06-17-2019, 03:35 PM
Since Tulsi is getting more notice in the upcoming debates, and is still favored by Berniebros and Berniesisters as their favorite VP choice, it's time to resurrect this thread and get it back on topic. Time to reveal the truth and the facts about Tulsi again. If people point to Biden's past record, and say it invalidates anything he says now, then Tulsi should not be let of the hook for HER past record, which is even more dismal than Joe's.
Her voting record and co-sponsorship record in congress is less progressive than even the infamous Hillary-supporting former head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and by quite a bit. She supports drone wars that kill thousands of civilians, and she supports Putin's war-criminal bombing campaign in Russia that killed thousands of civilians. She said the revolution and uprising of 2011 of the people of Syria against their monster dictator (and monster is a polite term for him; apologies that I can't think of a worse one) was an invasion of US troops in a war of regime change. How utterly disrespectful and insulting to a people who so courageously rose up and gave their lives in a futile struggle for freedom and dignity! AND she advocated that the USA BOMB Syria in the hopes of killing some al nusra fighters there. She opposed the Iran nuclear deal, and went on every TV show she could find to defend the phrase "radical Islam" and support the wars against Islam. That's why she supported Israel's attacks on Palestinians too. She is a Hindu nationalist who supports right-wing ruler Modi. Not only that, she is a reluctant recent convert away from an opponent of homosexuals and LGBTQ rights and gay marriage.
Here's one credible article on her:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/...-explained
....As early as January 2015, she started going on every cable channel that would have her — including Fox News — and bashing Obama’s policy on terrorism. She sounded indistinguishable from a Republican presidential candidate.
“What is so frustrating ... is that our administration refuses to recognize who our enemy is,” she said in a January 2015 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And unless and until that happens, then it’s impossible to come up with a strategy to defeat that enemy. We have to recognize that this is about radical Islam.”
The problem with this argument, according to both the Obama administration and most terrorism experts, is that “radical Islam” paints with too broad a brush. The term implies that jihadist militants are part of a unified ideological movement, rather than a series of discrete groups that are often at war with each other. It’s also insulting to the vast majority of Muslims around the world. President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism team refused to use it for these reasons.
This overwhelming focus on the threat from terrorism culminated in what’s now her most infamous policy position: quasi-support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator responsible for the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the conflict’s worst atrocities.
Gabbard argued, along with a small minority of foreign policy analysts, that the best way to defeat ISIS in Syria was for the US to align itself with Assad’s regime. She argued that the US should cut funding to the rebels fighting Assad, even sponsoring a bill in Congress to cut off US support. In the fall of 2015, when Russia began its bombing campaign in Syria, Gabbard celebrated it as a win for counterterrorism.
Tulsi Gabbard
✔
@TulsiGabbard
Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.
In fact, Russian forces were mostly targeting Syrian rebel groups overall rather than al-Qaeda-aligned rebel groups specifically. The goal was not narrow counterterrorism but rather defending a Russian-friendly regime that was (at the time) losing the war.
But there’s an internal logic here, one that the Kremlin itself has argued publicly. If you’re focused solely on the threat from the jihadist elements inside the Syrian opposition to the American homeland, to the exclusion of moral concerns about Assad’s regime, then it makes a grim kind of sense to align oneself with the Syrian and Russian governments.
This appears to be how Gabbard, who once described Assad as “brutal,” could support Russia’s intervention on his behalf — even going so far as to unfavorably compare Obama to Putin:
Tulsi Gabbard
✔
@TulsiGabbard
Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911
In January 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad personally, blindsiding the Democratic leadership in Congress. After returning to the US, she went on CNN and parroted the regime’s line that there was “no difference” between the mainstream anti-Assad rebels and ISIS.
By this point, Democratic leadership considered her disloyal. “Rep. Gabbard loses me and, I think, many others when she claims to support peaceful values and policies that protect civilians and still engages with and even defends a murderous dictator, Bashar al-Assad,” Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior NSC official in the Obama administration, told me. “There is no excuse for this. The hypocrisy of these actions is astonishing. One can be antiwar without being pro-murderous dictator, a fact that seems obvious.”
When Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in April 2017, Gabbard said she was “skeptical” that Assad was responsible, aligning herself with conspiracy theorists against both US intelligence and the overwhelming majority of independent experts.
Assad was not the only foreign authoritarian Gabbard praised for fighting terrorism. She issued a statement celebrating Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s “great courage and leadership in taking on ... extreme Islamist ideology” — despite Sisi taking power in a coup and massacring more than 800 peaceful protesters in a single day.
