The most sophisticated liar and opportunist in today's politics?
taking a look at Tulsi Gabbard
To be entirely honest, I have not been paying a huge amount of attention to Tulsi Gabbard. She has been popping up in my news feed with reasonable regularity ever since she took Kamala Harris out of the presidential primary by being marginally observant.
She made news a few times, most notably when she realized she does not have a future in the Democrat Party and decided she is an Independent. Chances are she will wait out a couple more years, make a lot of noise by claiming to speak “truth to power” with the military-industrial complex being her chosen boogeyman. It is an intelligently chosen bogeyman because she has served in the National Guard and deployed to Iraq which gives her something of a carde blanche to go after the military. Most of us have a lot of respect for the military and those who have served, so she does not get challenged a lot. Interestingly, it is very hard to find any details about her service other than that she served in a medical unit. I can’t tell if this was just a John Kerry-esque career enhancing photo-op, or something a little more genuine. Perhaps both. Multiple things can be true at once.
A couple of days ago, her statement on the pistol brace ban by the ATF popped up in my Twitter feed and surprised the hell out of me:
When she was in office, she voted against gun rights every chance she got. Looking up her voting record, it wasn’t too many times but I can find five-out-of-five anti-gun votes. Looking at the rest of her voting record, she was a very reliable left wing democrat. For a little bit, she was a rising star among the Democrats and a DNC vice-chair for four years. Somewhere in there she did manage to cross the wrong person, it seems, which eventually resulted in the situation we have now. My suspicion is that she did not want to wait for her turn, so the DNC establishment turned on her, but it is largely conjecture.
Jordan Peterson just did an interview with her and I listened to the whole thing. The last half hour or so are in the subscriber-only section on Dailywire, but there is a lot of interesting stuff in there. Below is the link to the portion available on Youtube. To listen to her, she has always been this contrarian with the heart of gold who was marching to the beat of her own drum and the whole DNC business happened because the powers that be liked her intersectional credentials, but did not understand that she, allegedly, can not be controlled by anyone. Peterson tried to press her on that a little, but she skillfully weaseled out of it. He seems to find her sympathetic, so he stopped pushing. I do have to admit that her act is superbly well rehearsed and acted out. She is absolutely a gifted and skillful politician. She is charismatic. She presents herself well and makes very few mistakes in communicating her message. I fully expect her to gradually shift her political positions while beating the drum of anti-military isolationist populism until she is properly positioned to run for office as a Republican. Do not be surprised to see her on a presidential ticket in 2028. Whoever picks her as a VP candidate better have a food taster. It is entirely possible that her political evolution is genuine, but I do not think so. Perhaps, I am jaded by listening to all the communist leaders in the Soviet Union while growing up, but to me she comes off as just another slimy politician who does not believe in anything other than her personal quest for power.
Both Jordan Peterson and Tulsi Gabbard are fundamentally Chamberlainian in their approach to the war in Ukraine. I have talked at length about why I think Jordan Peterson is wrong about this one. It is something of a complex issue, but fundamentally he thinks that Russia is a Western nation. If you assume that, his logical arguments are perfectly logical. There is one problem though: Russia is not a Western nation. This is probably worth a longer discussion, but they spent quit a lot of time discussing the threat of a nuclear confrontation and what does it constitute for the West to have a win in this war in Ukraine. It is a manipulative and really wrong (I think) way to look at it. It is better to look at the cost of Russia winning that war. In a way, I can argue that the win for the West is simply Russia not achiving its goals. As simple as that and perhaps I’ll go into more detail on that at a future point.
With Tulsi Gabbard, it is really a much simpler argument. Since her favourite boogeyman is the American military industrial complex, she has never seen a foreign conflict that was not its fault and she has never seen a foreign dictator who was not either its victim or its pawn. Oh, and she has no perceivable comprehension of Russian or Ukrainian culture and history. Peterson has a comprehension albeit an incorrect one. She doesn’t even have that.
The interesting thing is that she likes to refer to Eisenhower’s famous warning and it is not entirely unjustified. However, to say that the US defense industry is behind every bad thing that happens is sort of a “tail wagging the dog argument”. Once again, this is a situation where multiple things can be true at once. It is very natural to find something shady and mysterious, so that we can endow it with unlimited powers in our minds and then bravely rebel against it. There is a lot of personal safety in rebelling against things we made up in our minds. While I would really like to clean house in the defense industry (I work within that world and I can tell you all sorts of fun stories about the waste happening in there), I do not think the corruption there even cracks the top ten of what we need to be paying attention to. To be fair, since she is skillfully courting a somewhat different electorate, she is gradually distancing herself from all the thing she was passionate about before: gun control, green new deal, etc, but not so much as to be obvious. For example, rather than disavow the Green insanity, she is now talking about clean water, since everyone wants clean water. Before too long, she will gradually stop talking about it much, other than proudly telling people that she was always for clean water. Somehow, the fact that she wanted to ban fracking and move away from fossil fuels and from nuclear energy no longer comes up a lot. We can assume, I suppose, that she was pushing for the wholescale transition to wind and solar because she couldn’t do math, but since there is no evidence of her taking any community college courses recently, it is safer assume that she is just a normal opportunist politician, except an unusually well polished one.
Examining her record is also interesting because on one hand she has managed to do quite a lot of things in her fairly young life. On the other hand, it is easy to miss the fact that she has done absolutely nothing productive or useful (with possible exception of her very opaque military service). She ran for her first office when she was 21 and never looked back. In other words, she is a professional useless person with lots of personal charisma.
One of the things Tulsi Gabbard does exceptionally well is that she does not come off as an obvious liar like, for example, Biden or Clinton do. In that regard, she is likely made out of the same cloth as Obama, who has a real gift for politics as well. If you can say a bunch of vague, dishonest and stupid things while sounding intelligent, truthful and precise, you were born to be a politician. If you want an example of that, take a close look at Tulsi Gabbard.