Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well.
So, Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard is not like other Democrats.
Far from screaming about fringe policies like open
borders or democratic socialism, Tulsi chooses to focus on the mainstream.
She opposes the decriminalisation of border crossings, she’s
socially centrist, and she’s advocated for breaking up big tech.
She’s also certainly not shy about her anti-war stance.
It’s her key talking point; end the endless conflicts and
focus on peace and prosperity, while reinvesting the money that
would be saved from ceasing to intervene in foreign conflict into
social programs at home.
And certainly, as ex-military, Tulsi would know what she’s talking
about.
It is for these reasons that a lot of people on the right side of politics
find her very palatable.
Whether it’s because of her policy positions, or because it’s just so nice to find a Democrat
who isn’t a fringe, right wingers dig Tulsi, certainly more than the
other candidates.
This, however, has not been good for Tusli.
It has left her at the mercy of the hyper-partisan extreme left, who view
any belief to the right of Bernie as inherently evil.
There has been a calculated smear campaign against Tulsi in the
mainstream media, and I mean outlets like CNN and The New York
times, which are notably left leaning,
or at the very least pro-Democrat.
This smear campaign involves accusations of her being an Assad apologist,
of being alt-right, deliberately sowing discord in the Democratic
party, and of course, being a Russian puppet.
Tulsi, to her credit, has fobbed off these accusations, choosing to rise
above it and focus on her campaign.
That is, until a certain twice- failed presidential candidate opened her mouth.
Hillary Clinton, that enlightened soul, that shining light for women
everywhere unless they didn’t vote for her, appeared on the
Campaign HQ podcast hosted by David Plouffe on October 17th, and
had a few interesting things to say
Now, although Hillary didn’t mention the name of this so-called
third-party candidate, it was fairly obvious who she meant.
And when aide to Hillary Nick Merrill was asked
by a CNN reporter to clarify the comments, he replied with, “If
the nesting doll fits”.
Well, at least he’s trying to be witty.
So, Tulsi, after having remained fairly restrained in her reactions to
such baseless and very insulting accusations, finally stuck the boot in,
as they say in my country, tweeting
“Great!
Thank you Hillary Clinton.
You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification
of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long,
have finally come out from behind the curtain.
From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...
... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation.
We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and ...
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of
the threat I pose.
It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me.
Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies.
Join the race directly.”
So, this is a pretty comprehensive calling out of Hillary Clinton, I
mean look at the language; warmonger, corruption, rot, all the things
we know she is, Tulsi summed up in a couple of tweets.
This caused quite a storm; everybody seemed to have something
to say about it.
And of course, Trump jumped into the fray
“So now Crooked Hillary is at it again!
She is calling Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard “a Russian favourite,” and
Jill Stein “a Russian asset.”
As you may have heard, I was called a big Russia lover also (actually, I
do like Russian people.
I like all people!).
Hillary’s gone Crazy!”
Okay, so I had always wondered at how hostile the Democrats and
the mainstream media were about Tusli.
In my naivete, I assumed it was because she wasn’t left wing enough.
She’s not a Democratic socialist, she’s very moderate when it comes
to “reproductive
health”, she doesn’t openly state that she’s a feminist, and she
doesn’t delve into toxic identity politics.
Which she could, considering she’s on the left and is a woman, a
millennial, just, and is a woman of colour who was born in Samoa
and is a Hindu.
However, this incident with Hillary has shown me that
I’m wrong.
It’s Tulsi’s anti-war stance that the party doesn’t like; she
said it herself when she referenced the “war machine”, which has a
lot of control over politics, the media, and big corporations.
War is very profitable, remember; the media likes it because it gives
them headlines and helps them sell papers, politicians like it because
it helps them galvanise constituents, and corporations make billions
of dollars from it from things like arms sales.
It’s a real industry, and anyone threatening that, like Tulsi, or Trump,
or Bernie Sanders, is not someone these bad faith people want in
power.
Regarding Hillary’s dislike for Tulsi, this, I found out, stems back to
2016.
Thanks to leaked emails via Wikileaks, it came out that there
was significant bias within the Democratic Party against Bernie
Sanders around the time of the primaries.
Former chairwoman of the DNC Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and
others in the organisation, had been disparaging of Bernie’s
campaign, and had made noises that he would not be president.
Tulsi, gutsy woman, saw this and repeatedly called it out.
She eventually resigned from her position as vice-chair
of the DNC, and endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.
This slight against Hillary
would spark the hatred and resentment Hillary and the corporate
media have for her.
Which Tulsi has explained in
this video
Ultimately, Tulsi will benefit from this.
By leaning into the drama, her campaign has been caterpaulted into the spotlight,
and she has raised a lot of money as a result.
But holy crap, has Hillary Clinton made herself look terrible by doing this.
I mean, she already looked terrible, but this attitude of “everyone
who disagrees with me is a Russian asset” is just next level.
This situation reveals, yet again, that Hillary still has not accepted the
loss of the 2016 election.
I can understand her not getting over it, or
her feeling resentful, I mean it was an enormous and shocking loss,
that’s going to take its toll.
