There are multiple ways they're ratfucking the 2026 elections already. I'm sure what you describe iw on their menu. Don't forget taco said he only won PA because, "Elon knows how those vote counting machines work."

Everything is a distraction from everything else, and they are all fucking awful.

During what time period? I remember when she was trying to enter the presidential primary, I looked into her. She seems great on the surface, but you don’t have to go much beneath the surface to see differently, and the further you looked, the worse it got

All the people that tried to convince me over the last decade that she was somehow an intelligent principled candidate.

Just like with Ron Paul, the fact that she was outspokenly critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (among other fronts) made her such an outlier that people would tilt towards her on reflex. Also like Ron Paul, her deeply reactionary religious beliefs and her profound racism never got the kind of daylight it deserved even among her mainstream media critics.

She was worse than even I implied at the time.

I saw a lot of people lashing out at her as a "Russian Asset" precisely because she was so staunchly anti-war. The fact that she was corrupt (and, largely corrupt in favor of Narendra Modi, whom these hawks continue to adore) was incidental to the fact that she was opposed to the Bush Era Middle East atrocities.

One of the most damning critiques of Gabbard in the modern day is that she was absolutely full of shit with regard to her anti-war stance. Turns out it was entirely circumstantial and fell away rapidly when the belligerents changed. But, again, this never seems to be a point against her with the Bush Era neocons. If you can get Gabbard on board with bombing China or Pakistan or Iran, that's good enough for them.

I remember when people preferred her to Bernie or thought she was like Bernie in 2020.

I always thought she was a Putin loving cultist stooge and she keeps proving me correct.

Hmm...

Santos was a bit different though. Gabbard tries to tell something resembling the truth, twisted as necessary to accommodate her lack of principles. Santos didn't even try to tell anything vaguely resembling the truth. He just spewed a constant stream of ridiculously obvious lies.

Yeah.... probably on an absolute scale, Santos was even more unprincipled than Gabbard.

I guess I didn't even consider him because it was never necessary to dive that deep into his character to discover fatal flaws. I never made it to the point of questioning his principles because he couldn't even open his mouth without lying. With Gabbard on the other hand, her sort of superficially honest-ish approach to things throws her complete and total lack of principles into stark relief.

Or something like that...