Fool me thrice, shame on … you know the thing!

The meme I made when “Tulsi” sold her soul the first time.

By Craig McKee

When in doubt, assume that any political figure is made of clay, feet and all, until proven otherwise.

Assume they are corrupt and willing to get behind the most horrific state-sponsored evil and barbarity when it suits them to do so. Assume this, and you won’t be disappointed later. Don’t be fooled when they say something you like about some issue you care about. If they show signs of humanity, it’s probably insincere. And probably temporary.

How many times have we seen politicians, commentators, or journalists say something that just doesn’t match the stands they’ve taken before? One immediately thinks of Noam Chomsky, who has been a vocal critic of Israel and of U.S. intervention in Central America for decades but who has blinders on when it comes to 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination.

Or Michael Moore, who in the days of Roger and Me seemed like a genuine champion of workers and the poor. He has gone from an establishment critic to a key proponent of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And don’t even get me started on Bernie Sanders, the once socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont. In my home town of Montreal, we got Vermont TV stations, so I was very familiar with his stands on behalf of regular people. Now he’s a shell of his once principled self as he repeats establishment lies.

More recently we’ve seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ­– who has taken such strong stands against the pharmaceutical industry, Anthony Fauci, Covid “vaccines,”

and the Ukraine War. Despite making sense on these, he also shills for Israel, justifying their murderous assault on Gaza. How can one be so right about one thing and so blindly wrong about another?

Then there is the case of Tulsi Gabbard. When she was running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, she said some worthwhile things. She said the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan, and she disputed the false official narrative that Syria had used chemical weapons against civilians. She also routinely spoke out against U.S. “regime-change wars” and said that the money spent on these wars should be used instead to help people at home.

I guess I saw her modest “anti-war” statements at the time as being better than nothing. (Of course, she still blamed al-Qaeda for 9/11, but she was hardly alone there.) But I should have paid more attention to a statement she made on The View that U.S. interventions around the world are well intentioned, despite them causing great suffering. How could anyone take seriously a politician who would tell a lie like that even if she does tell some of the truth, some of the time?

I guess I’m just so used to politicians speaking nonsense like this, I hardly noticed it. Then, when she dropped out of the race, she endorsed Joe Biden, apparently betraying everything she claimed to stand for. That’s when I made the meme at the top of this article, cursing myself for having given the benefit of even one doubt. (After this I would no longer refer to her as “Tulsi.” She instantly became “that Gabbard woman!”) Like Sanders before her, Gabbard endorsed a pro-war, anti-worker globalist hack for president. Are they hypocrites for doing this or are we all just fools for thinking they weren’t liars from the beginning?

Gabbard’s willingness to kneel before the establishment in 2020 does not look any better three years later. It may seem to some that she recovered some of her credibility with her decision to leave the Democratic Party and her willingness to infuriate liberals by appearing several times on Tucker Carlson’s nightly Fox News show to attack Democratic policies. While it seemed nice to see someone from the political left calling out the Dems – who have turned into the insane, pro-war, pro-censorship party – any credit one might want to give her disappears in a flash following her disgusting statements about Israel and Gaza.

As the world expresses its outrage at the Israeli murder of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza open-air prison, Gabbard joins Kennedy in justifying Israel’s brutality. Of the people accusing Israel of committing a genocide, Gabbard said this a few days ago:

“It is the height of hypocrisy because it is the apologists and supporters of these Islamist Hamas terrorists who are calling for a genocide, the extermination of all Jews not just in Israel but around the world.”

How’s that for projection? She also uses a propaganda talking point that’s straight out of the Israeli playbook: using statements that question or deny Israel’s right to exist to justify repression or violence. (One can’t help thinking about how much mileage they got from some famous comments by Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.)

It seems that one statement against Israel is worth a thousand bombs.

Gabbard continues:

“And we’re seeing this being carried out by these violent mobs and other things that are happening against Jewish people literally around the world. And the worst part is [that the Israel critics are] doing this under the guise of, well, we care about innocent people, and we don’t want innocent people to get hurt. They are in essence supporting and apologizing for the barbaric actions of Hamas against innocent women, children, and civilians.”

I can’t help but think of what my Jewish friend told me (see my October post) when I had the audacity to I say I stand with Palestine. He said I was standing for the extermination of all Jews in the world. Multiple layers of irony… My friend has clearly been brainwashed to the point that he sees the oppressors as the victims and vice versa. The real message, whether he was conscious of it or not, was that if you speak against the Israel-victim narrative, you are complicit in plans to exterminate Jews.

What’s Gabbard’s excuse?

It’s interesting that just as the U.S. appears to be starting to distance itself from the Ukraine War (by urging the Ukrainian government to begin negotiating with Russia), the specter of “Muslim terrorists” is brought back into the limelight with a vengeance. While it was American interventions around the world that were the problem three years ago, according to Gabbard, now it’s back to those damned “Islamists.” A few days ago, she tweeted this:

I've deployed 3 times to the war zones in the Middle East/Africa. I know how serious the threat from Islamist jihadists is. The Dem elite not only don’t care, they’ve become apologists for Islamist jihadists. They leave our borders open which we know are being exploited by these terrorists, and instead redirect our intel/security assets towards their political opponents like Trump/MAGA.

Was Gabbard always this much of a war pig (borrowing this term from Jimmy Dore)? If she wasn’t, she was obviously capable of becoming one – just like RFK Jr. was capable of being a shill for Israel, Michael Moore for the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders for the Military Industrial Complex, and Noam Chomsky for the 9/11 official story. Give them time, and they’ll all show their true colors.

I know, some of you reading this will want to scold me for ever having believed any of this from any of these people. Save it. Instead, let’s all practice raising awareness – in a way that won’t turn people off – about the need for all of us to believe in truth rather than in “celebrities” who claim to have the truth.

If we don’t learn this lesson, shame on us.