Michael Tracey, Ron Paul-tard (updated)

I'd had a fair amount of this information buried at the bottom of my Tulsi Gabbard Kool-Aid piece.

It needed its own post, per the header, and now it's getting it.

So, just what is the background of Michael Tracey, Tulsi Gabbard fellator and unofficial campaign press secretary?

Even before the Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign announcement, he'd been writing some hacktacular crap. It only got worse since then. He lost two reputational star levels with me, not just one.

And, until I hit teh Google, I forgot Tracey's own #FakeNews claim that Maxine Waters pushed him. I couldn't have forgotten, because I did not know until this teh Google, that Tracey wrote extensively for paleocon outfit The American Conservative. That includes repeating conservative BS that the IRS targeted conservative political shops. Both there, and before that at Reason, he wrote several bromance articles about Ron Paul, never talking about his racism or his Religious Right stances that undercut his claims to really being a libertarian. (And, yes, Michael, they're bromance pieces.)

The Paul bromance, assuming the heart of yearning for it still beats — and I have no reason to believe it does not — explains a lot about Tracey running Gabbard up the flagpole and saluting her. I wonder if, in a lower grade way, Tracey doesn't support sort of Caitlin Johnstone-type red-brown or red-black alliance. If not seeing his Uranus rising in the House of Caity, then compare him to a younger Justin Raimondo. (I hadn't looked up his address in years; he comes off more than ever as a self-hating gay if he can't even support traditional libertarian ideas for legal positive protection of gay rights as needed.) More evidence the Paul bromance might be a thing? Tracey took to Real Clear Politics to whine about the DNC not yet qualifying Gabbard for the next debate. That link is also slightly conspiracy thinking. This tweet, about another candidate, is even more so.

Jay Inslee passed the 130,000 donor mark on Monday. Today he drops out. Seems a little sketchy

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 22, 2019

And, no, this isn't an "occasional thing." Tracy was writing for Reason before the Occupy movement started. He wrote nearly 30 pieces for TAC over five years. Which then leads me to wonder: Was The Young Turks that dumb to hire him? That lazy on vetting him? Did he do some good spinning? Many Redditors had the same questions at the time Cenk let him go.

And, I wonder if Tracey has ever thought of modifying his "anti-Semitism isn't THAT bad" comments after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. As for him citing Alec Cockburn as support? I stopped reading Counterpunch for years in part because I thought Alec sometimes pushed the envelope on anti-Zionism hard enough to put a toe or two across the line of anti-Semitism. In any case, it was arguably dumb at the time and certainly is now. It comes off as of a piece with his Tulsi comments, though; that he's the one true person to see left-liberal reality correctly.

Speaking of Michael's seeming fellow travelers? Caity Johnstone's also got the hots for Tulsi. Reason No. 5 is wrong, per what I've read about the reasons behind the DNC split. Besides, things like superdelegates have been around, and have been a problem, for 40 years. And, it took Tulsi three-plus to complain? She also takes a selective look at Tulsi's foreign policy (i.e., not a word about India or about refugees).

However, there's just one BIG problem.

As I tweeted Tracey my original Kool-Aid piece repeatedly, Gabbard favors drones, favors torture, has passed on lies that Palestinians uses human shields and said that if AIPAC had asked her, she would have spoken to their conference, as well as accepting defense contractor campaign money. That was even before she voted FOR AIPAC, mentioned in my piece of a couple of weeks about about the cult of the #TulsiTwerkers.

She's not a paleocon by any means. Not even close. Especially when you add in the Islamophobia that's connected to her Hindutva peddling. She's a neocon as much as anything, on much of foreign policy — just one who doesn't want to expend American military lives on the neocon project in general and otherwise draws the circle fairly narrowly.

What I can't figure is, is this a case of Tracey being that self-deluding, or is it more a case of him willingly peddling the Kool-Aid for whatever reasons. And I don't even want to risk warping my mind on why Caity's bromancing her.

Greenwald doesn't seem to be a Kool-Aid drinker as much as a fence-straddler, or at least he seemed that way when she first announced. But, his tweets were ... not altogether sound, is the best way I can explain it. (Note: More and more left-liberals and leftists who take a serious look at both economic and social injustice have over the past year or two taken a more serious look at Glenn, and found him more and more wanting.)

I'm kind of surprised Justin Raimondo wasn't puffing her before he died. She did get guest column space on Antiwar.com, though.

Oh, and earlier this month, new shit hit the fan. That would be Hindutva fellow-traveling Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi suspending the Indian constitution and constitution-based agreements for and with Kashmir, cutting off electronic communication access from Kashmir to the outside as much as possible, and essentially putting it under martial law.

The reality of Kashmir as a "giant prison camp" and how India (led by the BJP, but with Congress and allies in acquiescence) got to this point is explained in detail by Arundhati Roy.

That's the subject of this tweet:

Why don't you ask Chomsky if Tulsi Gabbard is an apologist for Modi in the light of Kashmir? Why don't you talk about that yourself, for that matter, Michael Tracey? https://t.co/uUkXHlut5N

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 23, 2019

===
I had told readers to stand by for further news related to this, by early October. And, we're here.

And that additional news? I'll tell what I can, and you fill in the blanks, on me mentioning my side of an email exchange. (I don't feel it's fair to release another person's emails unless it's about a matter already public.) Any

Anyway? I submitted an edited version of this to Ken Silverstein with the hope (and later, more hope) it would run in Washington Babylon. And, we're two months on, and it hasn't.

That hope was of two parts. One was having Ken run something else of mine, as he has run one or two other pieces.

The other was getting the information about Tracey's background — and bank-shotting off that to Gabbard's background — to a wider audience than my site. That was my primary hope, even as other alleged outside the box journos show themselves to actually be stenos on things like Gabbard and Trump's Ukraine missteps.

I have used a couple of Ken's tweets, or links he's posted on Book of Face, as a Twitter cudgel, but it's not quite the same.

I don't know why, and even if I did, I couldn't tell you on here. But, Twitter is public, and Andrew Stewart, who is Ken's managing editor or something, didn't like this version. He especially doesn't like the "Paul-tard" part. (Stew comes off as about as puzzling as Justin Raimondo, about whose political incomprehensibility I blogged when he died.)

Note 2: I think Matt Taibbi may be moving halfway into Tracey range as an uncritical Gabbard steno. And, I'm thinking I may write specifically about that, and some other alleged outside-the-box journos who peddle at least parts of the Tulsi Kool-Aid.

Note 3: Per someone pointing this out on Twitter, I was so focused on the Ron Paul stories on Am Con that I didn't notice Mikey was enough of either an idiot or an ass kisser to call Booger Ted Cruz "charming" in 2014.