A writer for the right-wing National Review has eviscerated his own magazine for two editorials it ran in support of Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for head of national intelligence.
The conservative-media stalwart had previously published pieces by former CIA counterterrorism director Bernard Hudson and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) arguing that decades of instability in the Middle East have eroded Americans’ faith in the intelligence community.
Gabbard, a former House Democrat turned Trump loyalist, is openly skeptical of the agencies Trump wants her to lead, making her a good person to restore that faith, they claimed. Her willingness to “push back” on widely accepted intelligence narratives, like the recently deposed Syrian president-slash-dictator Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people, also shows she’s an independent thinker, they added.
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The problem with that argument, Noah Rothman wrote in a scathing rebuttal, is that al-Assad did gas his own people, and Gabbard’s pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad narratives are so prevalent they’ve emerged as a feature, not a bug.
“Readers may need a neck brace after reading a lengthy missive about the intelligence community’s unacceptable inaccuracies only to pivot to a defense of inaccuracies,” about al-Assad, he wrote. “Hey, at least they are iconoclastic inaccuracies!”
Rothman went on to blast Paul’s argument as a “blizzard of buzzwords” and “thought-terminating clichés” that “fail[ed] to paper over Gabbard’s unique defects of character and judgment.”
Restoring faith in the intelligence community is indeed imperative, he wrote, but plenty of other qualified candidates disapprove of the “politicization” of the U.S. intelligence community.
And these candidates “come with the added bonus of not having spent the last decade credulously retelling any anti-American narrative they encountered regardless of their provenance (which was usually Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus),” Rothman added.
He isn’t the only one skeptical of Gabbard’s “unique” views.
Republican senators are also wary of Gabbard’s “sympathies for brutal dictators,” as NPR put it recently. Despite a pre-Christmas PR blitz on the Hill, she’s facing an uphill battle for Senate confirmation.
