Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

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Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Sounder » Sat Apr 06, 2019 8:33 am

Cynthia McKinney touches on many issues in this interview. The audience seems to be largely conservative and they positively love Cynthia and what she has to say. Is the 'left' seriously intent on beating Trump? Not if, in reality they belong to the same war party that Trump affiliates with. I can certainly see why AD would call Cynthia a 'crypto-fascist', I mean I see why AD would call Cynthia a crypto-fascist because anybody that has the interests of their constituents at heart is a populist and therefor a budding fascist. This of course, to anyone with a brain and critical reasoning skills, is a narrative with an agenda that seeks to devalue input from outsiders, or really regular authentic human beings in favor of machine politicians.

This American model oozes in-authenticity. Imagine the wellsprings of desire for authenticity among all people. One might even trust that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and all this overdosing on in-authenticity will come to be seen as tiresome, embarrassing and requiring all to much energy in order to maintain our pile of lies.



All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby elfismiles » Sat Apr 06, 2019 9:51 am

Thanks for this - will give it a listen. I voted for Cynthia for president years ago...
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby thrulookingglass » Sat Apr 06, 2019 2:34 pm

There does seem to be some surge, life in the true "leftist" agenda types that even the corporate media cannot avoid at this time. I absolutely love AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar as they operate. Its sad to see the two of them receive so much scrutiny and others so little. They are still a thousand times to the right of my values though. I want an immediate end of war, work our way out of using money to purchase anything ever again, healthcare for all who live, the right to a home, mass public transit, nutritional needs met for all, end to class ism and racism, homosexual rights, end of prisons, use of torture and the death penalty to cease, etc.! The stuff an intelligent world might provide. Good to see, but its pretty far from a blue high tide.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Grizzly » Sun Apr 07, 2019 1:47 am

^^^Fucked up thing is, we could have all that and more if. ...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Grizzly » Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:03 pm

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Elvis » Sat Apr 13, 2019 9:49 pm

Gabbard is no Cynthia McKinney...and the more I hear the less I like.

Tulsi Gabbard "Not Interested" in a Federal Job Guarantee? Here is why she is wrong.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bctMPLHPEHU
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Sounder » Fri May 17, 2019 6:03 am

I want to see politicians that are 'off the reservation'. Note the surge of the Brexit Party in Britain. The core issue is; Do we serve the govt. or does the govt. serve us. Cynthia McKinney comes across as one who wishes to serve her constituents, as does Tulsi Gabbard. Both have appeal that transcends the more typical posturing and virtue signaling of the rest of the Democratic 'field'. How well does that virtue signaling work anyway, if on the other hand war, intrigue and killing are still explicitly and implicitly supported?

Farage pulls support from both the left and the right because in general Britons do not want to go in the direction that the EU is choosing to go.

Here also in America, the average person is feeling quite weighted down by considerations of what our 'social betters' seem to have as management plans going forward.

If the incipient desires and ideas of the masses were given voice and thereby focus, the structures that support society might actually do that in a broad manner, rather than the current habit of forcing 'subjects' to conform to the structure.

No money for ad people that do work for insurgent candidates. So typically lame.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Elvis » Sat May 18, 2019 9:37 am

Gabbard sounds really good on some important issues, and it's encouraging that she takes the biggest media hit for "meeting with Assad." But I'm not fully convinced; is she really "progressive"? I'm still unclear on why Bannon would like her. Links & more pics at original.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... nnon-right

Who is Tulsi Gabbard? The progressive 2020 hopeful praised by Bannon and the right

Image

Gabbard’s unorthodox positions and conflicts with fellow Democrats could emerge as stumbling blocks in her campaign

Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy in New York
Tue 19 Mar 2019 01.00 EDT
Last modified on Mon 13 May 2019 07.54 EDT


Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is not afraid to take a stand.

For a promising young Democrat in 2015, one of the seemingly worst places to be was on the wrong side of Hillary Clinton, who – barring some bizarre twist – was on her way to becoming America’s next president.

