Tulsi gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard is looking pretty good right now. I mean, even better than usual. The veteran and Hawaii congresswoman has stood out from the crowded Democratic field with her peacenik foreign policy-focused campaign. And now President Trump, with his impulsive killing of Qasem Soleimani, has become the Big Bad Hawk Gabbard has described him as all along. When she entered the race in February of last year, Gabbard pledged to strike out against the military-industrial complex: 'We must stand up.

The most meme-friendly and amusing explanation for Kamala Harris’s demise is that she was splattered by Tulsi Gabbard over the summer and never recovered. There’s some truth to that: Kamala had never been challenged on her record in a high-pressure national setting before, and the moment someone finally turned up the heat, she crumbled. The New York Timesarticle last week presaging the end of her campaign noted that donors were so flustered by her performance that they demanded she ‘strike back at Ms Gabbard more aggressively’, which was a tad ironic given on that same night Kamala had infamously declared herself a ‘top-tier candidate’ who need not trouble herself with the insignificant pesterings of a minor contender like Tulsi.

MSNBC dropped all pretenses of neutrality at last week’s debate, not that its pretenses were ever remotely credible to begin with. Most of the time they’d at least attempt to play it straight, however perfunctorily. Of course, no one should have been under the illusion that running a debate well was within the repertoire of Rachel Maddow — one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists — whose very presence as lead moderator undermined the legitimacy of the entire affair from the outset. Even with the albatross of Maddow, though, it is conceivable that they could have striven for something resembling an impartial approach. Not surprisingly, that all went out the window when one particular candidate was targeted for open contempt.

Fear not everyone — there are only seven Democratic debates left this cycle. As if the prospect of a fifth in six months wasn't exhausting enough, the Atlanta bonanza kicked off after 11 hours of impeachment hearings. No wonder the spin room was more muted than usual. Host Rachel Maddow opened proceedings with an impeachment question, making the huge assumption that most viewers had watched them (they hadn't). Of the senators running, only Bernie Sanders didn't take the bait. 'We should not be consumed by Donald Trump', he said, 'we can deal with Trump's corruption, but we also have to stand up for the working families of this country.' Much of the night appeared like business as usual.

Andrew Yang claimed to be surprised that the media dubbed Tulsi Gabbard the first Asian American to run for the Democratic nomination. Of course Gabbard snagged this prize of the higher tokenism, first claimed by Patsy Mink in 1972. Yang may be doing better in the single-figure freakshow of the nomination race, but Gabbard looks better when encasing her policies in a tight wetsuit or engaging in Lycra-clad iron-pumping. https://twitter.com/tulsigabbard/status/1173605168841203712?lang=en This is not all the Gabbard candidacy has set a-pumping. No Democrat so quickens the blood of the red-meat, male-voice choir of Buchananites and Bannonites.

It was never especially plausible that Tulsi Gabbard would follow through on her threat to boycott last night’s presidential debate. Too much campaign energy and resources have flowed into ensuring that she secured a spot on the corporate TV stage, which is a sordid but unavoidable aspect of the modern primary process. But in her first comments, she spelled out the reasons why such a boycott would in theory have been absolutely warranted. The two media co-sponsors, CNN and the New York Times, had just spent the past several days attacking her with a level of brazenness that was shocking even to those well-accustomed to the regularity with which she is smeared by journalistic antagonists.

Conservative sadbois like two things: hot moms and Middle Eastern despots. Enter Tulsi Gabbard, the comely representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district. The single lock of gray hair tucked behind her ear and her array of red pants-suits give her an almost Palinesque allure. Her secret friendship with Bashar al-Assad and visceral hatred for the House of Saud brings us all back to our political puberty: hiding copies of The American Conservative under our beds, taking them out only when our parents weren’t home and fantasizing madly about the end of American Empire. Knowing only that, we can hardly blame an aging fogey who finds himself crushing on Rep. Gabbard.

To the extent Joe Biden is capable of actually formulating coherent sentences – a questionable proposition – he delivered an attack last night that Bernie Sanders has never really been forced to contend with during either of his presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton was not in a position in 2016 where she had to aggressively attack Bernie. Had she been, she would have almost certainly brought up the fact that he is a self-described 'socialist'. Of course, that’s common knowledge by now. But it's a salient point for Bernie's rivals to press him on, especially considering the overriding concern for Democratic voters at present is 'electability'.

MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted in July what, at surface level, seems an obvious point: 'If I were the DNC, I would be spending a lot of money learning basically everything I could about 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016.' Considering how much Hayes and others on the mainstream left have invested into debunking the current administration, there’s no surprise that, when the rubber meets the road, the Democrats let their collective hatred of Trump cloud their political judgement. Look no further than their treatment of Tulsi Gabbard.

