Patterico's Pontifications

8/14/2019

Tulsi Gabbard Leaves Campaign Trail For National Guard Training

Filed under: General — Dana @ 9:00 am



[guest post by Dana]

[Ed. I thought JVW might post about his Little Aloha Sweetie but maybe the thoughts of her going to such a far away place makes him too sad to post…]

Tulsi Gabbard announced that she was leaving the campaign trail for two weeks to participate in National Guard training in Indonesia:

“While some people are telling me, ‘Gosh, this is a terrible time to leave the campaign. Can’t you find a way out of it?’ That’s not what this is about,” the Hawaii Democrat said in a news release. “I look forward to joining my fellow soldiers for a joint-training exercise with the Indonesian military, focused on counterterrorism and disaster response.”

“I love our country,” Gabbard said Monday. “I am grateful to be able to serve our country and the American people in many ways, including as a soldier.”

Gabbard has demonstrated her love of country and a willingness to serve wherever, whenever. While politics certainly played a part in her decision-making, I think ultimately she is honoring a commitment that she takes very seriously, in spite of her political campaign. And yet, a huge part of what draws supporters to her is her military service and experience. And she makes no bones that it is what anchors her in the quest for the presidency:

…her military experience has become a central selling point to her campaign. During the second night of July’s debates — wherein Gabbard finished the night as Google’s most-searched candidate — she wielded her credentials as an Iraq War veteran to speak about foreign policy decisions with a personal tone.

“For too long, we had leaders who have been arbitrating foreign policy from ivory towers in Washington without any idea about the cost and the consequence, the toll it takes on our service members, on their families,” Gabbard said. “We have to do the right thing. End the wasteful regime change wars and bring our troops home.

“The leadership I will bring to do the right thing, to bring our troops home within the first year in office, because they shouldn’t have been there this long.”

Moreover:

“It’s impossible to separate the experience that I have serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee, on the Armed Services Committee, as we’re going through these exercises and I think it’s an added value in bringing these two different perspectives together — those of the policymakers in Washington and that of a soldier.”

Gabbard is clearly in an uphill battle on the campaign trail. While she has met the threshold of 130,000 contributions from individual donors, she still hovers at 1% support in the polls, which makes her short of the “two percent in four surveys” polling criteria. She is also rightfully facing scrutiny for her meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Here she is being interviewed by (ironically) Chris Cuomo on CNN, where he demanded she denounce Assad (at the 1:23 mark):

Anyway, Assad aside, Gabbard clearly loves America, and I’m grateful for her willingness to serve our country.

Untitled

–Dana

29 Responses to “Tulsi Gabbard Leaves Campaign Trail For National Guard Training”

  1. I find her an interesting candidate in a sea of woke wimps.

    Dana (fdf131)

  2. She seems to have a bit of authenticity about her which the other candidates clearly do not. Well, except for Marianne Williamson, who is on another planet altogether.

    Dana (fdf131)

  3. JVW’s TulsiWatch begins anew…

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  4. Here she is being interviewed by (ironically) Chris Cuomo Gamecock Naples on CNN, where he demanded she denounce Assad (at the 1:23 mark):

    FIFY

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  5. Tu, Tu, Tulsi, goodbye?

    nk (dbc370)

  6. if she’s training with kopassus, that’s a tough crew, they aren’t known for a light touch,

    I understand her point of view, she think sunni Salafism, is much more dangerous than the alawite Iranian axis,

    narciso (d1f714)

  7. Good for her.

    If the stars aligns and she ends up being the Democratic Presidential Candidate, would she pull in more centrist and ‘not-Trump’ GOP voters than the extreme left staying home on election day?

    Like Dana said, she has issues but she’s way more authentic than the other yahoos.

    whembly (fd57f6)

  8. I’m not stuck on her like JVW, but Samoas have been my favorite Girl Scout cookies for a long time.

    nk (dbc370)

  9. You think Williamson is authentic? To me she seems like a straight up new age grifter using this as a chance to burnish her brand.

    Time123 (235fc4)

  10. …or as I call it, Connect Four Islam (Sunni Salaf) versus Chess Playing Islam (Iran, Syria) – one could be base and call the latter Whiter Islam.

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  11. would she pull in more centrist and ‘not-Trump’ GOP voters than the extreme left staying home on election day

    She is a full-on socialist, and wants to surrender to the Taliban and ISIS too.