Yet Gabbard, then a 34-year-old second-term congresswoman from Hawaii with both combat experience and a radiant smile, had the temerity to cross Clinton by calling for additional debates between Clinton and her opponent in the Democratic primary race, Bernie Sanders.

Soon after, Gabbard resigned from the Democratic National Committee leadership and was disinvited from the party’s first presidential debate. “It’s very dangerous when we have people in positions of leadership who use their power to try to quiet those who disagree with them,” she said at the time.

In retrospect, the clash clearly looks bad for the Democratic party, whose rush to nominate Clinton did not work out. But the conflict also scans as a red flag for Gabbard, whose defections would later multiply, establishing her independence but scrambling her political identity and fueling questions about her conservative past.

A 2020 candidate with some unusual stances

Gabbard’s ascent in national politics to that point had been seemingly frictionless. As an Iraq war veteran with progressive views on the economy and the environment, and more than a hint of glamour, Gabbard was seen by TV host Rachel Maddow as “on the fast track to being very famous” upon her election to Congress in 2012. A Vogue magazine profile the following year, titled “Making a Splash: Is Tulsi Gabbard the next Democratic party star?” hailed her as “an embodiment of the Obama era”.

But lurking ahead for Gabbard were moments when her political instincts were tested and her judgment called into doubt. For all her talk of “spreading the aloha spirit” her career has been defined, in Washington and Hawaii, by a series of unexpected and difficult-to-explain conflicts with her supposed ideological allies. To her fellow Democrats, she has seemed both to pick the wrong fights (Clinton, Barack Obama, Democratic senators) and attract the wrong fans, from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to the former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon.

“He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her,” the Hill newspaper quoted a Bannon associate as saying after Bannon arranged for Gabbard to meet Trump following the November 2016 election, a meeting that Gabbard later denied was a job interview. “Wants to work with her on everything.”

Fast-forward three years, and now Gabbard herself is running for president, on a platform that appears at a glance to match that of any other Democrat circa 2020: universal healthcare, a call to action on climate change, education reform, spending on infrastructure and jobs, and the decriminalization of marijuana.

But Gabbard’s other stances set her apart. She opposes military interventions abroad with a rare credibility of intent, even going so far, in arguing against foreign interventions, as to repeatedly cast doubt on the wealth of evidence that the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons on his own people.

She has staked out a split identity as both a foreign policy hawk (on “Islamic extremism”) and a dove (on “regime-change” wars). She has defended multiple Trump judicial nominees against questions by her fellow Democrats about their social views. She also has shown what some colleagues see as a Trump-like comfort with foreign dictators, including Assad, whom she met on a trip to Syria in 2017.

And she has strived to distance herself from a not-so-distant past as one of Hawaii’s most stringent anti-LGBT voices. She has been publicly disavowing that past since 2012, telling voters that she was raised in a “very socially conservative home”. It is an effort that some local activists today say falls short.

“I was raised to believe that if you’ve done harm to somebody – and as much harm as she and her family have done – she has to take ownership of that, because she rose to power on that last name as well,” said Michael Golojuch Jr, a Honolulu-based activist and longtime critic of Gabbard.

“That name became a household name because of their hatred toward the LGBTQIA community. You have to do something to make up for the bad you’ve done. And all she’s done is say: ‘Oh, I’ve changed!’”

Neither Gabbard’s 2020 campaign nor her congressional office responded to requests for comment for this article, including detailed questions about her record on LGBT issues.

Gabbard has taken many stands in the past. As she sets her sights on the White House, it’s an open question whether some of those stands might now emerge as stumbling blocks.

‘She’s a very charismatic politician’

Among presidential candidates, Gabbard is a pioneer with a unique life story – as much as Barack Obama was when he first emerged on the national scene.

Both Obama and Gabbard grew up in Hawaii. Both had mothers from the midwest – Obama’s from Kansas, Gabbard’s from Michigan. But while Obama’s father was African, Gabbard’s father, a polarizing local Hawaiian politician named Mike Gabbard, grew up in American Samoa, the tiny US territory in the South Pacific Ocean, where Tulsi Gabbard and her four siblings were born. She is the first American Samoan and the first Hindu member of the US Congress, and she was the first representative to be sworn in on the Bhagavad Gita.

