The reasons given for hating and sabotaging Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign—notably in a combined ActBlue/DailyKos fund-raising appeal designed to remove Tulsi from Congress—strike me as profoundly bogus. Her measured, slow, thoughtful explanations of exactly what’s gone very wrong with US foreign policy are a direct threat to the Kissinger-Clinton tradition of imperial hegemony, centered on reducing third world counties to powerless desperation, while turning a blind eye to deteriorating conditions for most of the “99%” at home. Trump won over a critical mass (enough to win the electoral college if not the popular vote) by promising (or rather, pretending to promise) to change this approach to foreign policy; he obviously hasn’t done so. Tulsi’s foreign policy analysis is arguably more cogent, more in-depth, than that of Bernie Sanders and others on the leftish side of the Democratic race.
After writing the above, I came across this recent video by chance.
It describes the situation more succinctly and eloquently than I can. Watch the whole of it before you make up your mind. As in a good courtroom closing argument to a skeptical jury, the logic builds up over time until — in my humble opinion — it’s irrefutable. I am not familiar with the speaker.
Similar shenanigans designed to discredit and ostracize Bernie Sanders (and anyone who supported Sanders) backfired very badly in 2016. That same tone-deaf pseudo-strategy is likely fail even more dramatically in 2020. The centrists pretended to attack Sanders from the left. They pretended he was allied with right-wing anti-immigrant militia gangs. They implied he was making up, or wildly exaggerating, his involvement in civil rights struggles in the 1960s. They were determined to break his momentum by any means, fair or foul. This time, it’s a more of a pre-emptive strike, starting earlier and hitting harder—to eliminate the one candidate who’s the most serious threat to the stale, discredited centrist agenda of neoliberal economics and endless warfare draining the life out of one impoverished country after another.
Some further background on the smear campaign, included its tainted sources:
and finally, here’s a sensible and informative interview with Tulsi Gabbard from a little while ago, that gives a pretty good idea of who she is and how she thinks…
Joe Rogan is someone I’m not familiar with, except just now glancing at his wikipedia bio—if you want, you can fill up the comments with “gotcha” complaints about the interviewer’s political preferences. Go ahead. His questions and other contributions seem reasonable enough to me. I chose this video just because it’s the longest and most informative interview I can find, in which Tulsi is given time to explain her various positions in a relaxed, thorough, and nuanced way. Unless you’re happy to just jump up and down, squeaking and growling, in the orchestrated groupthink hate-fest against Tulsi, I urge you to listen to this interview to learn more about who you’re being urged to hate.
I’m convinced that the centrist neolib Dems would rather keep Trump in the White House than risk letting the American public hear a well-constructed, well-informed level-headed message that seriously exposes and challenges their own fundamental assumptions.
——— [Updated, a few hours after posting] ———
Finally, here’s an article from Maui (an island that’s in her Congressional district if I’m not mistaken), taken from a link in soulflower’s comment below…
The Ramped Up Smear Campaign Against Hawai’i’s Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard — Is There a Coordinated, Orchestrated Campaign to Derail Gabbard?