She also proposed a policy of US special forces raids around the world and even expressed a willingness to authorize torture of terrorism suspects if she were president. She referred to herself in one interview as a “dove” on regime change but a “hawk” on terrorism, neatly summarizing her actual positions.....
Her voting record and co-sponsorship record in congress is less progressive than even the infamous Hillary-supporting former head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and by quite a bit. She supports drone wars that kill thousands of civilians, and she supports Putin's war-criminal bombing campaign in Russia that killed thousands of civilians. She said the revolution and uprising of 2011 of the people of Syria against their monster dictator (and monster is a polite term for him; apologies that I can't think of a worse one) was an invasion of US troops in a war of regime change. How utterly disrespectful and insulting to a people who so courageously rose up and gave their lives in a futile struggle for freedom and dignity! AND she advocated that the USA BOMB Syria in the hopes of killing some al nusra fighters there. She opposed the Iran nuclear deal, and went on every TV show she could find to defend the phrase "radical Islam" and support the wars against Islam. That's why she supported Israel's attacks on Palestinians too. She is a Hindu nationalist who supports right-wing ruler Modi. Not only that, she is a reluctant recent convert away from an opponent of homosexuals and LGBTQ rights and gay marriage.
Here's one credible article on her:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/...-explained
....As early as January 2015, she started going on every cable channel that would have her — including Fox News — and bashing Obama’s policy on terrorism. She sounded indistinguishable from a Republican presidential candidate.
“What is so frustrating ... is that our administration refuses to recognize who our enemy is,” she said in a January 2015 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And unless and until that happens, then it’s impossible to come up with a strategy to defeat that enemy. We have to recognize that this is about radical Islam.”
The problem with this argument, according to both the Obama administration and most terrorism experts, is that “radical Islam” paints with too broad a brush. The term implies that jihadist militants are part of a unified ideological movement, rather than a series of discrete groups that are often at war with each other. It’s also insulting to the vast majority of Muslims around the world. President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism team refused to use it for these reasons.
This overwhelming focus on the threat from terrorism culminated in what’s now her most infamous policy position: quasi-support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator responsible for the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the conflict’s worst atrocities.
Gabbard argued, along with a small minority of foreign policy analysts, that the best way to defeat ISIS in Syria was for the US to align itself with Assad’s regime. She argued that the US should cut funding to the rebels fighting Assad, even sponsoring a bill in Congress to cut off US support. In the fall of 2015, when Russia began its bombing campaign in Syria, Gabbard celebrated it as a win for counterterrorism.
Tulsi Gabbard
✔
@TulsiGabbard
Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.
In fact, Russian forces were mostly targeting Syrian rebel groups overall rather than al-Qaeda-aligned rebel groups specifically. The goal was not narrow counterterrorism but rather defending a Russian-friendly regime that was (at the time) losing the war.
But there’s an internal logic here, one that the Kremlin itself has argued publicly. If you’re focused solely on the threat from the jihadist elements inside the Syrian opposition to the American homeland, to the exclusion of moral concerns about Assad’s regime, then it makes a grim kind of sense to align oneself with the Syrian and Russian governments.
This appears to be how Gabbard, who once described Assad as “brutal,” could support Russia’s intervention on his behalf — even going so far as to unfavorably compare Obama to Putin:
Tulsi Gabbard
✔
@TulsiGabbard
Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911
In January 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad personally, blindsiding the Democratic leadership in Congress. After returning to the US, she went on CNN and parroted the regime’s line that there was “no difference” between the mainstream anti-Assad rebels and ISIS.
By this point, Democratic leadership considered her disloyal. “Rep. Gabbard loses me and, I think, many others when she claims to support peaceful values and policies that protect civilians and still engages with and even defends a murderous dictator, Bashar al-Assad,” Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior NSC official in the Obama administration, told me. “There is no excuse for this. The hypocrisy of these actions is astonishing. One can be antiwar without being pro-murderous dictator, a fact that seems obvious.”
When Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in April 2017, Gabbard said she was “skeptical” that Assad was responsible, aligning herself with conspiracy theorists against both US intelligence and the overwhelming majority of independent experts.
Assad was not the only foreign authoritarian Gabbard praised for fighting terrorism. She issued a statement celebrating Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s “great courage and leadership in taking on ... extreme Islamist ideology” — despite Sisi taking power in a coup and massacring more than 800 peaceful protesters in a single day.
She also proposed a policy of US special forces raids around the world and even expressed a willingness to authorize torture of terrorism suspects if she were president. She referred to herself in one interview as a “dove” on regime change but a “hawk” on terrorism, neatly summarizing her actual positions.....