{"id":222128,"date":"2022-10-17T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=222128"},"modified":"2022-10-16T05:51:45","modified_gmt":"2022-10-16T04:51:45","slug":"tulsi-gabbard-dares-to-challenge-washingtons-war-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/10\/tulsi-gabbard-dares-to-challenge-washingtons-war-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Tulsi Gabbard Dares to Challenge Washington\u2019s War Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The former presidential candidate has shown that opposing regime-change policies is the one taboo that the ruling class will not tolerate.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Tulsi Gabbard. \u00a9 AP Photo\/Charlie Neibergall<\/p><\/div>\n

13 Oct 2022 – <\/em>Tulsi Gabbard\u2019s rapid transformation from rising Democratic star to demonized outcast \u2013\u00a0 culminating this week with her decision to leave the party \u2013 has exposed the one thing on which every powerful person in Washington can agree: war is good.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the one thing, in fact, that everyone must agree on, if they expect to attain any power and have a long and prosperous career in American politics. Those who don\u2019t will be kept on the fringes, at best. If they speak out too effectively, they\u2019ll be branded a traitor. As former congressman Ron Paul and his son, Senator Rand Paul, have proved, they\u2019ll never be taken seriously as a presidential candidate and won\u2019t be allowed to contest, regardless of how many debates they win.<\/p>\n

Gabbard has illustrated this reality better than anyone. Consider how much she brought to the table when she entered Congress in 2013, how touted she was as the next big thing, then look at how seemingly little it took for her to be essentially excommunicated. Her fall from grace was astonishingly quick, and illuminating.<\/p>\n

Then just 31, she came from one of the most reliably blue states, Hawaii, as the youngest lawmaker to ever represent her district. She\u2019s non-white. In fact, she checked a couple of those identitarian boxes that the Democrats love so much, becoming the first Hindu member and the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress. She\u2019s a war veteran. She\u2019s articulate and comes across as a person who passionately believes in what she\u2019s saying.<\/p>\n

In short, she was like a far better version of Kamala Harris. Try to imagine the current vice president being younger, smarter, likable and principled. Sprinkle in some extra credit points for military service and an ability to seem human, without the uncontrollable laughing in the most inappropriate moments. That would be Tulsi Gabbard.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t hard for Democratic Party leaders to see Gabbard\u2019s potential when she won her first primary in 2012. President Barack Obama endorsed her, and Nancy Pelosi, then House minority leader, invited her to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Immediately upon arriving in Congress in 2013, she was named vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).<\/p>\n

Right on cue, CNN and other legacy media outlets began fawning over Gabbard as the \u201cnext superstar\u201d<\/em> and \u201cthe one to watch.<\/em>\u201d MSNBC suggested that Hollywood might want to make a movie about her, and CNN commentator Ana Navarro quipped, \u201cI don\u2019t know, but in a battle, I want her in my trench.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

But then almost as suddenly, none of the talking heads wanted Gabbard in their trench. After Donald Trump\u2019s shocking victory in the 2016 presidential election, she had the audacity to meet with the president-elect. The problem wasn\u2019t really that she had a conversation with Bad Orange Man. What was unforgivable was what she wanted to talk about: the US regime-change campaign in Syria.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the president-elect now, before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government,\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gabbard said at the time. Weeks later, she traveled to Syria to see the horrific conditions on the ground, and she met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.<\/p>\n

For all intents and purposes, Gabbard\u2019s stint as a Democratic Party darling was over. Actually, it was worse than being removed from the A-list. She was deemed a traitor to her nation in the eyes of the power brokers. Hillary Clinton, the party\u2019s 2016 presidential nominee, went so far as to suggest that Gabbard was being groomed as a Russian pawn, saying:\u00a0\u201cShe\u2019s the favorite of the Russians.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

When Gabbard ran for president in the 2020 race, she brought her anti-war message to the primary debates and humiliated Harris as a hypocrite on criminal justice. After her first debate<\/a> performance, she became the most searched candidate online, but Google suspended<\/a> her advertising account, meaning she couldn\u2019t capitalize on the surge in voter interest. She accused the DNC of keeping her out of some of the key later debates, in one case changing its rules to do so, and Gabbard quit the race shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n

With the media portraying her as an anti-LGBTQ bigot and a \u201cRussian asset,\u201d<\/em> Gabbard\u2019s career in Congress was also soon to end. She chose not to seek re-election and was the only Democrat who didn\u2019t join with other party members in the House to vote for Trump\u2019s impeachment.<\/p>\n

However, Gabbard continued to speak out against warmongering, especially after Russia began its military offensive against Ukraine in February, triggering rebukes from Democrats and Republicans alike. She became even more of a political pariah when she warned that Biden\u2019s policy of fighting a proxy war against Russia was pushing Americans closer to nuclear disaster. After she raised concern about claims of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, Senator Mitt Romney accused her of spouting \u201ctreasonous lies.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

When Gabbard announced her exit from the Democratic Party on Tuesday, she spoke of \u201ccowardly wokeness,\u201d<\/em> racial divisiveness, hostility toward people of faith and weaponization of law enforcement against political opponents. But the one real deal killer, the one truly irreconcilable difference, was war.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can no longer remain in today\u2019s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers,\u201d<\/em> she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sadly, she could have said the same thing about the Republican Party. As economist and policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs pointed out in an interview on Monday, \u201cThis country is a war machine at the top.\u201d<\/em> He added, \u201cWe are a security state. We have a secret state which runs most of our foreign and military policy.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/picture> READ MORE: <\/b>US economist Jeffrey Sachs breaks ranks on nuclear plant strikes<\/span> <\/a><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All the gamesmanship about race, gender and other trumped-up social issues is just political theater. What really matters in Washington is war, and Gabbard\u2019s effectiveness as a communicator makes her dangerous to the war machine. She makes clear that US policies have nothing to do with the real security and economic interests of the American people.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have too many people in Washington who are warmongers, subservient to the military industrial complex, and continuing to put their own selfish interests and the interests of their donors first, with no mind for the cost and consequence that their decisions have on the American people,\u201d<\/em> she said<\/a> in a Fox News interview on Tuesday [11 Oct].<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what we\u2019re seeing right now with President Biden and leaders in Congress, whose decisions are actively pushing us to the brink of a nuclear holocaust, of which they may have their bunkers where they\u2019ll be safe, but we the American people will have no shelter, no place to go, no place to hide, and face the consequences that could destroy all of humanity and the world as we know it.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

_________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Tony Cox, a US journalist who has written or edited for <\/em>Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – rt.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Oct 2022 – Tulsi Gabbard\u2019s rapid transformation from rising Democratic star to demonized outcast–culminating this week with her decision to leave the party–has exposed the one thing on which every powerful person in Washington agree: war is good. The former presidential candidate has shown that opposing regime-change policies is the one taboo that the ruling class will not tolerate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":222130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2009,2797,2896,1346,70,481],"class_list":["post-222128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-anti-war","tag-culture-of-war","tag-dissent","tag-tulsi-gabbard","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}