National Review Writer Scorches Op-Eds in His Own Magazine Defending Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Baseless Lies’ to Defend ‘Our Enemies’
National Review writer Noah Rothman panned two op-eds published in his own magazine that sought to defend President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Tulsi Gabbard to serve as Director of National Intelligence.
Gabbard, a veteran and former House Democrat of Hawaii who restyled herself as a pro-Trump conservative after leaving office — replete with guest hosting duties on Fox News and interviews with Joe Rogan — will need to be confirmed by the Senate if she hopes to serve in the high-powered role managing America’s sprawling intelligence agencies. NPR reported this month that she faces an “uphill battle” in the Senate, where some Republicans crucial to her fate have expressed reservations about her nomination.
The National Review recently published two op-eds supporting her nomination: One, from Bernard Hudson, the former director of counterterrorism of the CIA, argued the “United States has increasingly become a low-trust society” and Gabbard, a vocal critic of the intelligence community, “has the experience, temperament, and professional integrity necessary… to win and keep the trust of the American people.
The other, from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), made a similar case: “Her appointment would send an unmistakable message: The days of the intelligence community operating as an unaccountable black box are over.”
Rothman, who has long criticized Gabbard for her foreign policy views, rejected both of those arguments in a scathing piece for the same magazine. He argued that plenty of other candidates fit the mould that Hudson and Rand are seeking in a DNI director, and “come with the added bonus of not having spent the last decade credulously retailing any anti-American narrative they encountered regardless of their provenance (which was usually Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus).”
“Hudson attributes criticisms of Gabbard’s naïveté to ‘the Left,’ which is so obviously untrue that we must assume it is merely a mechanism to trigger thoughtless tribal loyalty among partisan Republicans,” Rothman wrote.
In response to both Hudson and Paul, Rothman argued:
Ultimately, these arguments fall flat because they skirt around what those who support Gabbard truly like about her. Her credulous recitation of pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad narratives is not a bug but a feature. Her openness to the Kremlin’s talking points is no flaw to those who share the conviction that America’s foreign policy is essentially imperialistic. Gabbard has been imprudently consistent in her beliefs. Her allies should take a page from her book and own that outlook just as Gabbard has owned hers.
He added: “The problem with those arguments is that dozens, if not hundreds, of highly qualified, decorated career public servants are just as suspicious of the dominant culture in America’s intelligence agencies. Those candidates also didn’t devote years to broadcasting baseless lies about America that advance the interests of our enemies.”
Read the full piece here.
