Tulsi goes to CPAC

While I like the concept of the Libertarian Party, supporting maximum freedom and individual rights, I will admit to not having much use for it. The primary function of a political party is to bring like-minded people together to win elections, to get their policies and principles into governing power; that’s the definition given to me by Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky, back in the horse-and-buggy days.

And that is where the Libertarian Party fails: whether people like its positions or not, the party fails in its most important function, getting people elected to office. On June 8, 2018, I went to the Libertarian Party’s website, to find their list of Libertarian Party candidates who were actually elected to public office. They claimed a total of 166 elected officials, with 52 of them holding partisan offices. Their highest, at the time, elected officials were three state representatives from New Hampshire, all of whom were elected as Republicans or Democrats, and none of whom were re-elected.

Representative Justin Amash (L-MI) switched to the Libertarian Party, due to his disagreements with President Trump, but he, too, was elected as a Republican. To date, there have been exactly zero candidates running as Libertarians who have been elected President, Senator, United States Representative, Governor, state Senator or state Representatives. For a party which has been around since 1971, that’s a pretty massive failure.

Former Representative Ron Paul, elected as a Republican, was the Libertarian Party candidate for President in 1988. Following that, he won the House seat again in 1996, and served in the House of Representatives until January of 2013. He twice ran for the Republican presidential nomination, in 2008 and 2012, failing both times.

His son, Rand Paul, was elected to represent Kentucky in the United States Senate in 2010, as a Republican, and re-elected in 2016; he is currently running for a third term, and is heavily favored. The Bluegrass State is home to two of the libertarian Republicans, with Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4), first elected in 2012. Dr Paul and Mr Massie used the TEA Party movement to help win election.

The electoral history has been simple: lower-case libertarians can win, if they run as Republicans, but running as upper-case Libertarians, the lose, and lose badly.

Now comes former Representative Tulsi Garrard Williams (D-HI 2). A Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination herself in 2020, but withdrew on March 19, and endorsed Joe Biden after doing poorly. The odious Hillary Clinton later floated rumors that Mrs Williams was going to run as a third-party candidate, to throw the 2020 election to President Trump. Mrs Williams is very much a liberal, but she’s also a libertarian, believing in people’s individual rights.

    Contrarian Dem Tulsi Gabbard To Headline CPAC

    by Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets Columnist | Monday, February 21, 2022 | 9:19 AM EST

    Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a 2020 presidential primary candidate who has been critical of President Joe Biden and liberal lawmakers, will be the headliner at the main CPAC dinner event this week, officials told Secrets Monday.

    Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman, will speak at the annual Ronald Reagan Dinner held by the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Glenn Beck is slated to be the keynote.

    Having a popular Democrat speak at the group’s main dinner, to be held Friday, is an “extraordinary event,” said a spokeswoman.

    Gabbard has recently roiled Democratic circles with her criticism of Biden’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine crisis and decision to only consider a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. She has also blasted Vice President Kamala Harris as a weak vice president.

    CPAC opens in Orlando Thursday and ends Sunday. Former President Donald Trump and virtually every conservative politician and pundit is expected to speak.

Again, Mrs Williams is no conservative, but her inclusion at CPAC tells us one thing: the GOP has completely co-opted libertarianism, and the future for the Libertarian Party is to stop being stupid, and become part of the Republican Party to which it naturally belongs.

Conservatives will never go along with everything for which the Libertarian Party stands, but there is much we can appreciate. And today’s Democratic Party, with its ‘progressive’ bent, is one which demands conformity over individuality, one which seeks to punish those who do not go along with its social demands and conformity policies. Mrs Williams may support universal health care, and even a guaranteed annual income, but she also supports our First Amendment rights, supports freedom of speech, and of the press, and or religion, of peaceable assembly, and due process of law. She has called out President Biden and his saber-rattling (sanctions-rattling?) against Russia, in a matter in which we cannot stop President Putin from taking. She has criticized his odious vaccine mandates. She was the best candidate the Democrats had, and while Republicans would have been upset that President Trump had lost, we wouldn’t be nearly as upset with Mrs Williams as President as we are with the dummkopf from Delaware and his ‘progressive’ filled administration.

The Dems blew off the best they had!

One thing I’ve said all along: while Republicans wouldn’t have been happy that President Trump lost, if the Democrats had nominated then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI) in 2020, we’d have been a lot happier with the outcome than we are about Joe Biden being President.

