The Chris Moeller Archives

What, exactly, is Tulsi Gabbard up to?

It had to get ugly before the situation could even start to improve, and the bad news is that it’s going to get uglier still. The good news is that the inevitable collapse of a corrupt system has begun.

As principled progressives attempt to wrestle control of the Democratic Party away from corporatists and the war industry, it was never going to be the case that the thugs would go quietly. This was the point of a hostile opposition all along. Power doesn’t surrender. Justice and fairness must be demanded, not simply requested. Concessions are for the powerful to make, not the powerless. Compromise can never mean being compromised.

Hillary Clinton’s stomach-churning and amoral, but very-much-in-character accusations of treason against Hawaii 2nd District Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and 2016 Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein last week betray the claustrophobic feeling the Intelligence State and Republican wing of the Democratic party is starting to feel. Representative Gabbard is an honored combat veteran of the unjust Iraq War that Clinton voted for and vigorously promoted, and the congresswoman left her DNC vice chair position in 2016 to endorse Clinton’s opponent, Bernie Sanders, for the party presidential nomination. Stein, for her part, ran head-to-head against Clinton in the ’16 general election as the representative of a different Constitutionally-protected political party, one that Democrats refuse to publicly debate but still frequently slander.

Last week, Clinton called both of these political opponents, and opponents of her seemingly-endless parade of regime change wars “Russian assets.” The assertion, by extension, casts each of us as the same if we defied to vote against her as she went down to flaming defeat. Her failure to still… still… concede that her loss at the ballot box three years ago was both legitimate and self-induced has left her clearly discomfited and possibly mentally unstable. It makes a modicum of sense that this psychological damage would be inflicted. She lost embarrassingly to the least popular political figure arguably in American history, and that loss was most clearly a wholesale rejection of her rather than an endorsement of him, based on basically any other head-to-head hypotheticals.

It is, alas, also not surprising that Clinton's comments would fit so comfortably inside Beltway orthodoxy. We’ve been headed this way. Washington media favorites and “mainstream” Democratic political figures have been expressing open suspicion surrounding Gabbard as a 2020 Democratic presidential option. She has shown the courage to touch that only true third-rail of our political life-- the industry of American military aggression. The New York Times has hit her (the headline of their recent profile asks the sinister question "What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?"). So have NBC and the Daily Beast. An ex-intelligence official speaking on one of these, who made his spook career and post-spook career inherently off the manufacturing of terminal bloodshed, called Gabbard "the Kremlin’s preferred Democrat." Joe McCarthy lives and breathes in 2019.

The Russians are still lurking under every bed if we bother to listen to the MSNBC Democrats. McCarthy Republicans of the ‘50s are now Clinton and Biden Democrats. Red-baiting is de rigueur again. We’re told that Vladimir Putin has the power to shape and distort the minds of weak-willed, ignorant Americans. He’s the Stranger Things shadow monster, escaped from the upside-down, stretching his tentacles through the open orifices of all those that don’t keep their attentions fixed on the conspiracy.

Any opposition is disloyalty. Russian skeptics are Russian denialists-- and pro-Trump. Stein has been the most popular target for years. She once attended a formal dinner with Putin in Moscow (though FYI, Bill Clinton once received a $500,000 speakers’ fee for appearing and dining at the same type of event). Gabbard is an “Assad lover,” opposed to U.S. military involvement in Syria, making her also a puppet of Putin. Paul Manafort must have met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. No evidence of that particular accusation was required for the traditional media to bite on it, even as Clinton doesn’t need to provide any evidence for her recent charges. Mitch McConnell is now "Moscow Mitch." Any third party earning ballot access had its first meet-up inside Lenin’s Mausoleum. Nancy Pelosi literally pointed at Trump in the Oval Office earlier this fall and deplored, "All roads to Putin." They’re sick and their reign is dying.

It’s a losing strategy, and a symptom of the inevitable collapse. Its fatal flaw is that it casts American voters as dupes, when they are not, and it gradually alienates. The strategy took a game-show clown with no political organization and no establishment support and it elevated him to President of the United States. On a smaller scale, and on a more positive note, it just provided a much-needed boost to Tulsi Gabbard. She’s been speaking truth to power for months, but getting ignored by the Washington media almost entirely, and struggling to meet the oppressive DNC guidelines to qualify for the televised debates. Then Hillary tripped and bumped her head. Naturally, Tulsi was quick to plant the seeds in the rich Twitter soil and boost her own campaign. As she should. She quickly demanded that Clinton leave the sidelines and enter the 2020 race, declaring that the entire Democratic primary race had just been re-framed as Clinton vs. Gabbard. At an Iowa City campaign event Saturday, crowds were large and one supporter brought her a Russian hat to illicit her laughter. Having Hillary Clinton criticize you politically in the United States is receiving the gift of all political gifts. It must be something like an endorsement from Steve Jobs, Kylie Jenner, and Prince in one fell swoop. Gabbard’s oratory sizzled this weekend. In her return-fire tweet, she called Clinton "The queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long." I’ve been searching for 15 years on this blog to find a Clinton description this perfectly-constructed.

posted by CM @ 8:37 PM