President Tulsi?

An old friend of mine called the other day to say she wanted to congratulate me on the post I wrote exposing Tulsi Gabbard as a fraud a couple of years ago and that she planned to send it around her social media circles. I told her two things, first that I had written dozens of posts exposing Tulsi as a fraud so I was unsure which one she meant and second, that I had had an opportunity to sit down and speak with Tulsi at length recently and that I am less likely to express antipathy towards her and more likely to listen to what she has to say with an open mind. I noted that Pramila Jayapal had just reintroduced the Medicare-For-All bill, and that Tulsi signed on as a co-sponsor immediately (unlike 45 other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who refused to) and that although just 45 members of Congress had committed to the Green New Deal, Tulsi was one of the very first AND that when I was beating the bushes to find some brave souls to join AOC and Ro Khanna in opposing the virulently anti-progressive PAY-GO scam, the only person I persuaded to do so was Tulsi.

That doesn't mean I'm going to vote for her to be president-- nor did it keep me from publishing a guest post from state Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging her to a primary for her seat while she runs for president.

Over the weekend, Tulsi launched her presidential campaign with a full-blown progressive wish-list. She was raised, I'm told, to believe she would one day be president. She seems like a long-shot now but... you have to start somewhere. She's starting by going hard after the foreign policy establishment, long her main area of interest. "We must stand united and stand strong against those in both parties who never tire of war-- neocons and neolibs who drag us from one regime-change war to the next and who are exacerbating the new Cold War, pushing us to the brink of nuclear war... We must stand against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage & new places for people to die. Wasting trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, undermining our economy and security, and destroying our middle class... These powerful politicians dishonor the sacrifices made by every one of our service members, and their families-- they are the ones who pay the price for these wars."

Even before she announced, corporate media was on the attack, accusing her of being the Russian tool in the cycle. Robert Windrem and Ben Popken wrote for NBC News that "the Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 U.S. election is now promoting the presidential aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat who earlier this month declared her intention to run for president in 2020" and reporting that "an NBC News analysis of the main English-language news sites employed by Russia in its 2016 election meddling shows Gabbard... has become a favorite of the sites Moscow used when it interfered in 2016... RT, the Russian-owned TV outlet; Sputnik News, a radio outlet; and Russia Insider, a blog that experts say closely follows the Kremlin line."

All three sites celebrated Gabbard's announcement, defended her positions on Russia and her 2017 meeting with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, and attacked those who have suggested she is a pawn for Moscow. The coverage devoted to Gabbard, both in news and commentary, exceeds that afforded to any of the declared or rumored Democratic candidates despite Gabbard's lack of voter recognition.

Gabbard was mentioned on the three sites about twice as often as two of the best known Democratic possibilities for 2020, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, each with 10 stories. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren had fewer. In each case, the other contenders were treated more critically than Gabbard... "Her promulgation of positions compatible with Russian geo strategic interests can help them mainstream such discussion in the [Democratic] party," said Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook and now an NBC News analyst. Gabbard, said Stamos, helps them with all their "lines of attack."

...Gabbard's most controversial position and the one where she's most in line with Russian interests is on Syria. She's accused the U.S. of pushing a policy of "regime change" wars and in January 2017, she met with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria on what she called a "fact-finding mission."

RT began defending Gabbard as soon as she announced. A behavioral science expert who studies social media tweeted out a vow on Jan. 11 to start a GoFundMe campaign to finance a reporting trip to Gabbard's Hawaii district. Reporters for RT's television network pounced, calling it "an investigative vacation" and a "beachside investigation" by an "establishment Democrat."

On Jan. 12, the day after Gabbard announced, RT headlined her decision this way: "'Putin puppet' vs 'Assad shill': Dems & Reps unite in panic over Gabbard challenging Trump in 2020."

The unsigned article claimed, "With Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) entering the 2020 presidential fray, establishment figures on both Right and Left are scrambling to smear the anti-war congresswoman with impeccable identity-politics bona fides. Ever since her 2017 visit to Syria, Gabbard has been condemned for daring to seek firsthand accounts rather than blindly trusting the MSM narrative, so on Friday the pundits were again off to the races, with fresh accusations of Assad-sympathizing."

On Jan. 16, Lee Stranahan, one of the co-hosts on Fault Line, a Washington-based program on Sputnik News, admitted that the debates should be the focus for Gabbard.

"The significant thing about her being in the race is because one of her main issues is peace and specifically on Syria, where she is telling the truth on Syria," said Stranahan, who joined Sputnik after stints at Breitbart News, the right-wing news site. "I think she is going to change the debate. If she can get through the first few months, and make it to actual debates, is there a big millionaire or billionaire that will support Tulsi Gabbard."

