Aren’t you glad Hillary never became President? [Video]

Paranoid Hillary Clinton may have received a lot of cover from her press cronies, but she committed a grave miscalculation when she insinuated that US House Representative Tulsi Gabbard was being groomed to be a Russian asset. TR

Imagine if this woman had won the White House. Where might we be now? The Russian people were afraid of her, suspecting she might start a war. She seemed even in the 2016 campaign to be mildly psychotic or mentally disturbed in some way. And now this, with her really blatant speculation that Rep. Gabbard is being groomed for use as a Russian asset, along with Jill Stein, who in Hillary’s opinion, is already one.

Tulsi is probably the only Democrat candidate that would be likely to call out the former Secretary of State exactly on how deeply flawed her policy actions were (and that is a very polite understatement). As we have seen and reported here at The Duran, Rep. Gabbard has an understanding of Middle East policy that is pretty close to a correct assessment of the situation, though she is a little too soft on Iran, as revealed by the very interesting things President Hassan Rouhani said in an interview with Chris Wallace some weeks ago.

Nevertheless, in foreign policy matters Tulsi Gabbard is no neo-con or neo-lib (essentially the same thing – a globalist, secular humanist), and the only person in politics in the US that has a similar position is also the only person actually trying to execute that policy – President Donald Trump himself.

Let us make a flashback to Hillary’s comment, as reported here and on Fox News’ website:

“I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said, in apparent reference to Gabbard. “She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

She then accused Stein, who ran against her and Donald Trump in 2016, of also being an asset of Russia: “That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset.”

Perhaps Hillary Clinton thought this was a clever move that would throw President Trump off the hunt for information on the quid-pro-quo activity undertaken by former Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine, or his activity in China, allegedly placing the office of the Vice Presidency in China’s hands for $1.5 billion.

Perhaps she thought this would warn Democrats “not to go there” in the same manner that previous people started to find a little too much information about the Clintons. In the past such actors were usually individuals, and they had a nasty habit of dying before the information they learned could be made public.

Tucker offers his commentary here, which is always worth watching. He includes clips of Hillary actually speaking what she thinks.

But here, it seems that her intention is backfiring. Maybe there is something more subtle going on, but from what it looks like now, the result of this is exposure of Hillary as at the least, crazy and paranoid, and at worst, an absolute bane to the Democrat Party. Everyone has reacted negatively to Hillary’s claim, from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, all the way to crazy-as-hell Beto O’Rourke.

There seems to be not one bit of support for her claim, at least not from anyone that matters. (Andrew Yang and The View do not matter). Further, the topic is ludicrous at this point, having gone through a tiresome two year “investigation” into Russian meddling which showed nothing, at least nothing beyond the usual efforts countries (including the United States) make to influence rival power’s political scene.

Even far-left Vox News said this in their article explaining the Clinton-Gabbard “feud”:

This is a bizarrely intense fight given that these two are members of the same party. Clinton suggesting Gabbard is the Kremlin’s chosen agent for destroying the Democrats in 2020? Gabbard accusing Clinton of being the puppet master behind a massive conspiracy against her? Are these people serious?

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is “yes” — in ways that reveal some troubling tendencies among American liberals and leftists today.

On Clinton’s part, the accusation reflects a remarkable overestimation of Russian influence on the part of certain Democratic Party loyalists — and a corresponding willingness to fling around baseless allegations of people they don’t like being aligned with the Kremlin agents. At bottom, it’s a conspiratorial way of viewing the world that disconnects Democrats from reality.

Gabbard’s bizarre counter-allegations of a Clinton conspiracy reflect the way in which her nominally anti-war politics are actually a kind of pro-authoritarian, conspiratorial worldview — particularly on Syria, an issue at the top of the political agenda right now. Her approach has a handful of fans on the party’s left flank but has really found its base on the pro-Trump right, real-life proof the horseshoe theory of the political spectrum has actual merit.

The Vox piece goes on to indicate “why Clinton’s claim has merit” which does, unfortunately, attempt to cast Gabbard’s actions below described as signs of an American “sellout” to the dastardly Russians. However, there is useful information here (emphasis added):

Gabbard is a combat veteran and US Army reservist who has made issues of war and peace the central plank of her campaign platform. She has sold herself as a non-interventionist, a critic of “regime change” and “endless war.” In practice, though, Gabbard’s record doesn’t fully bear this stance out. She has long spoken favorably about American use of force when it’s not directed at toppling dictators, arguing that the US needs to refocus on fighting Islamist terrorists.

