Tulsi Gabbard ‘Open’ to VP Slot

"Your probably the same type that believes a RINO is better than a Democrat..."

You're propin' a collectivist and write that pant load knowing my main point is not to piss off the base??? Logic challenged are ye?

Sigh….I guess those meds aren’t working well for you today.

it doesn’t have to be Tulsi, but it needs to be someone that can attract Independents and fence-sitting Dems. Put another Republican on the ticket, and it will result in no appreciable gain for Trump other than what he already has.

Trump has to win the Presidency first.

PS…posting memes doesn’t mean your argument is any more correct.

I LIKE what you're sayin'!

WRONG

Trump is winning in the polls by a considerable margin. He only needs to maintain that advantage and find ways to keep the vote stealing to a minimum. Trying to add to his lead by choosing a moderate for VP is a losing strategy. Whatever gain in support he gets from doing so will be counteracted by a significant number of existing supporters deciding to no longer support him. It would likely be a net loss for him rather than a net gain, when that’s taken into account.

Some people need to do their homework.

Trump was a Democrat. Reagan was a Democrat and president of the screen actors guild union.

And Charlie Crist was a Democrat before he was a Republican, before switching back to Democrat. The lesson? Not everyone who switches parties does so on principle.

Ok

I hear you about the "purity zealots" but in this case they have a point. Deep down, Tulsi is a very liberal Democrat. If she claims otherwise, she needs to announce that she's "evolved" from her well documented left wing positions.

The only think dumber than Tulsi as VP would be to pick Tucker Carlson.

Well, the way Trump thinks debt is OK, I think he hasn’t shaken all of the NY Democrat out of his system.

And, yes I knew they were all democrats.

But I thought this was a conservative site. Gabbard is no conservative.

Sadly, Tulsi Gabbard is not Art. II, §1, Cl. 5 natural born citizen. That is to say, she was not born solely within the jurisdiction of two U.S. citizen parents. However, I am sure President Trump would be able to find a suitable cabinet position for her to serve the nation.

In terms of Trump’s VP pick, I think Allen West would be Trump’s best pick for VP.
Lieutenant Colonel (Ret) Allen West is a Christian constitutional conservative, combat veteran, former Member of the US Congress from Florida, the Executive Director for The American Constitutional Rights Union, and former Texas GOP Chair.

I see you’re still the same confused, contentious lunatic, entitled female with no reason or accountability. No wonder your years are so boring.

That’s about all I have to say to you. So you can keep babbling away like you’re in an echo chamber, nobody listening except you.

Now, go back under that rock where you came from.

To be fair, I think it’s a question of priorities rather than Trump thinking that debt is okay. I think he’s currently focused on more immediate existential issues. He also has never had a Congress that had any serious intention of doing anything to cut spending.

Leading comes from the front.

At this point, it doesn’t much matter. With a declining tax base, and increased spending…we will eventually burn out like an old star

how is she a trash slut? you know this woman?

That might be the only reason would vote for Trump, otherwise I am looking at Bob Kennedy as he is the only one talking about the most important issues we are facing as neither Trump or Biden are doing so.

Yeah...I know her.

She is friends with Kennedy and has said that most of her positions are in alignment with his. I get that if Trump cannot have RFK Jr as a running mate, he isn’t above messing with his potential VP choice but Kennedy will get to select first which will clarify the situation greatly.

so you don’t. and you throw around “slut” for no reason.

I just finished watching Tucker Carlson interview Tulsi Gabbard.

NOTE: This is a lengthy explanatory note before my analysis/discussion, and I regret the need to post it, but there are reasons for it so I feel compelled to do so in what is so obviously an important (and bitter) issue with many.

The following discourse keeps in mind that there is a push for Tulsi Gabbard as a VP for Trump, and fully accepts that the articles we are reading, and the appearance of her on a program like Tucker Carlson's show is quite possibly nothing more than a coordinated push by elites to rehabilitate her image among Conservatives. I accept this dynamic in the course of my analysis and discussion and place it here in the opening as a concession it may be one dynamic at play.

