Before she became a progressive darling for endorsing Sanders, Gabbard became a conservative darling for relentlessly hawking the idea — later popularized by Trump — that Obama’s foreign policy was failing because he refused to use the term “Islamic extremism,” or some variation of it.

Gabbard is also a pretty reliably progressive voice in the House on a host of domestic issues. As far back as 2012, she was calling for restoring Glass-Steagall. She opposed any cuts to Medicare or Social Security under the Obama-backed Simpson-Bowles proposal. She believes Obamacare didn’t go far enough and supports universal health care. She’s against nuclear energy, pushed to curb the NSA’s bulk collection of data, and personally protested the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Unsavory aspects of her politics

Yet the starry-eyed anointment of Gabbard has obscured the more unsavory aspects of her politics — so unsavory, in fact, that White House adviser Steve Bannon has reportedly spoken well of her. From her vigorous opposition to the Iran nuclear deal to her obsession with “radical Islam” to her love for the far-right Indian leader Narendra Modi, Gabbard is far from the progressive hero many assume her to be.

espite her progressive image today, Gabbard has conservative roots. Her father is Mike Gabbard, a former Honolulu city councilman, state senator, and high profile anti-gay activist who led a campaign against same-sex marriage in Hawaii in the 1990s. He founded the educational nonprofit Stop Promoting Homosexuality and bought himself a show on a local radio station to denounce LGBT people.

Early in her career, Gabbard took after her father. She opposed abortion and supported a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. After Honolulu Magazine emailed her father to ask about his former ties to a conservative Hare Krishna splinter group for a 2004 profile, it was Gabbard who replied angrily, accusing the magazine of “acting as a conduit for The Honolulu Weekly and other homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case [her father’s opponent].” The same year, she used her platform as a state representative to testify against civil unions, calling the claim that they were different from same-sex marriage “dishonest, cowardly, and extremely disrespectful to the people of Hawaii,” who had voted in favor of Constitutional Amendment 2 in 1998, empowering the legislature to withhold marriage from same-sex couples.

“As Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists,” she said at the time.

Gabbard has since done a 180, citing her military service in the Middle East as the impetus for her conversion to social liberalism.

“The contrast between our society and those in the Middle East made me realize that the difference — the reason those societies are so oppressive — is that they are essentially theocracies where the government and government leaders wield the power to both define and then enforce ‘morality,’” she wrote in a December 2011 post. “I began to realize that the positions I had held previously regarding the issues of choice and gay marriage were rooted in the same premise held by those in power in the oppressive Middle East regimes I saw.”

She effected a similar about-face on abortion, even receiving an endorsement from EMILY’S List during her 2012 congressional run despite her history of opposing reproductive rights.

And why not? Gabbard was only twenty-three when she expounded her socially conservative views, and it’s not unheard of for people’s thinking to evolve.

But suspicion of Gabbard lingers. …

Read The Rest

*****

Tulsi Gabbard Claims Anti-War Credentials After Accepting Over $100,000 From Arms Dealers

Lockheed Martin and Boeing were two of Gabbard’s largest donors during the 2016 election cycle.

By Akbar Shahid Ahmed
HuffPost (1/31/19)