Tulsi Gabbard was not expected to be the source of fireworks on debate night, but I’m sure that before the debate started, she would have liked that spotlight.
She got her wish, and I am not so sure it was the kind of attention she wanted.
After calling Hillary Clinton - the winner of more votes for president than anyone in history except for Barack Obama - the queen of warmongers, her combat with the former Secretary of State was sure to come up. It did, pretty early in the debate when Gabbard was asked what she meant by her pointed attacks at the woman who is now turning out to be prescient in her 2016 warnings about Donald Trump.
After a canned answer from Gabbard, Sen. Kamala Harris got to answer. Sen. Harris is known for her sharp jabs, and Gabbard learned exactly what that’s like. Harris mopped the floor with Fox News’s favorite Democrat
““I think that it’s unfortunate that we have someone on the stage who is attempting to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, who during the Obama administration spent four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama…who has spent full time criticizing people on this stage,””
Watch the video:
Kamala Harris went after Tulsi Gabbard for attacking Democrats and going on Fox News https://t.co/mGd9OJaUqd pic.twitter.com/KxuiFqWNEK
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 21, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
That’s going to leave a mark. The worst part for Gabbard? Not a single candidate came to her defense. Not even Bernie Sanders, whose campaign Gabbard had supported in 2016.
Gabbard tried to claim relevance again later in the debate. In an exchange with fellow veteran Pete Buttigieg, Gabbard attacked Buttigieg’s judgment for recent comments that he would send American troops to Mexico to cooperate with the Mexican government to fight the cartels. It appeared headed for a boring tit-for-tat, until it became clear what Buttigieg had been dying to unleash: he clocked Gabbard hard for her meeting with war criminal and Syrian pro-Russia dictator Bashar Al Assad.
Gabbard tried to pick up the pieces by comparing her meeting with Assad to President Eisenhower’s meeting with USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev and other historic high level meetings among adversaries, but Buttigieg was apparently prepared for that too, clipping Gabbard with “like Donald Trump met with (North Korean dictator) Kim Jung Un.”
At another point in the debate, Gabbard got the first chance to answer a question about white supremacist violence being the biggest domestic terrorist threat in the United States according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. She never even uttered the term ‘white supremacist’, choosing instead to talk about ‘racial’ discrimination and bigotry, and the criminal justice system. Domestic terrorism is, of course, more than a question of the reforming the criminal justice system.
It’s anyone’s guess as to why Gabbard refuses to utter that term, but it probably didn’t hurt that she has been endorsed by KKK leader David Duke and inspired the rebranding and relaunching of the white nationalist station ‘Stormfront Radio’ as The Morning Aloha Report.
I guess when you have it this good, you don’t want to ruin it by bringing up the fact that the people supporting you are the voice of domestic terrorists.
I will leave it up to pundits to figure out who had a “good” night at the November debate. But I am pretty sure Gabbard had the worst night.
Pretty happy about that.