Gabbard, Gabbard .. what the hey?

Our director of national intelligence warns us that 'elites' are clamoring for some mushroom clouds

Intro by Sam Bellamy

Tulsi Gabbard is apparently due for her annual review with Vladimir Putin.

That seems the most likely explanation for why our director of national intelligence chose to release a bizarre video this week warning Americans that “political elite and warmongers” are pushing the world toward nuclear war because … they have nice, safe place to live out the apocalypse.

Seriously. At about the 2:50-mark in the linked video below, Gabbard says this:

As we stand here, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers. And perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.

Er. Right.

Because the smug, wealthy owners of luxury nuclear shelters who salivate for some boom-boom are willing to give up their multiple second homes, expensive art collections, yachts, tennis courts, trophy wives and impossible-to-get reservations at the world’s most exclusive restaurants so they can live in an underground bunker for the rest of their lives, eating C-rations, adjusting to the Zoom version of Davos and lamenting the inability to find good help.

For what? The light show?

Gabbard doesn’t mention who these evil people are, but given her long habit of parroting Russian propaganda, we might safely assume it’s Democrats and erstwhile NATO allies who’d like to stop Putin from taking Ukraine and marching westward across Europe.

You know, the sort of thing Republicans like Ronald Reagan used to warn us about and — for reals — push us to the point of nuclear conflict with Putin’s old pals in the Soviet Union. (“My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes,” Reagan “joked” into a soon-to-be-live microphone for a radio broadcast in 1984.)

The beginning of Gabbard’s video focuses on her recent trip to Hiroshima, where it was apparently revealed to her that hundreds of thousands of civilians suffered or died when the United States dropped the first of two nuclear bombs on Japan as World War II drew to a close.

This is the sort of history lesson that slack-jawed MAGA devotees, who seem to view international affairs as they might a WWE or UFC fight, could benefit from.

But rather than propose to the world a new round of disarmament we haven’t seen in decades, Gabbard suggests there’s some sort of cabal hankering to see a replay of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Disarming the heaping piles of nuclear weapons across our planet would have been a fine direction for Gabbard to take with this weird production. Even if we can’t countenance the idea of eliminating all of our own weapons, surely we can see the wisdom in reducing their number further. We’d still have more than enough to bomb the cellular structure out of any place we’d like.

The unsettling reality is that an act of aggression wouldn’t be necessary to start a nuclear apocalypse. All it would take is laziness and incompetence — and you know which world regime has cornered the market on those.

Earlier this year, the Trump team and its barely postpubescent budget wizards at DOGE gleefully fired many of the men and women who oversee the safety and security of our nuclear weapons — those damned things do need maintenance — and then, realizing their mistake, scrambled to rehire them.

Only to discover they didn’t know how to get in touch with them.