As a child, Gabbard, who turns 38 next month, was part of a religious community centered around the teachings of the spiritual leader Chris Butler, a Hindu philosopher with links to the Hare Krishna movement who as early as 1970 was treated in the local Hawaiian press as a hippie guru and whose Science of Identity Foundation remains active worldwide.

Gabbard has downplayed the association, telling the New Yorker magazine in 2017 that “I’ve had many different spiritual teachers, and continue to.” But her ties to the Butler community, from her family to her donor network, run deep, and since her election to Congress she has referred to Butler has her “guru dev”, or spiritual guide.

Gabbard’s father, who identifies as Catholic, and mother, a Hindu convert from Methodist Christianity, home-schooled their children. “They gave all their children staunchly Hindu names,” Gabbard told the Indo American News before her first run for Congress, “and raised us as Hindus and vegetarians”. She describes being shy as a child, studying martial arts and learning to surf.

Gabbard’s political career sprouted unusually early. At 21, she became the youngest-ever member of the Hawaiian state legislature, foreshadowing victories in a 10-person primary field for the Honolulu city council and, later, over a popular former Honolulu mayor in her first congressional race.

“She’s a very charismatic politician, and that’s always been a big advantage for her, and has allowed her to win victories in Hawaii,” said Colin Moore, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii. Moore said Gabbard remained popular locally, “particularly on the neighbor islands [outside Oahu], I think in part because of her iconoclastic views on a lot of things, and because I think people feel like she stands up to the power structure in Washington and to some extent the Democratic machine here in Hawaii.”

Her political rise was interrupted in 2003, after the US-led invasion of Iraq, when she joined the Hawaii army national guard.

Gabbard volunteered for a 12-month deployment to Iraq, where she served in a combat zone as a medical operations specialist and a military police officer. After graduating with distinction from the Alabama military academyʼs officer candidate school, she signed up for a second deployment, to Kuwait.

Gabbard describes her military service as a life-changing moment. There were personal consequences, including the dissolution of her first marriage, which she has attributed to the duress of overseas deployment. She credits her deployment with shaping her foreign policy views. It also, she says, changed her mind about other things.

‘I can’t marry my dog!’

“My first encounter with Tulsi was on those TV commercials,” said Michael Carver, a Hawaiian Aids activist and HIV survivor. He is referring to a campaign against same-sex marriage starring Mike Gabbard, Tulsi’s father, in 1998, when Gabbard was 17 and the state was weighing a constitutional amendment upholding a same-sex marriage ban.

The TV ads were part of a larger public relations campaign “criticizing and degrading homosexuals and how awful they were, what disgusting perverts they were”, said Carver.

In one TV ad that Tulsi Gabbard appeared in, her father, arguing against same-sex marriage, says, “For example, I’m not allowed to marry my daughter, or my son.” Then a surfer runs by and says, “And I can’t marry my dog!”

“Don’t open the door to weird marriages,” Mike Gabbard concludes.

Tulsi Gabbard has repeatedly apologized for her past attacks on the LGBT community, in personal videos and, most recently, on national TV.

“I was raised in a very socially conservative home,” Gabbard said recently on CNN. “My father is Catholic, he was a leading voice against gay marriage in Hawaii during that time. Again I was very young, but these were the values and beliefs that I grew up around.”

Gabbard’s attacks on the LGBT community lasted at least until 2004, when, as a 23-year-old state legislator, she led, with speeches and demonstrations, a successful fight against a bill that would have created civil unions in Hawaii for same-sex couples and a separate fight against anti-bullying legislation.

“To try to act as if there is a difference between ‘civil unions’ and same-sex marriage is dishonest, cowardly and extremely disrespectful to the people of Hawaii,” Gabbard told the committee introducing the civil unions bill. “As Democrats we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”

Golojuch said he was stunned at the time by Gabbard’s vehemence.

“She got up there and she torched [committee chair Eric] Hamakawa and the entire committee for even hearing the bill, called them disgraceful,” said Golojuch. “And it wasn’t the actions of somebody who was doing these because they were forced to.

