It Happens Less than 5% Of The Time

But I find myself agreeing with a couple of Democrats.  Including a few that I have never agreed with: the Squad. 

It starts out almost that strange; I was looking at an article from FEE (the Foundation for Economic Education) about how Tulsi Gabbard was speaking out against John Brennan's dangerous push for new laws empowering surveillance against ‘religious extremists,’ ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ and even ‘libertarians.’  I've noticed a few times in the last couple of months that Ms. Gabbard has been sounding rational which led to a  "what's going on here?" reaction.   That probably prompted my noticing the article. 

I recall catching little of the Democrat primary debates, but in what I did see she sounded as loony as all the other candidates.  That leads me to say, "a politician who changes what they say with their audience - how novel," but kept noticing other quotes that were making sense.  Then she tweeted this:

@joebiden Your leadership is needed now to denounce those like John Brennan & Rep Schiff who are advocating for targeting half the country as potential domestic terrorists. Truly unite the American people around our Constitution & the rights that are endowed to us by our Creator.

In an interview on Fox News, she said this:

“We don’t have to guess about where this goes or where it ends,” Gabbard argues, “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements… that in his words make up this ‘unholy alliance’ of ‘religious extremists,’ ‘racists,’ ‘bigots’ … even ‘libertarians.’”

“So, when you look at their process as they’re building this profile of a potential ‘extremist,’ what are we talking about?” she asked. “Are we talking about evangelical Christians? Somebody who is pro-life? Libertarians? People who attended a Trump rally?”

“[This would] lead to a very dangerous undermining of our civil liberties… and a targeting of almost half the country,” Gabbard concluded.

This is where the article takes a real hard turn into territory I never expected.  A letter signed by 10 progressive House Democrats, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ro Khanna, calls on leadership to “reject reactionary demands to further erode the rights and liberties of the American people."

My first reaction was that if I'm finding Rashida Tlaib saying something reasonable, I should look into some sort of counseling.  Then I read her tweet and the letter attached and felt better.  It turned I didn't need to look into counseling, just look into what she was actually saying.  Her logic is just as pretzel-twisted as always.  Her concern isn't Americans as a whole like Tulsi Gabbard appears to be saying.  Her concern is only if they're "of color" or especially Muslim-Americans.  If she accidentally gives some benefit to conservatives, that's just the price of doing good. 

Photo montage from FEE; Image credit to Wikimedia and Pixelbay.

The bottom line is that I can dismiss the squad's comments with the usual, "a broken clock is right twice a day."  Another example of the insignificant, almost-random chance of being right.  Congresswoman Gabbard, on the other hand, is making more sense.  She could be honestly changing over to more respect for the constitution.  She's ex-military after all, and could be drifting right as she gets older.  Of course she could also be benefiting from the news not quoting her when she says something insane.  At this point, though, she might be more constitutional and logical than John McCain was and seems to be more so than Mitt Romney is now.