As far back as 2015, she has been advocating that the US work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — and his chief ally, Russia — in fighting ISIS and extremist factions among the Syrian rebels. This view has led her to take a remarkably pro-Russia stance on the Syria conflict, even when it clashes with the policies of her own party’s president and standard-bearer.

In January 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad personally, catching the Democratic leadership in Congress off-guard. After returning to the US, she went on CNN and parroted the regime’s line that there was “no difference” between the mainstream anti-Assad rebels and ISIS. At last week’s Democratic debate, she described the Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria, which is controlled by America’s Kurdish allies, as “yet another negative consequence of the regime change war we’ve been waging in Syria” — a false description of what happened that seemed to let Trump’s troop withdrawal off the hook.

The Kremlin may be taking notice. One recent analysis from the Alliance for Securing Democracy (an electoral interference monitoring group) found that Russian state media has given Gabbard disproportionate coverage relative to her poll numbers. It also documented Twitter bots that appear to be of Russian origin being active on her behalf. That said, the extent to which Russian bots are working to promote Gabbard is contested, and it’s not clear that Clinton is justified in saying that Gabbard is Russia’s favorite.

One has to be careful picking through the garbage thrown into this newspiece to make Rep. Gabbard look like a traitor. In reality, Donald Trump is proceeding along the exact same policy route, but Tulsi is more articulate on this matter. If the reader take my emphasised sections alone, this becomes more apparent.

The American press and establishment is invested thoroughly in the matter of “endless Middle East wars” and if one follows my own contributions on this subject over the last several weeks, we see that what appears to be happening is an uncovering operation on the part of President Trump that has a lot of very powerful people suddenly getting “found out” or becoming very close to being found out.

This recent action also threatens to blow apart a very successful and long lasting propaganda effort made by the US establishment and the press – that Russia is bad, Putin is evil and that the Russians are out to get the Americans and take over the world again.

None of this is true. Russia has no ill will towards the US, but it does wish to be undisturbed by NATO and American pressure. That is certainly something that each side “adjusts” to suit its purposes, but Russian “aggression” is little more than a myth perpetrated by the American and Western Press. The Duran is so full of news pieces showing this that one need only do a search on “Russia” to see how true this is.

Tulsi Gabbard is out of step (for now) with the American Overton Window on this topic, and so is President Trump, but Hillary Clinton does appear to have radically overplayed her hand. While Vox tries to throw some cover for Clinton, it acknowledges in its piece that it really cannot do this. Further, Vox makes this statement:

It’s hard to overstate how serious it is to accuse a politician you don’t like of being an actual agent of a hostile power, of working to undermine the United States from within. The fact that Russian mouthpieces seem to approve of Gabbard and Stein is hardly sufficient to level such a grave charge.

Yet Clinton’s comments are not a one-off: they reflect a tendency among Democratic loyalists, both in the elite and rank and file, to throw around charges of Russian influence without much grounding in fact…

…[Russian overhype is] a worldview that conveniently exonerates Clinton for her 2016 defeat, suggesting that the Russians rather than Clinton’s own missteps decided the election. It’s a kind of epistemic poison, leading Democrats astray in a similar-but-much-smaller-scale way that Fox News narratives mislead Republicans. When you develop a vision of American electoral politics that overstates Russian power, you end up missing what actually matters.

In 2016 and 2017, what seemed to matter was that Hillary Clinton lost because she ran a poor campaign, based on an entitlement attitude about the Presidency more than actually proving she has the qualifications for the job.

But now what matters is what President Trump is doing to unravel a very powerful establishment, the infamous “military industrial complex” that seems to seek war for war’s own ends (and weapons purchases), and to instead relegate the defense industry to real defense of the United States. For too long the military we love has been made the pawn of very powerful people. Our soldiers are the finest in the world, and if they have to be put to the real fight, they will get the job done. But the foreign policy puppet masters for decades have sent thousands of these great men and women to their deaths or to being maimed for life, plus all the spiritual and psychological horror of war, and for precious little reason.

Tulsi Gabbard knows this from personal experience, having served in some of these very wars. She is definitely on to the truth, as is her rival President Trump.

Given the absolute craziness that has seized the halls of power of late in the US, the only prediction I can offer is this: Next week will probably be twice as crazy as this week.

Stay tuned.