“She got glee out of it. There was a rancor and a glee in her voice.”

But Gabbard has repeatedly described an “evolution” on same-sex marriage akin to that undergone by Obama and Clinton. She attributes her evolution to her time in the Middle East, when she said she saw the “negative impact of a government trying to act as a moral arbiter for the people”.

“These experiences caused me to go through some soul-searching myself,” she said on CNN. “And so I ask you to look to my record in Congress now for over six years, where it is a reflection of what is in my heart, and it is a reflection of my commitment to fight for equality for all people.”

Gabbard has pointed out that she has earned a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign and that she was endorsed in 2012 by the Equality Hawaii Action Fund, which said, “We believe in Gabbard’s commitment to our community, and to helping heal and move our state forward on issues of marriage equality.” Earlier this month, Gabbard cosponsored legislation in Congress to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

But activists in Hawaii say she has not done enough to repair the harm she caused.

“She’s never had any contact with our community here, she’s never participated in any gay pride events or worked with LGBTQ youth to help affirm that they are an acceptable part of society,” said Carver. “She’s done nothing with the gay community. And I think if she was sincere in that apology, she would be reaching out to try and repair the damage that she did.”

‘Underestimated’

When Gabbard returned from Iraq, she picked up where she left off, winning difficult political races and surprising more experienced opponents. “Tulsi Gabbard throughout her career has often been underestimated,” said Moore.

Accordingly, when Gabbard blazed into Congress in early 2013, Washington sat up and took notice.

But at times, Gabbard has seemed more at home with Republicans than with her own party. Even before she baled on Clinton, Gabbard emerged as a hero on the right for going on Fox News, repeatedly, to boost the network’s line that Obama’s refusal to use the phrase “radical Islamic terror” amounted to a fatal failure of leadership. “In my opinion, it really is not recognizing that Islamic extremism is the enemy,” Gabbard said in one appearance. Delighted that an elected Democrat was willing to bash the president, the Fox host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly singled Gabbard out for praise.

By April 2015, the conservative National Review was all in, publishing a profile titled, “Meet the Beautiful, Tough Young Democrat Who’s Turning Heads by Challenging Obama’s Foreign Policy.” “I like her thinking a lot,” Arthur Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was quoted as saying. “She could be a very powerful new voice on the D side.”

The words are warmer than some of what Gabbard hears from her own party – and has for them. In January, Gabbard published an op-ed in the Hill newspaper attacking Democratic senators, including a colleague from the Hawaii delegation, Senator Mazie Hirono – although not by name – for using a confirmation hearing to question a Trump judicial appointee, Brian Buescher, about his anti-abortion views and his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization that has organized opposition to same-sex marriage. Gabbard’s op-ed accused the Democrats of “fomenting religious bigotry”.

In reply, a Hirono spokesman said: “It is unfortunate that Congresswoman Gabbard based her misguided opinion on the far-right wing manipulation of these straightforward questions.” Asked soon afterwards about Gabbard’s presidential bid, Hirono alluded to Gabbard’s past spotty record as a progressive and said, “I wish her well.”

Some read the Gabbard op-ed as a canny way for the candidate to pre-empt questions about her own religious background, and as a play for attention in a crowded Democratic field. But that’s not how Moore, the political science professor, read it.

“I think some people would say that a lot of what Tulsi Gabbard does is just pure political calculation,” Moore said. “But I wouldn’t agree with that. I think her positions on foreign policy really do come from her experience as a veteran.

“And I do think her experience of being part of a religious minority really does make her sensitive to any suggestion of using people’s spiritual and religious beliefs as a political weapon, as they have been against her on occasion. I think those come from a genuine place for her, and in some ways, as a result of that, she’s probably made some unforced errors.

“But I think that’s also something people respect about Tulsi Gabbard.”

• This article was corrected on 13 May 2019. Gabbard was not kicked off the DNC leadership, as stated in an earlier version, she resigned.


