by William Skink

Last week every single Democrat in the Senate voted to further bloat the “defense” budget. Only that wild-haired progressive and a handful of Republicans voted against the obscene military largesse:

In 2018, the United States spent $623 billion on national defense – more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan spent on their militaries, combined. Last week, every Senate Democrat (with the arguable exception of Bernie Sanders) ostensibly decided that the Pentagon’s current budget wasn’t quite large enough.

On one level, this was perfectly understandable. In Mitch McConnell’s Senate, a heaping helping of Pentagon pork is the price Democrats must pay to keep basic public services funded; by voting for a $17 billion increase in defense spending, Democrats secured new appropriations for the departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services.

And yet, it’s still noteworthy that not a single one of the Democratic senators vying for ownership of the “progressive lane” in 2020 availed themselves of the opportunity for a protest vote.

Are Democrats making the cold calculation that their base doesn’t give a shit about war and death? Are Democrats confident that corporate media won’t expose the full extent of America’s enabling of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen? Is there not an anti-war bone left in the Democratic Party?

There is one brave politician willing to speak honestly about US foreign policy, Tulsi Gabbard. I’ll have to go to Sputnik to show what happens when politicians step out of line of the official propaganda narrative. Here is how Sputnik reported on the Jake Tapper smear against Gabbard:

What followed was a debate between Gabbard and Tapper, who called Assad a ‘butcher’ and said that there was no democracy to speak of in Syria. Gabbard, who documented her conversations with ordinary Syrians during the fact-finding trip, said that she had heard something very different from what the mainstream media narrative is pushing.

“I’ll tell you what I heard from the Syrian people that I met with walking down the streets in Aleppo, in Damascus,” the Congresswoman said. “They expressed happiness and joy in seeing an American walking through their streets, but [asked] a question: Why is it that the United States, its allies and other countries are providing support and arms to terrorist groups like al-Nusra (al-Qaeda), Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS who are on the ground there raping, kidnapping, torturing and killing the Syrian people?”

Tulsi Gabbard is smeared by corporate media because she has the audacity to ask critical questions about who our tax dollars are supporting in places like Syria. While Gabbard is willing to put herself out there to be targeted by craven propagandists, her spineless colleagues remain silent as millions starve in Yemen.