Tulsi Gabbard leaves the Democrats.
Why now? Ukraine.
Tulsi Gabbard, formerly a congresswoman from Hawaii, has announced she’s leaving the Democratic Party. Gabbard sought that party’s nomination for president in 2020. (Four years earlier, she endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.)
There are good reasons why Gabbard would want to break free from the Democrats. As she said in her announcement, the party is controlled by the woke, “racializes every issue,” and attacks some of our basic rights.
But this has been the case for years. If these major flaws were Gabbard’s real concern, she would have left the party long ago. Instead, as noted, she sought to be its nominee for president less than three years ago.
What, then, really drove Gabbard out of the party? The answer seems clear from her statement, which leads off with this: “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers. . .”
Democratic wokeism, race mongering, and disregard for constitutional rights aren’t new. Joe Biden’s support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression is. It’s that support, I believe, that caused Gabbard to leave her party.
As further evidence, consider the fact that Gabbard did not say she’s joining the Republican Party. The Republicans are pretty solidly opposed to wokeism, racialization, and denials of religious and speech liberties. However, they mostly support helping Ukraine and, in the view of some who rage against a “warmongering elite,” are participants in the “cabal.”
Gabbard may join the Republicans at some point. However, she likely would have done so already, but for the fact that Ukraine and, more generally, U.S. military involvement in the world are her overriding issues.
So overriding, that she resorts to mindless name-calling and wild exaggeration. There’s plenty wrong with the Democratic Party, but it is not under the complete control of warmongers.
Biden is not a warmonger. He completed the pullout of Afghanistan, which Gabbard not only favored, but thanked him for effectuating.
In addition, Biden has steadfastly resisted calls to employ U.S. forces in Ukraine (in a war he tried to prevent). And although he has supplied Ukraine with military assistance to prevent it from being overrun, he has resisted calls to provide it with certain advanced weaponry because he hopes to contain the war and reach a negotiated settlement.
Barack Obama wasn’t a warmonger either. He wouldn’t even enforce his “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria. This delighted Gabbard, who at times, has been an apologist for Bashar al-Assad, the war criminal with whom she met in Syria.
I expect Gabbard will be celebrated by certain kinds of conservatives, now that she’s no longer a Democrat. For some of them, Gabbard’s aversion to any U.S. involvement in the war against Ukraine is a feature, not a bug. Other conservatives seem drawn to good-looking minority group members with celebrity or near-celebrity status who break to some extent with left-liberal orthodoxy.
This explains, in part, conservative fascination with Kanye West. It has been apparent for some time that this guy is a kook, and not a benign one. Yet, some conservatives embraced him anyway.
Ed Morrissey discusses this phenomenon, of which Herschel Walker is another example, here. Ed attributes it to a cultural inferiority complex on the right, and I think that’s part of it. The other part is opportunism — in West’s case, the quest for a shortcut to increasing support from blacks, hipsters, etc.
I don’t equate Gabbard with West or Walker. She’s sane, smart, and (as far as I know) personally above reproach. But except to those who share her extreme dovish, blame-America-first foreign policy views and believe our foreign policy is being driven by a cabal of warmongers, she’s not worthy of celebration.
She’s welcome to join the Republican Party, of course, but it’s fine with me if she doesn’t.
Gabbard is first and foremost a typical politician. The dem party has been far left for decades. She could never have been elected Hawaii's Senator as a republican. She couldn't go any further in the dem party, so she's striking out, looking for supporters. It seems obvious she's looking to get support from the Trump coalition. But she won't be successful as a republican or independent. The Trump coalition no longer believes in the republican establishment because they don't keep their promises or get results beneficial to America. They are neo-con war mongers. These endless wars only benefit the global plutocracy and the military/industrial complex. Wars make them fat and happy. They could care less about the countries they're destroying. Ukraine is just a massive money laundering scam. How much goes to the citizenry? Not much. The endless war advocates have left a trail of destruction for the last sixty years. They wasted American lives and tax payers treasure without ever intending to win. The innocent bystanders caught up in these foreign wars suffer the most. Just as the Southern invasion is destroying America the Muslim invasion is destroying Europe. That's all part of the globalists great reset.
Gabbard's description of the Democrats an elitist cabal of warmongers echoes a bizarre claim by Tucker Carlson in one of his books that the Democrats peaked as an anti-war party when Michael Dukakis rode in the tank, then became a pro-war and pro-interventionist party during the Clinton Administration. This makes no sense. Bill Clinton sought every opportunity to turn his back on the world: withdrawing from Somalia and leaving children to starve because a soldier was dragged through the street on camera; refusing to stop the genocide in Rwanda, even avoiding the word genocide, then claiming years later that he did not understand what was happening at the time, even though the TV showed a literal red river; refusing to act in Bosnia, then pretending that a token NATO airstrike stopped the genocide when the real reason was that the Croatian army attacked; doing the least bit possible to retaliate for the Khobar Towers, Dar es Salaam, and Nairobi bombings; rolling over for the Chinese Communists; and letting Saddam Hussein play footsie with the gulf war armistice.
My operative thesis, which fits the facts but is short on direct evidence, is that Tucker Carlson is uneducated in a particular way: He fails to see himself as part of an American story, and America as part of a world story, so that the events of the world -- he was 24 when the media freaked out over Somalia -- appear to him as just disjointed news events. Bad stuff on TV gets in the way of his comfort, and gets in the way of what he sees as America's daily business. I think it is actually possible that he graduated high school and college not knowing American history, and knowing nothing of the cold war. By third-hand accounts he was an irreverent teenager -- he allegedly claimed in his high school yearbook that he was in the "Dan White" [double-murderer] society -- and may have picked up anti-American attitudes during his childhood in San Francisco, just as Trump marinated in them in Manhattan.
Maybe Tulsi Gabbard suffers from the same syndrome. Perhaps she joins the National Guard and serves in Iraq without understanding any of the history -- not just the background of the Gulf War, but America's role in World War II and the shaping of the liberal world order. Maybe she sees the world as a tabula rasa, so that her first and only response to bad stuff happening is to throw a temper tantrum. If Obama could claim that Americans liberated Auschwitz, that Austrians speak Austrian, and that Roosevelt and Hitler held a summit meeting during World War II, is it so hard to believe that Carlson and Gabbard do not know middle school history? Perhaps they are simply as ignorant as Trump but their better grooming and behavior prevents people from recognizing it. Perhaps they feel no national pride because in their ignorance they do not know there is anything to feel pride about.