Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s search to find bipartisan solutions to our national security problems may have gotten her in hot water with the higher ups at the DNC. Now, super liberal blog the Daily Kos is calling for her to be primaried:
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who claims to be a member of the Democratic Party, recently took a secret freelance trip to Syria without informing either Paul Ryan or Nancy Pelosi, as would be customary. And on her return, she tried to keep up the secrecy, refusing to say whether she met with the country’s murderous autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad.
On Wednesday, with pressure mounting, she finally admitted she did just that, shocking the hell out of Republicans and Democrats alike. After all, who would grant Assad legitimacy like that? Yet Gabbard still refused to explain who had paid for her excursion—only to later claim it had been funded by an obscure group from Ohio (which is not, you might note, the state Gabbard represents) that doesn’t even have a functioning website.
This is ridiculous. Assad is, without question, a bad guy, but leaders in the Arab world tend to be terrible people. The presumption that whatever follows Assad in Syria will be something less violent and more tolerant is so much wishful thinking. There is no easy answer here. The recent history of Iraq and Libya should serve as a reminder of that.
Unlike most Democrats, Gabbard fully appreciates the threat posed by radical Islam. Her meeting might have been uncustomary and inappropriate, but it’s low on the list of Democratic foreign policy blunders. It’s worth noting that former Secretary of State John Kerry is honored by the Communist government of Vietnam, and that, at the height of the Cold War, revered Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy asked the Russians to interfere in the presidential election. Gabbard’s sin seems to be seeking to better understand a regional conflict that could have serious potential implications for the United States. It is highly excusable. Eight years of failed Democratic foreign policy that got us into this mess are not.