However, there is a difference between prolonged disappointment, and simply not accepting
the results of a democratically conducted election.
That’s a very different thing.
We know this because she has relentlessly blamed external factors
for the loss, rather than accepting that she simply did not do a good
enough job, and has recently been working very hard to undermine
Trump’s legitimacy as president, right in time for the 2020 campaign,
by making comments like this
So, on what exactly has Hillary Clinton blamed for her historic loss?
Well, it’s a long and exhaustive list, so, let me give you just a few key
things.
First; misogyny.
Apparently, America is a nation of sexists who just
weren’t ready for a female Commander in Chief.
Now, I’m not going to deny that Hillary copped some sexist criticism
from trolls in the comments section of news articles and Facebook
posts.
But to say misogyny cost her the election is just not
true.
How could it be?
She won the popular vote, by the largest margin ever for a losing candidate, three million
votes.
If America was a misogynistic nation where people weren’t
ready for a woman President, then how did she win the popular
vote?
Also, it wasn’t just allegedly horrible sexist men voting against
her; 53% of white women voted for Trump.
speaking of which…
White women.
Hillary Clinton blamed white women for her election
loss.
Rather than acknowledge they may not have voted for her
simply because they didn’t like her policies, she refused to accept
that not every single woman in the USA was on her side, pinning the
blame instead on the men in their lives
You know, for a woman who claims she’s a feminist, she doesn’t
seem to have a very high opinion of women, if she thinks they are
that easily swayed by men.
Also…
White people generally.
In an interview with PBS, Hillary referenced so-called “white resentment” as something
that lost her the election
“Trump was quite successful in referencing a nostalgia that would
give hope, comfort, settle grievances, for millions of people who
were upset about gains that were made by others … millions of white
people."
Okay.
Hillary can call it that if it helps her sleep at night, but anyone
with any sense can see the difference between giving hope to
socially and economically anxious votes, and stoking racial
grievances.
Aside from anything else, those same white people
elected a black president in 2008, and then again in 2012.
Also, according to exit polls, less white people voted for
Trump than did for Mitt Romney in 2012, and more white people
voted for Obama, a black man, than for Hillary Clinton, a white
woman.
And many of the white people who voted for Trump in states like
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin voted for Obama twice.
So, blaming some sort of white racial resentment
inherent to America would seem especially flawed.
Then, of course, there’s Russia.
I don’t think I really need to elaborate too much on exactly how Hillary
has blamed Russia; we all know the story.
And while Russia did attempt to meddle in the 2016
election, independently of Trump, it was in the form of ads on
Facebook, and the influence they had was debateable.
Needless to say, there are many more factors to Trump’s
win than a bunch of Russians diddling on the Internet.
Then there was “fake news”
Of course, the real world consequences of this allegedly fake news
she was talking about was the election of Donald Trump.
Yet another example of her refusal to accept the results
of a legitimately conducted election, and attempts to delegitimize
Trump’s presidency right from the get go.
The very few times she’s ever blamed, you know, herself are mostly
in reference to external things, like using a private email server and
the negative press it generated.
Or, the backhanded way she referred to her failed election campaign in
her book “What Happened”
"Still, in terms of fighting the previous war, I think it's fair to say that I
didn't realize how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet.
I was running a traditional presidential campaign
with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built
coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly
and relentlessly stoked Americans' anger and resentment."
So, rather than say, “my campaign was flawed”, she said, “my
campaign was fine; it’s everyone else who was the problem”.
Thing is, while Hillary Clinton may have suffered a bit of heat from
the media at inopportune times, and while naughty Russians may
have fiddled and diddled a little bit on Facebook; Donald Trump was
dealing with the entirety of the news media smearing him as a racist
sexist white supremacist with an army of racist sexist white
supremacist followers who sought to institute racism sexism and
white supremacy in the USA.
Notice a theme?
Plus there was the access Hollywood tape.
So, sorry, Hillary, but you weren’t the only one copping a whole lot of
calculated smears during your election campaign.
Compared to Trump, she fared very well.
The reality is that despite all the spin from Hillary and her supporters,
despite all the claims of fake news or misogyny or racist white
women or Russian bots or a pink flying spaghetti monster which I am
sure they would blame if they could, the reason Hillary Clinton lost
the 2016 US election was that she was a bad candidate, who ran a
bad campaign.
You can pull all the votes from the trendies on the coasts you want,
but at the end of the day, you can’t ignore and then ridicule working
class Middle America, threaten to take their coal mining jobs away,
appeal to every identity group in the country except straight white
men, who you eventually call deplorables, and dangle super rich
celebrities like Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus in their faces while you do it.
That’s not going to win any elections.
Nor is basing your campaign on the principle of, “I’m a woman, he’s a
misogynist, so vote for me or you’re a misogynist.”
All in all, Hillary Clinton deserves the title of “World’s Sorest Loser”.
This self-proclaimed role model for women is really a bitter,
immature, egomaniacal megalomaniac, who should really learn a
lesson in decorum and good sportsmanship.
And I sincerely hope she doesn’t take Tulsi up on her challenge to
run again.
America, and indeed the whole world, deserves better.