Tulsi Gabbard is arguably the most interesting woman in American politics today. A combat veteran from the Iraq war, the Hawaii Democrat’s beliefs were forged not only in the desert wastelands of Iraq but also by the wastefulness of America’s permanent bipartisan fusion party. Having served in the US Army National Guard in a medical unit during the darkest days of pre-surge Iraq, Gabbard was forced to question all of her pre-war assumptions. From that point, she entered politics and quickly rose to prominence as one of the few voices of restraint and reason among Democrats now infected by the warmongering ruling class. Since then, the four-term congresswoman has been lampooned by the leaders of her own party for her troubles.

Sen. Kamala Harris has been positioning herself as a supporter of sex worker rights lately. But listen closely when she talks about the issue and a different story emerges. It's a disconnect that highlights Harris's larger pattern of obscuring her positions, plans, and past. Twice when asked outright about the decriminalization of prostitution — first by Terrell J. Starr of The Root and then during a televised CNN townhall — Harris has answered in a way that's been characterized as supportive. But both times she has described her preferred system as one in which ‘johns’ would still be arrested. That is not decriminalization. Decriminalizing prostitution means neither paying for nor selling sex is illegal so long as it takes place between consenting adults.

It’s no great mystery why Tulsi Gabbard chose to focus her ire on Kamala Harris last night in Detroit. For months, Harris has gotten away with empty identity-related sloganeering and shallow performative stunts, like the one she pulled on Joe Biden in the previous round of debates – which of course was received rapturously by much of the media, leading to bogus claims of a Harris 'surge.' Meanwhile, left unexamined was the phony central conceit of Harris’s campaign: that she is a ‘progressive prosecutor’ and therefore supremely well-qualified to make the case against Trump. This mantra has long been ripe for a proper dissection, given its utter ridiculousness.

Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic congresswoman of Hawaii and lefty presidential candidate, appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday. 'Here’s the bottom line: it’s really about the unchecked power these big tech monopolies have over our public discourse,' she said. 'We’re talking about Google, Facebook, Twitter, these are big tech monopolies that have this unchecked power.' With that, Gabbard, a pro-choice, slightly Hindu, fiercely anti-war Democrat earned yet more credibility among Fox News viewers. For the left and right, increasingly, Big Tech is the bête noir.  Sneering centrists might put Gabbard’s appeal on the Right down to a very simple fact: she’s a looker. That’s not lost on anyone.

Now that former Pennsylvania congressman Joe Sestak has entered the race, there are now 24 Democratic candidates for the presidency (excluding Mike Gravel, who’s not running to win). That’s right – one candidate for every can of beer in a case. Or every hour in a day. Or both. Mercifully, all 24 won’t be onstage for the party’s first official debates, but there are nevertheless so many contenders who met the criteria for participation that the event has been split up into two nights.The prospect of a two-dozen-candidate field in a primary for an election which ultimately won’t be decided for over a year would make anyone want to grab the nearest adult beverage. So we created a drinking game for you.

Abortion promises to be a major talking point in 2020. While President Trump has pointedly condemned legislation allowing late-term abortion, his Democratic opponents refuse to name any limits on abortion, except to say 'it’s a decision the woman makes.' They also happen to have a monetary relationship with the nation’s largest abortion provider. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), 12 Democrats looking to secure the nomination in 2020 have received a combined $191,300 since 1990 from Planned Parenthood while serving as federal candidates. Here’s the breakdown of funding given by Planned Parenthood to Democrats eyeing 2020, listed by candidate and year: Sen.

The media verdict is clear: the Democrats abhor President Trump’s foreign policy, and the Democrats aren’t really going to talk about it. ‘Democrats want to challenge Trump’s foreign policy in 2020. They’re still working out how,’ reports Vox. ‘Democrats are playing down foreign policy. It’s shrewd — and it may be a mistake,’ opines the Washington Post. ‘Why Aren’t Democratic Presidential Candidates Criticizing Trump’s Foreign Policy?’ wonders Reason magazine. And on it goes. Behind the scenes, however, it’s a frenzy, with the hiring of foreign policy advisers way up. For the Democrats, 2016 was a two-horse race, with a heavy front-runner in the familiar form of Hillary Clinton.

Here is the tragedy of the Democratic party in 2019: its partisans are left to hope that personal hatred of Donald Trump will do for them in 2020 what the Iraq War and the Great Recession did in 2006 and 2008. The first time Nancy Pelosi became speaker of House of Representatives, her party was the party of second thoughts about Iraq. The fact that Democrats won control of the Senate with the 2006 election was even more clearly tied to that misbegotten war: the victory of James Webb over George Allen gave Democrats their 51st seat. Webb was a former Republican – a Reagan cabinet official – who switched parties and challenged Allen out of disgust with the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy.