-daily-beast-is-owned-by-iac-and-chelsea-clinton-sits-on-their-board-of-directors-d6978d1e9ee5
From the website: “IAC’s family of websites is one of the largest in the world, comprised of more than 150 brands and products.â€
Leadership: https://www.iac.com/about/leadership/board-directors/chelsea-clinton
Ronald writes, “To gain 20 or more Republicans to convict Trump still seems like a long shot, but Kasich, one of the few reputable Republicans, hopefully will assist in convincing a ‘Profile in Courage’ by Senators putting the nation ahead of their own personal ambitions and agenda.â€
John Kasich does not matter.
As for the other Republican U.S. senators: If they’re not buying what the Democrats are trying to sell, they would not (as noted by Ronald, “seems a long shotâ€) join the Democrats. They have Election 2020 to deal with. And if the impeachment does not work for the Democrats, the Republicans—as would Donald Trump—can run on the issue.
D wrote: As for the other Republican U.S. senators: If they’re not buying what the Democrats are trying to sell, they would not (as noted by Ronald, “seems a long shotâ€) join the Democrats. They have Election 2020 to deal with.
—————————-
We’re going to ensure that any ReThuglican who does not stand up against the Orange Monster is defeated.
We don’t read right-wing blogs such as Drudge or Breitbart or listen to Fux News because a) those sources lie and b) those sources are against progressive values.
All sources we read and listen to confronts bigots, such as Trump.
Princess Leia writes, “We’re going to ensure that any ReThuglican who does not stand up against the Orange Monster is defeated.â€
You can’t.
D wrote: Princess Leia writes, “We’re going to ensure that any ReThuglican who does not stand up against the Orange Monster is defeated.â€
You can’t.
—————
Yes we can. By voting.
Exactly, Leia. It is imperative that our side works to ensure that our side has record turnout.
Princess Leia,
“By voting†does not mean every person thinks alike let alone votes alike.
Self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats, in presidential election polls, typically comprise approximately 70 to 72 percent. Obviously, neither major political party wins all races.
You cannot “ensure†defeating or unseating all Republicans who support and/or do not oppose President Trump.
The Professor doesn’t like Tulsi either, for the very same reasons that other progressive sites are saying.
Pragmatic wrote: Exactly, Leia. It is imperative that our side works to ensure that our side has record turnout.
—————————–
Precisely!
Women and people of color are the ones most against Trump. If they turn our in record numbers, he’s doomed.
Pragmatic Progressive writes, “It is imperative that our side works to ensure that our side has record turnout.â€
Princess Leia writes, “Women and people of color are the ones most against Trump.â€
Your side—the neoliberal Democratic Party Establishment—are smearing a woman and person of color, Tulsi Gabbard, saying she is a “Russian asset†along with other sick lies. Do you think this is going to move people who are women and persons of color—and they all do not all self-identify as Democrats—will turn out in greater numbers for another pro-war, pro-Wall Street, 2020 Democratic Party Establishment general-election nominee?
Women and people of color will turn out for Bernie or Elizabeth or Joe or whoever the nominee is because they don’t want four more years of the bigoted, wannabe dictator.
In the wake of Russian manipulation of the 2016 elections, some of us Democrats are wary of Gabbard’s surprising popularity in right-wing circles, concerned about her frequent mentions in Russian news media, and suspicious that Russian bots may have promoted Twitter hashtags supporting her.
There are pieces up on right-wing sites – Fux News, the Washington Examiner, and the National Review – all defending Tulsi.
Tulsi’s debate comments re Trump’s pullout of troops in Syria were ridiculously lame. She must have repeated her “regime change wars†statement at least 4 times, showing a total lack of understanding of foreign policy (disclosure: the “regime change wars†description has been accurate many times in U.S. history, but does not describe the situation in Syria). Thankfully, Buttigieg let her have it on that one.
The very fact that Tulsi frequently goes on Fox and sides with them makes me wary of her.
I will vote for any of Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Booker, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Buttigieg, or Castro if he/she is the nominee.
Pragmatic said: I will vote for any of Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Booker, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Buttigieg, or Castro if he/she is the nominee.
———————–
I’m rooting for any of them as well. All of them are 1000 times better than Trump.
I hear Michael Moore is endorsing Bernie.
Bernie had a comeback rally today. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-comeback-rally-queens-queensbridge-houses-2020-democratic-presidential-primary_n_5daa140ae4b0f34e3a75619b
Southern Liberal writes, “Tulsi’s debate comments re Trump’s pullout of troops in Syria were ridiculously lame. She must have repeated her “regime change wars†statement at least 4 times, showing a total lack of understanding of foreign policy (disclosure: the “regime change wars†description has been accurate many times in U.S. history, but does not describe the situation in Syria). Thankfully, Buttigieg let her have it on that one.â€
I doesn’t sound like Pete Buttigieg out-debated Tulsi Gabbard. It sounds like Buttigieg let his intentions be known.
https://youtu.be/Ids-gLVou1w
Trump will do something to get the headlines back on him and this whole brouhaha between Hillary and Tulsi will be water under the bridge next week.
D – Stop falsely claiming that everyone who disagrees with you or your candidate of choice has motives.
D – Accept the fact that lots of people don’t trust Tulsi.
Princess Leia writes, “The very fact that Tulsi frequently goes on Fox and sides with them makes me wary of her.â€
Did you not see the following interview on MSNBC?
https://youtu.be/yqvJU9iZiAI
Agreed, Leia. And D also needs to get used to the fact that people who don’t trust her have valid reasons for doing so.
Pragmatic Progressive writes, “ D also needs to get used to the fact that people who don’t trust her have valid reasons for doing so.â€
Read my first comment.
The rest of us second that, Pragmatic.
Dumb Dumb Trump has backed away from using his roach motel for the G7.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/19/politics/trump-property-no-longer-considered-for-g7-summit/index.html
Some women’s summit is featuring Trump’s child-cager, Kirstjen Nielsen.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/10/19/1893604/-Filmmaker-Hampton-and-Clinton-back-out-of-women-s-summit-that-includes-child-caging-Kirstjen-Nielsen
Petition to drop Nielsen from that event.
https://act.credoaction.com/sign/no-nielsen-fortune-magazine/?sp_ref=517024624.4.200459.t.641654.2&referring_akid=34461.11279705.McW0Y-&source=tw_sp
This shows how most people of color feel about Trump. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/10/20/1893043/-Trump-s-spews-are-hazardous-to-my-health
British Trump got another setback in Brexit. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boris-johnson-brexit-delay_n_5dab1722e4b0422422c58c97