The same day, conservative writer Hunter Derensis noted on Russia Insider, "In line with her thinking on Syria, she lacks the anti-Russian stance of other Democratic politicians. 'How does going to war with Russia over Syria serve the interest of the American people?' she mentioned in a tweet. Gabbard has also supported Trump's diplomatic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in one of her multiple appearances with Tucker Carlson."

That story was headlined, "Heroic Tulsi Gabbard Will Run on Her Sensible Foreign Policy. Expect Democrats, Faux Progressives to Squeal."

In articles on the Russian sites, Gabbard is described as a "rebel," who is "straight-talking" and a "heroic" candidate who will "shake up" the establishment.

Coverage of other Democratic presidential hopefuls in pro-Kremlin media has been for the most part perfunctory, limited to candidates' announcements or summaries of their relative prospects. In recent weeks, Sputnik has poked fun at Elizabeth Warren's beer commercial and a widely circulated photo of Beto O'Rourke's in a dentist chair.

Erika Tsuji, a spokeswoman for Gabbard, said it as "ridiculous" to suggest the Russians supported her candidacy.

"Russia would never overtly support a candidate they wanted to help, because it would just hurt their candidacy," said Tsuji. "It’s common sense."

Tsuji also said that "From the start, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has denounced Russia's attempts to muddle (sic) in our elections and will continue to do so." She noted that Gabbard had cosponsored legislation calling for an independent investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, cosponsored a bill prohibiting foreign influence in the election process, and sponsored a bill to protect election infrastructure from hackers.

Experts in Russian on-line propaganda say Gabbard appeals to pro-Russian sites because her positions —and her appeal as an outsider in her own party — can be used to create division among Democrats.

Former FBI agent Clint Watts, author of Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News, said Gabbard has past or present positions on several issues that would be attractive to the Russian propaganda machine, and she is already popular with the U.S. "alt-left." Besides her views on Syria, she responded to reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election by saying the U.S. had interfered in foreign elections too.

...Watts and Stamos think the Russians may be gravitating to Gabbard not because they think she can win, but because her positions, often in line with those of the Kremlin, will become part of the Democratic primary debates.

"They probably just spotted her and figured this is someone to promote," said Watts, who is also an NBC News analyst. "You can just see it coming. They're telegraphing what coming the next two years, which is playing in the left."

"They want someone like Gabbard to voice a Russian position. They are not telling her what to say but they want her pro-Russian positions play into the debate."

Stamos agrees that Gabbard could be used to inject pro-Russian positions into the Democratic Party's discussions and debates during primary season.

"We should expect the Russian intel services and troll farms to be active in the Democratic primary process," said Stamos, "as this provides them with the best opportunity to create the most division in American society in 2020."

In the weeks before her "informal" announcement of candidacy on CNN and Saturday's "official" announcement, all three of Hawaii’s most influential columnists hadwritten anti-Tulsi pieces. That's unusual for Hawaii. Lee Cataluna, from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser is the most influential and his column Despite masking, Gabbard’s words remainwas devastating. He wrote that Tulsi has "a past full of gaping holes, hateful words and bigoted intentions that she fully expects people to ignore... Like other politicians and celebrities of our time, Gabbard is an expert in curating her image. Her public self is softened by filters. There’s lots of stuff edited or cropped out. Gabbard can try to brush away hateful things she said about LGBT people in her not-so-long-ago youth, but the unedited truth is that she didn’t just slip and say a bad word, she actively, passionately worked against the legalization of same-sex marriage. She belonged to a group of rabid advocates of 'traditional' marriage. She went to meetings, she strategized, she participated, she took action. She didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid served by her LGBT-hating parents; she helped them make the juice... Nobody takes her as seriously as she takes herself. Her intended climb is precipitous, and the baggage she carries is heavy, laden with a history of organized, strategized homophobia. She says she’s changed. She’ll say whatever she needs to say."

Covering Kirsten Gillibrand's announcement that she was running for president, CNN correspondent Dan Merica quoted Gillibrand's response to "questions about her policy shifts 10 years ago when she moved from the House to the Senate." Gillibrand has been telling the media this:

"I think it is important to know when you are wrong and to do what is right."

At that point-- this point-- it's up to each voter to determine if Gillibrand's statement is sincere, authentic and believable. I am certain that it isn't. She may have changed her mind that xenophobia doesn't best serve her career opportunities as well as it did when she was the poster child for New York's anti-immigrant campaign and she may have changed her mind that being the New York State poster child for the NRA doesn't best serve her career opportunities as well as it did when she represented a rural upstate congressional district. But I know her well enough that she never cared about either of these policy agendas. She didn't care about them when she was playing the race card and the gun-nut card and she doesn't care about them when she's pretending to be pro-immigrant and anti-gun. None of this is important to Kirsten Gillibrand. She's another political sociopath that doesn't think beyond herself and her career-- the very worst of what American politics pukes up from time to time. So what about Tulsi? Cataluna seems to have made his mind up. Now the rest of us are going to have to.