Send Us Hatemail ! mailbag@conservativecave.com
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Leftist voices have already weighed in on Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Joe Biden when she dropped out of the presidential race and they are far from happy with her. The reactions range from disgust to sadness and even to being resigned to Trump's ultimate victory in November. In fact, it is even starting to sound as if some among the left will be SUPPORTING Trump in the election since their other options have been closed off.
I never understood leftists hating on Tulsi Gabbard. All that hatred towards her is from the left.
It really started when Hillary called her a Russian asset, but also goes back to when Tulsi called out the DNC for cheating Bernie in 2016.
Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard is the new progressive darling. She’s young. She surfs. She’s a “rising star” in the Democratic Party, we’re told repeatedly. She might even win the presidency in 2020.Much of Gabbard’s elevated stature is due to her endorsement of Bernie Sanders at the end of February 2016, a seemingly principled, politically risky stand that led her to resign as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).But that wasn’t all. Before stepping down, Gabbard earned the ire of Democratic insiders when she called for more than the paltry six debates the party had scheduled under Hillary Clinton ally Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. She continued to needle the establishment on the eve of Clinton’s nomination, and offered a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement of the Democratic standard-bearer in the general election (“Given the remaining choices, like Bernie Sanders, I will be casting my vote for Hillary Clinton,” she said in August). At the Democratic National Convention, she was reportedly swamped with attention from other state delegates. “They like Tulsi because she stood up to the Democratic Party establishment,” said one.
Much of the praise Gabbard receives is for her anti-interventionism. During her 2012 House campaign, she ran ads complaining about “endless war.” She has called for pulling out of Afghanistan, the longest war in US history, suggesting that the government invest the money instead into “rebuilding our own nation through long-term infrastructure projects.” She’s opposed US intervention in Syria since 2013, air strikes in Iraq, and arms sales to Saudi Arabia. She backed Sanders in the Democratic primary because of Clinton’s record of supporting “interventionist regime change wars.”All of this has created the impression that Gabbard, unlike much of the Democratic Party, is antiwar.She’s not.Gabbard’s objections to US wars spring not from a concern for those parts of the world the US military bombs and invades, but exclusively from a concern about the Americans who fight them. As she told Truthout in 2012, her own military service in Iraq and Kuwait “changed my life completely” and revealed the “tremendous cost of war,” recounting the daily casualties and injuries to US troop she saw when she was deployed in a medical unit.Gabbard is also a pretty reliably progressive voice in the House on a host of domestic issues. As far back as 2012, she was calling for restoring Glass-Steagall. She opposed any cuts to Medicare or Social Security under the Obama-backed Simpson-Bowles proposal. She believes Obamacare didn’t go far enough and supports universal health care. She’s against nuclear energy, pushed to curb the NSA’s bulk collection of data, and personally protested the Dakota Access Pipeline.Yet the starry-eyed anointment of Gabbard has obscured the more unsavory aspects of her politics — so unsavory, in fact, that White House adviser Steve Bannon has reportedly spoken well of her. From her vigorous opposition to the Iran nuclear deal to her obsession with “radical Islam” to her love for the far-right Indian leader Narendra Modi, Gabbard is far from the progressive hero many assume her to be.
hich brings us to Gabbard’s other major red flag. Given her support for drones and special ops strikes, it’s not surprising to find that Gabbard never mentions US foreign policy as a catalyst for anti-American sentiment in regions like the Middle East, despite copious evidence to the contrary.So what is the cause of terrorism, according to Gabbard? Islam, of course.Before she became a progressive darling for endorsing Sanders, Gabbard became a conservative darling for relentlessly hawking the idea — later popularized by Trump — that Obama’s foreign policy was failing because he refused to use the term “Islamic extremism,” or some variation of it.From 2014 onward, Gabbard appeared regularly on Fox News to lambast the Obama administration for avoiding the phrase. In one interview, she told the host that “the vast majority of terrorist attacks conducted around the world for over the last decade have been conducted by groups who are fueled by this radical Islamic ideology,” a statement that may be technically true due to the violence and instability plaguing Middle Eastern countries, but is wildly misleading considering that non-Muslims make up the vast, vast majority of terrorist perpetrators in both Europe and the United States.In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in January 2015, Gabbard complained on Fox News that by “not using this term ‘Islamic extremism’ and clearly identifying our enemies,” the administration couldn’t “come up with a very effective strategy to defeat that enemy.” She told Neil Cavuto that “this isn’t about one specific group,” but about “this radical Islamic ideology that is fueling this,” and that it needed to be defeated “militarily and ideologically.” She characterized Obama’s refusal to “recognize” the enemy as “mind-boggling” and “troubling.”
