Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI) made a small splash Tuesday with her announcement that she was leaving the Democratic Party because “it's now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers, driven by cowardly wokeness.”
She had the cowardly part right. The Democrats should long ago have condemned and distanced themselves from Gabbard, an opportunist who has fought against Democratic values most of her adult life.
The closest Democrats came to disowning Gabbard came after her February speech to the far-right 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPACP, where she noted that she felt "right at home,” Honolulu Civil Beat reported. After Gabbard used her CPAC platform to rail against “woke and cancel culture,” she was censured by Hawaii Democrats, the report said. And it added this:
“Back at home on the same day, however, members of a subcommittee of the Oahu County Committee of the Democratic Party of Hawaii approved a resolution on a 15-2 vote that condemned Gabbard for participating in an event that raised funds “that will harm Democrats across the country and make it harder to achieve the goals” of the party.
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The resolution calls for the Oahu County Committee to form an ad hoc panel to investigate whether Gabbard — who represented Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District from 2013 to 2021 — violated the party’s bylaws, constitution and/or platform.
There was talk about expulsion that apparently did not materialize. But a better question is why it took so long for more Democrats to call out Gabbard, who had run as a Democrat for president from February 2019 to March 2020.
One who did was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spoke of Gabbard – without directly naming her – in a 2019 podcast:
“She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she’s also a Russian asset.”
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Reuters reported that had prompted a $50 million defamation suit against Clinton by Gabbard in January 2022. But the suit was dropped just four months later.
Earlier this year, Forbes published a report linking Gabbard to Sharon Tennison, who it described as “an American activist…and a Putin apologist” who defended his invasion of Ukraine.
That piece also charged that “Gabbard has long taken pro-Russian positions, most recently when she gave credence to a baseless Russian-supported conspiracy about U.S. involvement in biological-weapons laboratories in Ukraine.”
But Gabbard’s dubious record on Democratic Party long preceded her views on Russia. The Advocate Tuesday criticized her as “an anti-LGBTQ+ politician.” Here’s part of its report:
“Gabbard, the first Hindu elected to Congress, represented a Hawaii district in the U.S. House from 2013 to 2021. Before that she was a state representative and a member of the Hawaii City Council. While she was a state representative in 2004, she denounced “homosexual extremists,” who, she said, were falsely claiming there was a difference between civil unions and marriage. Hawaii was considering civil union legislation at the time. She also used the phrase to describe opponents of her father, Mike Gabbard, who ran an organization that worked against marriage equality and other LGBTQ+ causes, and reportedly endorsed conversion therapy.”
And there was this:
“On her way out of Congress in 2020, she introduced a bill to bar transgender girls and women from competing in female sports nationwide; it went nowhere. In April of this year, she posted a video to social media saying Florida’s “don’t say gay” law doesn’t go far enough in censoring the discussion of sexuality and gender identity in public schools. “As I read the legislation, I gotta tell you, I was shocked to learn that it only protects kids from kindergarten till third grade,” she said. “Third grade? What about 12th grade or not at all?”
The Daily Beast coverage of Gabbard’s CPAC speech summarized the new Gabbard posture:
“She praised special counsel John Durham’s probe of the investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election (which she portrayed as one into “Clinton corruption,” another conservative talking point about one of Gabbard’s political enemies). She hailed parents who have fought back against school boards who she said threatened how they were “raising their kids.” She also propped up the idea of “cancel culture” for those who tried to criticize the current administration.
“But she said the CPAC attendees—still without using the word “conservative”—will lead the battle to fight back against Democrats.
“We have decided that we belong to no one but God,” she said. “We are not subjects or slaves of those who govern and by God’s grace, we are free and we will fight to remain free.”