No, enemies on the Left

I can't with this Tulsi Gabbard shit

During the Mueller investigation, a bunch of lefter-than-thou types laughed at silly liberals for hoping it would catch fire. Russia, hah! they scoffed. Why, it’s like the Red Scare of old, except now Russia is a capitalist kleptocracy and the target is a fascist American President rather than Dalton Trumbo.

Matt Taibbi was deep in there and actually wrote something called “Russiagate is this generation’s WMD.” (I would say Taibbi, who has written some good stuff, is a massive disappointment, but then I remember his old man Mike Taibbi’s bullshit “investigation” of the Missing Foundation back in the Tompkins Square Riot days and think maybe the apple just doesn’t fall far from the tree.)

Taibbi is pulling something similar with impeachment — how dare we call the person who prompted it a “whistleblower” while Chelsea Manning rots in jail! But he’s not too overtly anti-impeachment; we’ve come to the shit-or-get-off-the-pot stage, and I guess Taibbi doesn’t want to get caught offsides with the JustTheTip Trumpers who claim to object to Trump but defend him against even the most damning testimony.

But Taibbi has rallied to the cause of one of the few anti-hashtag-Resistance heroes in whose company a leftist may be seen without embarrassment. Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich may be de trop, but there’s always room for Tulsi Gabbard:

Everyone Is a Russian Asset
America laughed at Hillary Clinton’s remarks about Tulsi Gabbard, but her ideas fit perfectly in the intellectual mainstream

And what is this “mainstream” that fans of Gabbard (polling under 3%) represent?*

Everyone is foreign scum these days. Democrats spent three years trying to prove Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is “Moscow Mitch.” Third party candidates are a Russian plot. The Bernie Sanders movement is not just a wasteland of racist and misogynist “Bros,” but — according to intelligence agencies and mainstream pundits alike — the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to “stoke the divide” within the Democratic Party. The Joe Rogan independents attracted to the mild antiwar message of Tulsi Gabbard are likewise traitors and dupes for the Kremlin.

If you’re keeping score, that’s pretty much the whole spectrum of American political thought, excepting MSNBC Democrats. What a coincidence!

I’m a longtime Sanders supporter and I never felt that calling Mitch McConnell “Moscow Mitch” was an affront to my beliefs or sense of propriety. It’s not that I believe he’s a Russian agent; it’s that my contempt for him is bottomless, and I ain’t too fond of Russia, either. It’s like someone calling him Satan’s bitch. I don’t even believe in Satan, much less that Mitch McConnell is his bitch, but I’m not going to waste my precious outrage reserves defending either of them from the charge. Leave that to such friends as they may have.

(Also, I don’t see any evidence that Joe Rogan is more mainstream than MSNBC. Yes, I know he has a lot of YouTube views and podcast listeners, but so do pet videos and This American Life. )

The #Resistance has come up with all sorts of words for such fifth-columnists and deviationists [as Gabbard]: they are “false-balancers” or “false equivalencers,” “neo-Naderites,” “purity-testers,” “both-sidesists,” “whataboutists,” “horseshoe theorists,” “Russia skeptics” or “Russia denialists,” and “anti-anti-Trumpers.” Such heretics are all ultimately seen as being on “team Putin.”

I haven’t used any of those terms and I don’t think Gabbard is working for Putin. I do think Gabbard is, wittingly or not, a Republican asset. There are, for evidence, the several Fox News appearances she’s made, slagging the party she professes to want to lead into electoral battle; Fox frequently returns the favor (“Tulsi Gabbard echoes Republican frustrations with impeachment inquiry: ‘I don’t know what’s going on in those closed doors’”). There’s also her weird run of insults against the previous nominee, and its aftermath. From Vice:

Of the 30 top-performing Facebook posts measured by interactions during that span, the analytics tool CrowdTangle says that 15 have come from Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Fox News and its personalities, and own-the-libs pundit Ben Shapiro. Most of the others likewise come from right-wing pages; no mainstream media outlet cracked the list.

You don’t have to be Jim Garrison to figure that shit out. And then there’s Newt Gingrich defending Gabbard from Kamala Harris, who called her out in Wednesday’s debate, with this “she’d be prettier if she smiled” bullshit clearly meant to appeal to Gabbard’s Republican constituents:

Bobby Lewis @revrrlewis

Newt Gingrich: Tulsi Gabbard has a great smile in contrast to Kamala Harris, who's always struggling and attacking. But wow, Tulsi's smile

I don’t blame her for the actions of Republican ratfuckers but she could do something to discourage it — like not go on their TV shows and dish her own party. I’ve heard Gabbard’s wingnut footsie described as outreach to winnable Trump voters, which is as ridiculous as any defense of Joe Biden’s alleged outreach to winnable Trump voters — and at least we all know Biden’s not going to run third party if he doesn’t get the Democratic nomination.

Gabbard is the alternative to Bernie Sanders for soreheads who realize Sanders is actually trying to win as a Democrat and who are too socially anxious to say that’s why they can’t support him, so they cleave instead to the anti-imperialist National Guardsman (this is a big year for soldiers turning on the establishment!) who just might fuck up the election for the Democrats. Helter Skelter, worser the better!

God knows I wanted to like her. She’s super cute and I agree with many of her positions (even though she’s a total trimmer on health care; “If you look at other countries in the world who have universal health care, every one of them has some form of a role for private insurance” is like saying “you have to realize that in The Most Dangerous Game some humans are just going to be caught and killed”).

But none of that matters if you can’t trust her. If she made a video and said “I reject the support of Newt Gingrich and defend my comrade Kamala Harris because” and then said something meaningful — not “we disagree on key issues” but something like “the Republican Party is a criminal conspiracy and an existential menace, and when Trump met with me in 2016 he tried to roofie my drink” — I could take her candidacy seriously. But you and I and Matt Tiabbi know she won’t.

* Commenter Jeffrey Kramer points out that, in the linked article, “mainstream” refers to the anti-Gabbardites, not the Gabbardites. On re-reading it I think Kramer is right — though it’s hard to tell from the jumble of Taibbi’s prose. So set that little point outside — all the rest of it about Taibbi’s advocacy of Gabbard still goes.