Make no mistake about it: Mrs Williams is very much a liberal. But she’s a lieutenant colonel in the Hawai’i National Guard, and has served in Iraq and Kuwait. Most importantly, she understands and respects our individual liberties. Were she President today, she would be strongly encouraging vaccinations, but she’d never try to order them.

Tulsi Gabbard Williams is very much a leftist, but the left hate her anyway Why? It's because she believes in our constitutional rights!

JVW, one of the regular posters on Patterico’s Pontifications, and the one who was least infected with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, calls her his Little Aloha Sweetie, and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI 2nd) was the most sensible — not that that’s saying a whole lot — of the Cavalcade of Clowns running for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. She is a true left liberal. From her Wikipedia biography:

Tulsi Gabbard (/ˈtʌlsi ˈɡæbərd/; born April 12, 1981) is an American politician and United States Army Reserve officer who served as the U.S. Representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021. Elected in 2012, she was the first Hindu member of Congress and also the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress. In early February 2019 she announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election.[1][2]

In 2002, Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives at the age of 21.[3] Gabbard served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009 as an Army Military Police platoon leader.[4][5][6] She was a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 to 2016, when she resigned to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Gabbard supports a two-tier universal health care plan that she calls “Single Payer Plus”[7][8][9] and strengthening Roe v. Wade by codifying it into federal law. Her position has evolved on the issue and she now believes that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”, although it is not a choice she would personally make.[10][11] She co-sponsored the Family Act for paid family and medical leave and endorsed universal basic income.[12][13][14] She opposes military interventionism,[15][16] although she has called herself a “hawk” on terrorism.[17] Her decision to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and her skeptical approach to two claims that he had used chemical weapons[18][19] were controversial.[20]

On March 19, 2020, Gabbard dropped out of the 2020 presidential race and endorsed Joe Biden. She had already withdrawn from her U.S. House re-election race during her presidential campaign and was succeeded by Kai Kahele on January 3, 2021.[21]

Mrs Williams greatest claim to fame in that primary was how she eviscerated Senator Kamala Harris Emhoff (D-CA) in the debates. That helped to torpedo Mrs Emhoff’s campaign, but, sadly, the eventual nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, selected her to be his vice presidential running mate. Mrs Emhoff is now Vice President of the United States, while Mrs Williams is out of public office. 🙁

But if she’s a leftist, Mrs Williams is one other thing: she’s a libertarian (not Libertarian), in that she believes in really radical things like freedom of speech. and privacy rights. The 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disliked Mrs Williams enough that she ‘hinted’ that JVW’s Little Aloha Sweetie was actually a Russian stalking horse, and that the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would use her as a third party candidate to try to split the liberal vote and hand the election to President Donald Trump.

Of course, Mrs Clinton has always found someone else to blame for her loss:

Clinton also said she thought Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, was a Russian asset: “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset – I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”

Bitter much? https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif

From National Review:

Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Is ‘a Targeting of Almost Half of the Country’

By Brittany Bernstein | January 23, 2021 | 10:05 AM

Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii, on Friday expressed concern that a proposed measure to combat domestic terrorism could be used to undermine civil liberties.

Gabbard’s comments came during an appearance on Fox News Primetime when host Brian Kilmeade asked her if she was “surprised they’re pushing forward with this extra surveillance on would-be domestic terror.”

“It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said.

No, we don’t have to guess about how things like this end; the results have been seen around the world.

She continued: “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.”

She said her concern lies in how officials will define the characteristics they are searching for in potential threats.

“What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this?” Gabbard said.

As noted above, Mrs Williams supports abortion, but, how about that, she was concerned for the rights of those of us who are pro-life. We saw Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) try to impose her own religious test on then nominee to the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and now Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, because Mrs Barrett is pro-life, yet Mrs Williams, who is pro-abortion, could support the rights of, shockingly, Catholics!

I’m old enough to remember how the left were the ones who insisted that Freedom of Speech was absolute, and how The New York Times fought for Freedom of the Press. Today, it seems, that the left are all for restricting freedom for those with whom they disagree, using the January 6th kerfuffle — and yes, that’s what it was, a kerfuffle, blown wholly out of proportion by liberals — as an excuse, but, as we’ve noted before, the attempts to restrict freedom of speech were already happening.

The Washington Post, which has the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its masthead, has, on its website, several articles all bemoaning the Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

The hypocrisy is astounding! The Post certainly defended its freedom of the press, in its own piece of the Pentagon Papers case, but now the editors and the newspapers’ columnists seem to want darkness to fall on people and opinions they dislike. No wonder the left hate Tulsi Gabbard Williams.