“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Sounder » Sat May 18, 2019 10:53 am

From the character assassination consortium, gutter division...
But Gabbard’s other stances set her apart. She opposes military interventions abroad with a rare credibility of intent, even going so far, in arguing against foreign interventions, as to repeatedly cast doubt on the wealth of evidence that the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons on his own people.



The nerve! Come on man, we have a R2P.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Harvey » Sat May 18, 2019 8:30 pm

Elvis » Sat May 18, 2019 2:37 pm wrote:Gabbard sounds really good on some important issues, and it's encouraging that she takes the biggest media hit for "meeting with Assad." But I'm not fully convinced; is she really "progressive"? I'm still unclear on why Bannon would like her. Links & more pics at original.


The answer to that is fairly simple. If the brand is toxic, such as Banon, an endorsement from him can damage an opponent far more effectively than anything else he can do directly, especially in combination with low level smear campaigns from the other direction via PR proxies, astroturfing and social media bots. Supporters on the far right, entrenched in reactionary identity politics are unlikely to follow any such endorsement, especially if you're working them at the other end. It's a relatively easy win.

By way of example, I realised what Murdoch was up to some years ago (having seen it all before in the UK where Murdoch built his first media empire*) when Fox began kite flying alternative positions as the toxicity of his brands spread beyond repair. Many reasons but here's a few, to potentially broaden the audience of course, but mainly to run interference among audiences unlikely ever to trust fox. They can still be heavily influenced. If Tucker Carlson says Syria was partly the result of western backed terrorists for example, and that those terrorists are carrying out false flag attacks, loyal Fox viewers won't necessarily follow him but a growing body of 'liberal' opinion will, and they'll encounter other political positions drawing them further to the right. More to the point, other liberal opinion entrenched in reactionary identity politics can be pushed away from positions they might naturally hold if they hear them coming from fox. For example, I saw a number of RI'ers over the last few years take positions against otherwise widely acknowledged information, because they said, they'd heard Fox pushing those same views. It can't work for long, but usually it works long enough to derail any system change possibility, or instal a deeply unpopular president...

*Where his basic approach evolved. Buy up exclusive rights to sporting events, popular music events, television shows, publishing events and also publishers. Fund the arts, support cultural venues and sell access fairly cheaply as a bundled loss leader to draw average punters deeper into the political output through repeated exposure, catering for a wide range of opinion at first then slowly drawing the audience into ever smaller political spaces. When opinion is too poisoned begin a slow swing back along the pendulum of political expression and appear to be changing position, then when enough are hooked, reel them in and head back in the other direction. He's been doing variations of this for five decades.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby RocketMan » Sun Jun 09, 2019 4:53 pm

I regret to report that McKinney seems to have made the full journey into fringe conspiratainment... \<]

I wonder if THIS Steele is some sort of intelligence asset that is still active. Weird that there's that other Steele, too...

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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Jun 09, 2019 5:58 pm

Met her yesterday! At her first rally in New York, which attracted about 400 supporters. Afterward, Elvis, you will be pleased to learn, I got to mumble to her incompetently for 20 seconds specifically about how she should reconsider the Jobs Guarantee, recognize that conversion comes only with disruption and that people should be protected, and see that it's not money that is real but labor and resources. I told her to check out Modern Monetary Theory. She was probably looking at me like I was a wacko. Definitely did not register, and my fault for that.

Among those with zero chance, I guess I like Mike Gravel! Among those with a greater than 1:1,000,000 chance, I do like her best. For the record, so does Jeff Wells. I can't believe the smear job that is done on her, and how effective it's been with leftists especially. I can think of several people who may not like anyone, who may hate the whole system, who mock the non-Bernie neoliberal pack and aren't too enamored of Bernie, but who have also been successfully prejudiced into harboring the most intense and personal hatred of Tulsi above all. It is incredibly inconsistent, insofar as nothing leveled at her (even if it were true), is worse than what is true of most of the rest.

