I don’t think there’s anything special that Gabbard did in that debate to make Kamala selfdestruct. She just asked her about the laughing about smoking weed after locking people up for smoking weed. Kamala had no answer prepared and in general isn’t great at thinking on her feet. Kamala’s prep needs to be better this time, otherwise it could be a repeat of the dem debates which could be catastropic in a close race.
Honestly the whole thing that she "eviscerated" her in the debate (as the New York Times put it) is a bunch of horseshit.
Here's the exchange. I think Harris was a little taken aback because it was at least 50% complete fabrications, and that's harder to deal with in a debate setting than in a prosecutorial setting. It's fair to say she handled it a little poorly and Gabbard did a good job at landing the dishonest attacks. But most of what it accomplished, at the end of the day, was to accelerate the putting of those lies into the public discourse in a big way as talking points, alongside the idea that if anyone in Harris's office was prosecuting people who broke the law at the time, that represents a fair reason to attack Harris today because obviously what she should have been doing was letting them go and instructing every prosecutor in California to do the same, and that wouldn't have caused any problems.
Nashville had already decriminalized weed as of 2016. I only find one other case (Houston) where it was a prosecutor making a policy decision not to prosecute weed, ahead of the rest of the government. Honestly, just read the rest of the article you cited -- it matters that a lot of the rest of the city government was on board for it, but it still left a little bit of a confusing way to go about it even after decriminalization, which the chief of police among some other people pointed out, along with the idea that yes weed should be legal so maybe it's a good thing.
Left unsaid in among all of that is that selective enforcement by police and prosecutors in almost every case works out, in practice even up to the modern day, to be racist selective enforcement. Honestly it's better for the legislature just to make it legal. I'm not trying to throw cold water on any prosecutor who wants to take the initiative to do a good thing if they can make sure it'll work out right, but generally, the prosecutorial portion of the government isn't where you want to be making your creative departures from the law the way the legislators wrote it down.
What is Gabbard’s story these days? She hates Harris (nothing wrong with that: in the US we are all entitled to hate any politicians we want)? Or she aligns with Trump in deeper ways now? I remember Gabbard from the 2020 Dem primary. She clobbered Harris pretty well back then. But she didn’t come across as even slightly likely to sympathize with Trump.
Since then, she has been on Fox News a lot. I wonder if it changed her?
There’s some evidence she’s a cult member, and was posturing as some kind of Manchurian candidate.
No, really.
Mike Prysner has made a few decent podcasts (QAA, eyes left) following her political career and service. I don’t think you can definitionally tie her to membership, but she’s got some questionable associations.
Tulsi Gabbard is part of the Science of Identity cult. She was literally raised in this cult and is Chris Butler’s heir apparent. They’re viciously anti-gay and she lied to the voters to be elected in Hawaii as a Democrat.
“Baffle them with bullshit” has been a saying for quite a while. But with Trump it’s more like “give them a stupidity migraine.” The stuff that comes out of his mouth hurts my brain to hear it.
You can’t help but to try to parse some meaning out of his words. They sound like English. But he assembles them in an arcane order where the harder you try to understand him, the less anything he says makes sense. He is like a human word cloud where you just have to infer the message based on the biggest, boldest words.
So yes, it’s hard to beat an opponent in a debate when you have to try to understand what he’s saying in order to form a cogent counterpoint. His audience of the hearing- and vocabulary-impaired only absorb the gist without ever attempting to parse actual meaning out of it.
It is truly a thing of wonder, and if the future of our nation didn’t hinge on it, it would be fascinating to explore. I hope future generations, unburdened by the threat of another Trump Presidency, might be able to study this and harness this power for good.
Imagine trying to think while a dimwitted centaur’s front end plays an invisible accordion to accompany his dementia-riddled and bigoted stream-of-consciousness.
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