There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike Gabbard, but none of them have anything to do with why she has faced universal unrelenting hostility from the Dem establishment and press.
Possibly the most useful part of the Gabbard campaign is that it made it clear that the whole “support and respect our Troops™️” thing was always utter bullshit.
Troops saying we need to go kill more brown people: full bipartisan support.
Troops who dare to speak honestly about the murderous corruption of US imperialism: no holds barred, go ahead and accuse them of being traitors. Evidence not required, the centrists will happily jump on board.
Since I’ve been pretty negative on Tulsi on BB, I want to say something positive about her. When she became the 4th member of my state’s Washington delegation, I was totally skeptical, simply because her family and the Butler cult have been regular news here as long as I can remember, and not in a good way. Her stint on our state legislature was dire (not only for her opposition to legal gay marriage), and she was worse on the 2011-12 stint on our city council (she sponsored legislation that targeted Occupy demonstrators and homeless people, one of the reasons I’ve found the way some segments of the left have embraced her just ignorant).
However, when she got to Washington she seemed to have genuinely changed her worldview and, while she was no Patsy Mink, overall I was pretty happy with her as our second congressperson. Given her ambition, which is famous here, I was especially impressed with the way she quit the DNC leadership in reaction to their abuse of their authority in the 2016 election.
Unfortunately, interviewing with Trump for a cabinet position, and then launching her presidential bid by attacking Mazie Hirono (who is beloved here), seemed to signal a reversion to type, and it is hard to know anymore what if anything she really has in mind. Fortunately, she is not standing for reelection, and with luck she will just disappear into the FOX universe.
When it’s contentious I like to use wikionary since they’ve probably had the same argument 10+ years ago and gone over all the edge cases etc and require pretty good sourcing.
Technically we’re both right since like many words it has multiple meanings
Or, being inclined to read things in plain English until there is a reason to believe that terms of art are being bandied, an “asset” is something of value. As in, “when trying to get from here to there, a good map is an asset.” It need, please note, not be owned – just available for use. Enough stories have used the phrase “unwitting asset” that you can find the term (even striking everything with “trump,” “gabbard,” “russia” and lots more) in thousands of instances. The fact that Clinton was not even specific as to the subjects of the cited Russian favor?
Yeah, I don’t see it going past the first motion to dismiss.
Gabbard will try to make the case that Clinton, having been a high-ranking national security official who’s prone to usingtechnocratic jargon*, used it as a term of art. But as you say, there’s no way she can prove it in this case.
[* “Basket of deplorables”, for example, smacks of marketing-speak]
They were actually doing that then, too, and it didn’t justify that witch hunt. The fact that they’re doing that doesn’t make everyone who disagrees with you a Russian asset.
That only scratches the surface, though. After the fall of the Soviet Union , it was discovered that they had much bigger US operations than most Americans suspected at all.