Anyway, I prefer those with a greater 1:20 chance, so it's Sanders insofar as I have any endorsement.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Tue Jun 11, 2019 12:39 pm



Seeing the world through rose-colored latex.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby Elvis » Tue Jun 11, 2019 6:09 pm

JackRiddler wrote:Elvis, you will be pleased to learn, I got to mumble to her incompetently for 20 seconds specifically about how she should reconsider the Jobs Guarantee, recognize that conversion comes only with disruption and that people should be protected, and see that it's not money that is real but labor and resources. I told her to check out Modern Monetary Theory. She was probably looking at me like I was a wacko. Definitely did not register, and my fault for that.


Good try! I've been trying to work up some succint phrasing to get MMT across in a few words—for just such opportunities. I'd love to spend 20 minutes with her and other candidates (not to mention those already in office.

Perhaps if you sent her a note recalling the encounter and giving a short iteration of a link or two.

I have an old friend in Hawaii, diehard 'liberal' all his life, who's dead set against Gabbard, and I need to write him for details about why. She's flip-flopped on gay marriage, as I recall, but it's probably more than that.
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Re: Cynthia McKinney- Tulsi Gabbard, the Golden Ticket

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jun 11, 2019 9:22 pm

She didn't flip-flop on gay marriage, insofar as I believe it was a genuine transformation of the sort that can and does happen in youth.

She grew up with a Hare Krishna mother, choosing Hinduism as her religion, and a conservative Catholic father, himself a politician and talk-radio blowhard. At the age of 22, in 2004, having become the youngest person ever elected to the Hawaii assembly, she made speeches echoing his hate rhetoric about marriage equality and the "gay agenda," and even in support of conversion therapy. You'll remember in 2004 the GOP was getting anti-gay marriage resolutions on state ballots to boost turnout among their base, and it worked to their advantage. Most Democratic politicians were against gay marriage, like both Obama and Clinton, or avoiding the issue, but few talked the trash she was talking. Then she left office because she signed up to go to Iraq!

These are biographical items that would make me reject almost anyone, but I find her story of transformation believable and sincere. To me she talks with the presence and intellect of someone who can evolve and change her mind for the right reasons. She returned from deployment, soured on the wars, and came to renounce her family's intolerance. Supposedly her father has also come around on the issue. (The old man's might be more of a "flip-flop," not unlike those of nearly all politicians regarding gay marriage in recent years.) In her four terms in Congress since 2013 her voting record on LGBT and equality issues has been at 100%.

As the first Hindu elected to Congress, she became a celebrity in India. She has met and is accused of being friendly to Modi and BJP. I don't like that at all, but I also have yet to see anything on this matter that distinguishes her stance from the statements and actions of almost the entire political class regarding the Indian government. Harris, Booker, Biden have met and praised Modi without being called Hindu nationalists. One might think the difference with Gabbard is one of religious prejudice, since she is Hindu, but I suspect this also would not matter if she was not being smeared generally for having the most rigorous antiwar stance of the candidate crop. I shall confess I probably do not care enough about what American politicians think about India, because American politicians have relatively little impact on Indian politics. You can't blame American influence for the rise of Modi, like you can blame Americans for propping up Saudi Arabia and backing Israel to the hilt. What matters to me is how they stand on the ongoing wars, the proposed new interventions, arms sales and military aid in general, Latin America, and of course support for the two main attack dogs in the Middle East.

Is she antiwar enough? Some have also attacked her on this, but it's not credible unless they first acknowledge that no one else compares to her among the candidates. (Actually, Gravel does. So does Marianne Williamson. And this is probably the only place on the Internet I visit where I do not have to explain who they are.) Gabbard's the only one speaking clearly and unapologetically: hands off Iran, hands off Venezuela, no more "regime change wars," no more arms to Saudi or the jihadi arms bazaar, drop charges against Assange and Snowden, engage in diplomacy rather than covert operations. She said all of these things Saturday in New York. She does not, unlike almost everyone else claiming to be antiwar, qualify any the anti-intervention stance with the de rigeur condemnations of these terrible regimes. To avoid that is not an endorsement, but of course it's treated that way: she's accused of being pro-Assad, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian/Venezuelan, etc. etc. On the left, the smear is instead to call her Islamophobic.

.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Tue Jun 11, 2019 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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