When Tulsi Gabbard stopped pretending to be a Democrat and fully embraced her Republican beliefs, the Media Research Center, particularly its onetime “news” division CNSNews.com, embraced her — even as she sided with China and Russia over the U.S. on security issues. That questionable loyalty to her country didn’t bother Donald Trump either, given that he nominated Gabbard to be his director of national intelligence. That made the MRC fall in love with her all over again, and either to be a Gabbard (and Trump) apologist. Curtis Houck whined about criticism of her in a Nov. 14 post:
Thursday morning on CNN Newsroom, rule of experts aficionado and Atlantic writer Tom Nichols found himself flustered given the ultra-rare occasion of having faced direct pushback for his views. This time, it came from CNN conservative political commentator Shermichael Singleton over whether former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) should be allowed to make her case to the Senate as President-Elect Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence.
Nichols was first able to make his argument that Gabbard is a threat from a domestic and international standpoint “given her political leanings, which is to say that she’s an admirer both of Bashar Assad of Syria and an apologist for Vladimir Putin of Russia.”
He explained that not only would her own employees hide things from her, but “our allies certainly wouldn’t want to work with her as someone they would trust sharing their secrets with[.]” He even knocked her brain power, claiming “she wouldn’t know what she’s doing” given its size overseeing the various intelligence agencies.
Singleton finally got to speak and started from the premise of every appointee having to undergo a thorough FBI background check and that her service record in the military and various deployments would lead one to believe that she’s not a mindless individual.
“Now, she has been very skeptical of wanting to involve U.S. troops in foreign wars and there’s a ton of data that would suggest the vast majority of the American people in both political parties actually would agree with that,” he added.
Asked by Brown to respond to Gabbard’s favoring views toward dictators like Putin, Singleton put the focus back on “her background as a military officer prepar[ing] her to do the job and do the job well.”
Just as he did with other nominees, Jeffrey Lord simply and lazily repeated her resume in his Nov. 16 column: “Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat Congresswoman from Hawaii who left the Democrats for the GOP, has spent more than two decades in the U.S. Army National Guard. She served on active duty in both Iraq and Kuwait, and in Congress served on the House Homeland Security Committee.”
Clay Waters spent a Nov. 17 post being upset that one commentator pointed out that Gabbard “is a favorite of the Russians. They call her ‘my girlfriend’ on Russian TV,” which he didn’t dispute. He then got weirdly technical when Trump’s picks were described as a “rogue’s gallery”: “The dictionary defines ‘rogues’ gallery’ as ‘a collection of pictures of persons arrested as criminals.’ Which of the cabinet picks are criminals?”
Bill D’Agostino got similarly upset when another commentator pointed out Gabbard’s fealty to Russia:
The reaction to Tulsi Gabbard being tapped as DNI was perhaps less absurd, though barely. Every talking head who objected to her nomination vaguely accused her of spreading “Russian disinformation” or “Russian propaganda.” Former White House Press Secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki went so far as to pretend that Gabbard might herself be a deep-cover Russian agent:
“Russian television, which is a propaganda machine, has joked that she’s a Russian asset. I don’t know that for a fact, but that is something they’ve talked about.”
He too didn’t dispute the accuracy of the observation. The MRC finally attempted an actual defense of Gabbard — albeit by parroting a Republican official’s talking points — in a Nov. 24 post by Jorge Bonilla:
Not three weeks have passed since the election of President Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States, and the left is already attempting to cobble together a resistance. With the Gaetz nomination for Attorney General withdrawn, the Regime Media appear to have settled on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence as one to try to scuttle.
Watch as former RNC Chair Reince Priebus pushed back against the phony “Russian asset” narrative deployed against Gabbard:
[…]To this day, no one can properly explain the “Putin talking point” Gabbard is alleged to have spread, nor can anyone explain why her visit to Syria makes her an “Assad apologist”.
Actually, Bonilla didn’t bother to look for any of that. Gabbard is clearly on record as repeating Vladimir Putin’s bogus claims about U.S.-linked biolabs in Ukraine, and she has also repeated Assad’s claims of U.S. culpability in the death and destruction in Syria, even accusing Trump of aiding al-Qaeda when he was president. But rather do any sort of actual investigation, Bonilla played baseless defense:
Rather than delve into the basis of Gabbard’s positions, the Regime Media are content both to amplify smears levied by Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, and to try to get Republicans to act defensively in the face of these smears.To his credit, Priebus refuses the bait and calls everyone out by making a very obvious point: if Gabbard is such a security threat, why is she still allowed to serve in the National Guard and in a command role? There is no response to that question, just as there was no real response to Priebus’s dismissal of the attacks against Gabbard as “hyperbolic nonsense”.
Waters returned to play whataboutism in a Nov. 25 post when a commentator pointed out during a discussion of Gabbard that Trump said “they spied on me and my campaign, which, of course, was not true”:
What? The Trump campaign was indeed spied on (Carter Page, a member of the Trump 2016 campaign, for one) no matter what euphemism the press might have used (“cloaked investigator” was a personal favorite). And let us pause for a moment at the sight of a mainstream journalist coming to the defense of government surveillance, of government spying on its own people, and The Patriot Act, just because Donald Trump is opposed.
Actually, then-Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz insisted that Page was not “spied on” but, rather, put under “surveillance,” something that was reasonable to do given that it was believed he may have been working with Russia.