Tulsi Gabbard for Vice-President?

Recently, Laura Ingraham challenged Donald Trump with a “short list” of persons having Vice-Presidential rumors swirling about them. Among the six names on that list, that of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) stood out. Of course that name stood out by reason of the “D” that followed her name. Tulsi Gabbard has broken permanently with the Democratic Party, finding that they’ve abandoned the values that drew her to them. But as Trump considers selecting her, he must ponder – then question her closely on – some apparent shifts in her positions. Some of those shifts are so frequent that CNAV must disqualify her for that reason alone.

Tulsi Gabbard and her current prospects

Newsweek shared the full list of Vice-President contenders Laura Ingraham mentioned. The other five are:

• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.)
• Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy
• Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)
• Gov. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.)
• Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.)

Gov. DeSantis’ State citizenship is the same as Trump’s, so the Florida delegation would have to vote for someone else. Vivek Ramaswamy is not a natural born citizen within the meaning of Vattel’s Law of Nations. (Neither, incidentally, is Nikki Haley.) Sen. Scott didn’t impress many people while he was running for President. Rep. Daniels is a relative unknown.

Interestingly, Gov. Noem yesterday specified five qualifications upon which Trump should insist in picking a Vice-Presidential running mate.

Noem herself meets her third qualification. She quit college to take over the family farm after her father died in an accident on the farm. During that time she added a hunting lodge and a restaurant to the property. “Having been a Commander in Chief” sounds like a qualification only former Presidents could meet. But perhaps she means having been a State governor and made significant National Guard deployment decisions. As she has done, recently sending South Dakota National Guardsmen to Texas to help defend the Northern Rio Grande Valley.

Tulsi Gabbard has been a military officer, so she knows what war is. But her other Noem Qualifications are week to lacking. She’s currently a long shot on that list, while Kristi Noem is the current favorite.

History of Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard seems to be trying to ingratiate herself with Trump. The Hill reports that she will headline a fundraiser, at Mar-A-Lago, for the 917 Society. That group, dedicated to educating American schoolchildren about the Constitution, takes its name from its proposal date: September 17, 1787.

Nevertheless, Tulsi Gabbard has a mixed record, and Trump should consider how she got mixed up with the Democratic Party to begin with. She began with a deep environmental consciousness. Growing up in Hawaii, with its contrast between natural beauty and rapid development, led her into politics. The Democratic Party attracted her then because they opposed the Vietnam War, while the Republican Party supported it. She also accused the Republican Establishment of that day of supporting “big business” in exploitation of labor and consumer alike.

And no doubt, much of what she says was true! Only the reputation of the Bolsheviks and their successors the Communists, and especially that of Nikita S. Khrushchev, could have excused anyone for wanting to continue that war. But she forgot to mention that Democrats started the Vietnam War. Only when Lyndon Johnson didn’t run again, and men like “Clean Gene” McCarthy, Edmund Muskie, and especially George S. McGovern gained the ascendancy, did the Democratic Party become the Anti-war Party.

Today she expresses shock and astonishment that this administration, and the Big Tech Axis, would behave as they are behaving. In blunt fact, we see the logical endgame of the Marxism the Democrats embraced, beginning with McCarthy, Muskie, and McGovern.

Political positions

Add Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to the list. Gabbard supported Sanders against Hillary Clinton, on the anti-war, corruption, cronyism, and elitism issues. But remember: Bernie Sanders honeymooned in Russia – back when it called itself Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t seem to have repudiated the positions Sanders holds – essentially that “citizens” should own nothing, and the State should own it all. Sanders differs only in which State should own everything: something called United States of America and not World Economic Forum.

Gabbard has swung from supporting traditional marriage, to opposing it. Now she opposes the worst modern excess of the Alphabet Soup movement: the spectacle of surgically altered and hormonally poisoned men competing against women in their sports divisions. She takes that position from a women’s rights angle – and thereby admits that men and women do differ biologically. (If they did not, men and women would have competed against one another in the ancient Olympics. Furthermore, they would have always fought side-by-side in war. Ancient history does record the Amazons, a female-dominated society that invented mounted cavalry, but these are the outliers.)