    Dave (1bb933)

  12. Hey, it worked for Matt Santos on the final season of West Wing.

    Brotherico (dfc953)

  13. Tulsi Gabbard probably won’t qualify for the third debate. She has reached the 130,000 donor threshhold, but she has only one poll in which she polled above 2%m and she needs three more by August 28. She’s trying to raise her poll results by urging her supporters to answer polls if they get the chance, and by filling out surveys from Survey Monkey and YouGov in the hopes they might be presented woth a presidential poll (people who answer surveys get more surveys, at least if they indicate they’re willing to take them.)

    Not doing quite as well as Tulsi Gabbard is Kirsten Gillibrand, who recently passed 100,000 and also only has one poll in which she passed 2%.

    Nine candidates have qualified, the last one being Andrew Yang, who was missing his fourth poll. The others who have qualified are Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., Senator Kamala Harris of California, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

    Closest is Julián Castro. He has surpassed 130,000 donors and needs just one more poll to qualify.

    Also just one poll short is Tom Steyer, who now got as high 3% in one poll. But he doesn’t have the number of unique individual donors. He’s doing whst would almost be irrational in any other context: Spending a lot of money advertising to get a lot less money back in donations. He needs $1 donors.

    Beto O’Rourke has made the cut for the third debate, but almost certainly won’t make it for the fourth, even though they have the same terms. He’s qualifying based on earlier polls. His polls have dropped from 6% at one time to about 1% now.

    If there are ten cadidates in the end, there will be one debate, but if 11 or more they will be split into two panels in September, unless they change that, and they could maybe decide to if they see there are 11 or 12. Maybe not – the ratings will be higher if there are two.

    See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/us/politics/andrew-yang-debate-monmouth-poll.html and
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/politics/next-democratic-debate-candidates.html

    Kirsten Gillibrand and

    Sammy Finkelman (324ec1)

  14. You think Williamson is authentic?

    I think Williamson has been a nutty chick for a really long time, and made a bundle off her nuttiness. She’s the same on the campaign trail, so in that sense, yes. However, I have seen her try to backtrack from her anti-vaxer stuff…

    Dana (fdf131)

  15. Maybe “consistent” would be a more apt description of Williamson than “authentic”.

    Dana (fdf131)

  16. You think Williamson is authentic?

    Williamson is real. Real crazy.

    Chuck Bartowski (bc1c71)

  17. It’s too bad that every last one of Tulsi’s policy positions are terrible. Still, she does serve, which puts her ahead of all the other Democrats with terrible policy positions.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  18. Gabbard favors authoritarians and mass murderers, just like a certain President. For example, she has embraced well known democracies such as Syria and Egypt:

    In 2015, two years after he orchestrated the worst mass killing of protesters in modern history, a smiling Gabbard appeared next to a grinning Sisi on a visit to Cairo, after which she praised him for showing “great courage and leadership” in the fight against “extreme Islamist ideology.”

    In January 2017—on a trip organized by members of the fascist Syrian Social Nationalist Party—Gabbard met with Assad, explaining herself afterward by saying that no meeting should be off the table “if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people.” That sympathy apparently did not extend to anyone who’d fought against Assad or belonged to the Syrian opposition, to whom she had previously tried to outlaw US assistance. Assad was a “brutal dictator,” Gabbard wrote, but “[e]very Syrian soldier we and our Saudi partners kill is one less soldier available to fight against ISIS.”

    The most abusive and dictatorial governments, by and large, have not been theocracies but nominally secular regimes. Many of the worst crimes—Assad’s chemical attacks and extermination camps, Sisi’s massacre of protesters, Muammar Gaddafi’s hangings and mass executions, Saddam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds—have been committed by the kind of “secular” autocrats Gabbard wants to stay in power. . . . Gabbard’s crusade against “extremist Islam” appeared to blind her to this reality.

    Source.

    She is also a supporter of a man “excluded under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that “makes any government official who was responsible for or directly carried out at any time particularly severe violations of religious freedom ineligible for a visa”, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

    As chief minister of Gujarat in 2012, Modi asserted, without any evidence, that Pakistan was responsible for a train disaster that killed Hindu pilgrims.

