Anti-war candidate Tulsi Gabbard took $111,500 from arms dealers
Hey, how about another diary detailing why Tulsi Gabbard should not be our 2020 presidential nominee? So glad you asked!
She may be dead in the water already, but then Donald Trump looked like his white supremacist Gans was cooked after he said Mexico was sending us its most notorious rapists. And look what happened there.
Hey, I’d love Tulsi Gabbard if she were a Democratic representative in Kansas or something. But she has no business representing deep-blue Hawaii, much less the Democratic Party as a whole.
Luckily, she’s about 2 newtons per square meter of pressure away from following Augustus Gloop up the chocolate tube (i.e., she’ll most likely be the first Dem to get her own Oompa-Loompa song).
But let’s not take anything for granted.
So … there’s this:
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is pitching herself as Democrats’ top anti-war voice and a serious progressive in her bid for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. But even as she spent years decrying American military interventions abroad and money’s role in politics, as a congresswoman she accepted donations worth more than $100,000 from the country’s biggest producers of bombs, planes and weapons systems.
Regular contributions from companies including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and BAE Systems poured in between 2012 (the year she was first elected) and 2016, according to a HuffPost review of donations to Gabbard’s campaign account and political action committee. (Federal Election Commission filings for the two organizations are publicly available and organized by the Center for Responsive Politics.)
The congresswoman said in May 2017 that she had “recently” stopped accepting money from the defense industry and would no longer accept political action committee largesse. Her total income from the arms industry by that point had hit $111,500, with weapons producers Boeing and Lockheed Martin featuring as her ninth and 12th biggest donors, respectively, in the 2016 election cycle.
Since Daily Kos has enthusiastically endorsed her 2020 primary opponent, I feel I’m in bounds in helping to expose this particular Democrat/lite-GOPster.
Let the comments flow like hot Hawaiian magma!
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