I also understand many of you who I pinged on this discussion have not only opposing views to mine, but those views are adamantly held. I hope we can discuss this in a civil manner.

I also recognize there are specific issues on which I do not yet have a full grasp of such as her current views on Abortion and Energy, not to mention her actual eligibility for the office (which may be lacking, but given how things are going, this appears to be fully academic over the last 15 years or so. Just stating a fact there.)

And the fact that I don't know about her current views doesn't mean I am going to accept something she said or did back in 2015 as the end of the story. That was the default position for me BEFORE I heard her state why she broke with the Democrat Party. I will try to find out more on some issues where I can.

I also need to state this explicitly: this post is not fully in support of Tulsi Gabbard as a VP pick or a member of the Republican Party in any way. It is more of a description of my views on her as a person and a politician, and her disavowal of the Democrat Party, not specifically whether she is a VP pick or not.

As you will see below-the key for me was to hear, just as I heard from Ronald Reagan, and in the same way I heard from David Horowitz, in her own words, how and why she has made this transition from Leftism to Conservatism.

As much as the writing appears to be on the wall on the fate of our country, and accepted as a fait accompli by many Freepers, some of whom I greatly respect, I myself simply cannot give up. I have to believe there is a way back from Leftism that does not involve oblivion, rejection, or withdrawal.

It is still important to me as an American, to believe that even if people cannot be reached and converted by logic, there is at least a chance of redemption based on the actions of the Left, that will cause people to reject wrong beliefs that they hold in a death grip.

So, I am asking for civil discourse on this. I see these types of conversions as important and vital to the survival of our nation.

I would also like to stress that this has nothing to do with her being a woman, or being an attractive one. I have deliberately faced that and placed it squarely off to the side to avoid being entrapped by it.

I fully admit to grinning gleefully at the famous (infamous) "Hot vs. Crazy Matrix" when it is used on Free Republic to make a point, but in my analysis, it will not apply, even as a joke.

I have had serious concerns about Tulsi Gabbard regarding her rejection of the Democrat Party and her possible consideration for the VP slot with Trump.

First off, she was a Democrat. In the Tucker Carlson interview, she talks about how her parents raised her to be an independent critical thinker, yet...she was a Democrat.

To me, the simple fact that she was a Democrat belied any contention she actually is a critical thinker. And when she rejected Hillary Clinton, she endorsed Bernie Sanders. In the same interview, she discussed how she is all in on capitalism, yet...she supported Bernie Sanders.

Granted-I fully understand this is certainly a political act, and all politicians are compelled to commit political acts in the course of their duties. But-Bernie Sanders? If it was not a purely political act, there could not have been any squaring of that circle with "critical thinking". I understand that in her role at that time of the Vice Chair of the DNC, she was not supposed to take sides in a partisan debate (Clinton vs Sanders) so she resigned her job as Vice Chair of the DNC to be able to state her case. I think that shows a favorable (to me) character.

So, I have questions about her support for Bernie Sanders. And if she outright states that was a simple political act she was compelled into (being a Democrat and being unable to support Hillary Clinton) I can understand and accept that. But I would rather hear her explicitly state it rather than having to divine it myself.

I also had serious questions about her stance on the 2nd Amendment. That was one of the key issues for me, quite apart from her simply being a Democrat which, in the absence of a unequivocal and vocal break from that party, was the foremost issue for me.

From an article at ConcealedCarry.com, they point out that her past politics related to firearm legislation earned her an F from the NRA and also a 100% endorsement from the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence. It doesn't get much worse than that.

But in watching her explain why she changed her stance, she explained something that I can completely understand and relate to: that she affirms that she sees the current government/Democrat Party have gone down the road of a weaponized banana republic tyranny, and that apart from the concept of personal defense, the 2nd Amendment is necessary to prevent us from a tyrannical government which ours has become. I accept her rationale.