But the one constant in her positions that forced her break with the Democrats, is preferring a non-interventionist foreign policy. She has opposed U.S. support for Ukraine, and pointed out Ukraine’s biowar labs (now confirmed).

Thus she has made bitter enemies of her former allies, as this Guardian piece makes clear. Last year she was accusing her once-fellow Democrats of “banana republic tactics.”

Problematic positions

But two years ago, John Anthony listed several problematic positions she has taken, most of which she has never repudiated. They include:

• The old Moving Forward Act, with subsidies for wind and solar power and “green building” programs for schools.
• Medicare for all, meaning all ages. (Joseph R. Mercola rejects that as funding the same-old, same-old, allopathic medicine that he despises.)
• Community grant programs that extend federal control, however indirect, over local zoning decisions.
• Proxy voting in the House of Representatives, as a containment measure against airborne “pandemics.”
• A law that would have severely hampered police response in major cities.
• A permanent “lobster trap” on ratification of the mis-called Equal Rights Amendment. (Whether she would support that amendment now, in view of the men-in-women’s-sports spectacle, is an open question.)
• Reducing off-shore oil leasing.
• A House resolution condemning President Trump’s first characterization of the migrants crashing the Mexican border as “an invasion.”

All these positions represent her actual votes in the House of Representatives. Has anything changed? She needs to tell us, and she hasn’t.

Indeed her positions in 2019 (per PBS) were almost as radical as anything President Biden (or his handlers) have done.

Her real objection: to leftist extremism

Her position on abortion has gone from opposition, to on-demand at any stage, to maybe limiting it after twenty weeks. Apparently her experiences fighting in a Muslim country soured her on what she feels is harsh religious moral discipline. But the selective application of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act on the part of the Biden administration after the Dobbs decision soured her on her fellow Democrats. That could be part of what she meant by “banana republic tactics.”

The thread she left on X as she left the Democratic Party is the latest comprehensive statement of her positions:

In short, Tulsi Gabbard despises the extremism the Democrats are now showing. The Democrats seem to have forgotten that anyone opposed to them are still human beings. That is, if the Democrats even agree on what a human being is.

The problem for people of faith is that she has shown no sign, thus far, that she recognizes that the moral strictures she saw so “harshly” enforced in Iraq, could have any sound, rational basis in natural law. To be sure, Islam imposes far harsher penalties than Christianity ever would. (The Spanish Inquisition doesn’t count; Torquemada didn’t get his ideas on punishments out of any Bible CNAV has read.) But she forms her opinions on social issues as matters of convenience only. In short, she tries to stay within the Overton Window. Great leaders move the Overton Window, and persuade others to accept its new position.

Conclusion: Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t cut it

For all the above reasons, CNAV does not endorse Tulsi Gabbard as a Vice-Presidential running mate. America needs great leaders, who take positions on immutable principles of natural law – and the Holy Scriptures. That meant something once, as the late producer Cecil B. DeMille ably demonstrated in his career. If it means nothing to any candidate, that candidate is not fit to lead John Adams’ “moral and religious people.”

Gov. Kristi Noem, besides being the current favorite, is the best-qualified candidate among the Ingraham Six. Nevertheless, Tulsi Gabbard might qualify as an Undersecretary of State for Middle Eastern, or Russian and East European, Affairs. (Sending her to the United Nations would be useless; Trump should withdraw from that “House That Hiss Built.” Besides, look at what “something in the air of Turtle Bay” did to Nikki Haley.) But Donald Trump must not appoint a Vice-President whom denizens of the Deep State – or Senator Sanders – might think they or he can manipulate if they can just get Trump out of the way.