    “What followed was mass bloodshed: 1,000 dead on official estimates, more than 2,000 by independent tallies. The vast majority of those who died were Muslim. Mobs of men dragged women and young girls out of their homes and raped them…One [of the ringleaders] boasted of how he slit open the womb of a pregnant woman.”

    There were clear signs that the attackers benefitted from state-level support. The attackers, armed with swords, machetes or iron bars, carried computer print-outs listing the addresses of Muslim families, shops and businesses, according to a report in The Telegraph.

    …..

    Across Gujarat, 180 mosques were destroyed or damaged along with thousands of Muslim-owned businesses and homes. Callers to police stations were told: “We don’t have orders to save you,” and “We cannot help you, we have orders from above.”

    Tulsi Gabbard has an exceptional appreciation for Modi.

    Hers is a very personal rapport. She presented him with her own copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, on which she took her Congressional oath of office, when he visited the U.S. Modi sent her with “a beautiful message of Krishna” for her wedding. Gabbard then presented him with a CD of music from her wedding.

    Upon Mr Modi’s invitation, she took a trip to India where she was widely regarded as the “darling of the BJP and the RSS” – the RSS (a right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organization) being the BJP’s ideological “parent.” Both groups, which wield enormous power in India, take pride in a narrow, chauvinistic view of India as a Hindu country where Muslims and other minorities should be considered second-class citizens.

    Such was her affinity that Tulsi opposed House Resolution 417 – “Praising India’s rich religious diversity and commitment to tolerance and equality, and reaffirming the need to protect the rights and freedoms of religious minorities” – that was seen as a veiled criticism of Modi. She even tried to brush away the Gujarat pogrom by saying, “There was a lot of misinformation that surrounded the event in 2002.”

    Source

    rip mudock (d2a2a8)

  19. Tulsa Time Tulsi Time

    She left the big island flyin’ on Hawaiian Air
    Just about to lose her mind
    She was goin’ on to Arizona, maybe to the dirty Beltway
    Where all the people live so fine
    His boys said he was crazy, her positions close to Mazie
    But he was goin’ to show ’em all this time
    ‘Cause you know it ain’t a lost cause and a rolling stone don’t have moss
    He weren’t born to just walk the line

    Livin’ on Tulsi time
    Livin’ on Tulsi time
    Well, you know he’s been through it
    Nail her good if closer to it
    Livin’ on Tulsi time

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  20. she doesn’t want to topple authoritarian regimes, without regards to what comes next, she has a different view on the kingdom, because she regards it as more destabilizing then iran,

    narciso (d1f714)

  21. I agree, Kevin M. @ 18.

    Dana (fdf131)

  22. [Ed. I thought JVW might post about his Little Aloha Sweetie but maybe the thoughts of her going to such a far away place makes him too sad to post…]

    I’ve been compiling some interesting My Little Aloha Sweetie tidbits for a future post, but I am the post-1990 Bruce Springsteen of guest bloggers. One album ever four years is good enough for him, and one post every week or so seems to be the limit of my abilities.

    JVW (54fd0b)

  23. Gabbard favors authoritarians and mass murderers, just like a certain President.

    Think of her as a throwback to anti-anti-communist Democrats in the Cold War era who didn’t think it was any of America’s damn business if third world people were being slaughtered by other third world people. I don’t necessarily agree with her, but we have seen what happens when we presume that we can lead dysfunctional societies to Western liberal democracy.

    JVW (54fd0b)

  24. Your posts are awesomely witty and insightful, and I look forward to them no matter when they pop up. Just don’t starve us.

    (As I am continually conflicted about Springsteen, I’ll jump over that comment…)

    Dana (fdf131)

  25. Fredo: Congresswoman, you need to acknowledge that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who kills his own citizens.

    Little Aloha Sweetie: Hey, if I discriminated against every two-bit weasely punk who rose to his station in life because of his corrupt and thuggish father, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.

    JVW (54fd0b)

  26. I don’t know why but I see her as a modern-day Scoop Jackson.

    DRJ (3a8a8a)

  27. 26,

    Lol.

    Dana (fdf131)

  28. I think that the biggest challenge to Trump in the next election is a centrist and reasonable Democrat. The small number of crayzees will keep that from happening, and the awful cycle continues.

    We just need more reasonable people on both sides.

    Simon Jester (8912cb)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0895 secs.