For me, that leaves her stance on Abortion and Energy as something I have questions about. I have not researched them fully, so I don't have an answer yet.

But I will say this: I was among the most convinced anti-Tulsi Gabbard Free Republic posters, and have called her a snake in the grass and worse. I even took issue with her membership in the Democrat Party as being at odds with all precepts of military service, and denigrated her service on that basis.

All this was because even though I was aware she had left the Democrat Party, I had not, up until today with the Tucker Carlson interview, heard an unequivocal rejection of the Democrat Party from her, in her own words.

Here is why I mention this, and why it is so important to me.

I am a big fan of David Horowitz, specifically in his role of Leftist Apostate.

He was as Leftist as they come in his radical youth, and even played a significant role working for the Black Panthers. But in his role with the Black Panthers, he worked with a woman who served as their legal accountant (Betty Van Patter) and when her body, raped and murdered was discovered, in his heart he knew the truth that she had been murdered by the Black Panthers themselves because they grew paranoid that she "knew too much" and decided to murder her and make it look like the act of a random stranger.

But David Horowitz knew, and had it subsequently verified from a reliable source that the Black Panthers had murdered her.

But for him, the crack widened, and he had to undergo a painful ideological amputation from Leftism that took him nearly ten years to accomplish, and culminated in his vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984, a formerly unthinkable act for him.

David Horowitz, once at the pinnacle of Leftism, had made the break, and become a die-hard, Capital-C Conservative.

And when he made that transition to Conservatism, he publicly bared his soul about it, and explained in excruciating detail why he made that break.

Over the last decade, I have been watching Tulsi Gabbard with alarm as I watched (from a distance) her increasing apparent dissidence with the precepts of the Democratic Party, but did not hear the public baring-of-the-soul from her that made me such a believer in the honesty and depth of the transition undergone by David Horowitz.

In the absence of that, I assumed it was not a full or real conversion, but like Liberals who leave states like California and New York to go to states like Texas and Florida, I fully believed she intended to bring her Leftist principles to the Republican Party.

And I adamantly believed that, in the absence of a concentrated and detailed rejection of the Left on her part, Conservatives should reject her completely, because we already have enough of that. We are being hamstrung by them, sabotaged by them, and outright opposed from them.

So, when I saw this interview, in spite of my misgivings, I forced myself to watch the entire program, and I tried to keep an open mind on the content and human expression of what she said.

In the end, I said in exasperation to a friend: "What the Hell did she ever have to do with the Democrat Party? What?"

What hit me the most about her interview was her obvious (and not feigned) revulsion to the woman interviewed last week who denied our rights come from God. When asked, she answered unequivocally that our rights come from God, and Democrats simply do not care about the Constitution. She explained how this fundamental belief of Conservatives (that we are endowed with unalienable rights from God) is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and that the Constitution was specifically created to encapsulate that truth.

(It was at this point that I uttered the "What the Hell" exclamation described above.

I understand the possibility that this may all be a political ploy by her to obtain power, but after watching her, viewing her countenance as she said those things, as she spoke about the corruption with insider trading, the war-like dishonesty of international relations, the weaponization of government and the associated tyranny, I could not find myself in disagreement with her, except on the issues that she did not explicitly address that I described above in this post.

I fully retract my statements on her being a Leftist Snake In The Grass. I don't believe it anymore.

And while I accept my skepticism as necessary, I wish I had not had to view her in that light, though I believe I was not left with a choice in the absence of her vocal criticism and unequivocal rejection of the Democrat Party.

But that said, I did not come to these conclusions lightly. I also believe that people can and do change...especially people who believed in something, and are then persecuted and shunned by those who were former "fellow travelers". And in Tulsi Gabbard's interview, she explained how this took place, and how, like Ronald Reagan and David Horowitz, she explained in unequivocal terms that the Democrat Party is the main threat to this country.

I am very curious about the reactions of others who may have seen this interview as well.