On Thursday afternoon, former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien ripped Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for refusing to vote for the impeachment of President Trump on Wednesday, tweeting that Gabbard is an “American Coward.”
Gabbard, as a member of the Hawaii National Guard, served in a field medical unit in a combat zone in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009.
Gabbard had simply voted “present” when the vote was taken. In the video to which O’Brien responded, she explained:
Here’s the deal. Politics should not be a zero-sum game, but tragically, that’s exactly what it has become, and it’s polluted the whole nature of our politics. The point of politics should not be about doing maximum damage to your opponents just to win, because all that’s happened, as has in the case of our current America, is that people get hurt and nothing gets done. My stance yesterday, my vote, was opting out of this zero-sum game mindset and back into one of negotiation and compromise. We are stuck right now in this terrible scenario where everyone is trying to exact maximum hurt from their opponent for a “win.”
She continued, “My ‘present’ vote was not passive; it was an active protest against the terrible fallout of this zero-sum mindset that the two opposing political parties have trapped America in. There’s no winning here. Everyone is losing. Our country is losing. If we, we, don’t break this stalemate we find ourselves in, America is done for. My vote and my campaign for president is about freeing our country from this damaging mindset so that we can work side by side to usher in a brighter future for all Americans.”
American Coward https://t.co/7RTJyKyqhO
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) December 19, 2019
The Daily Wire noted that according to the Star Advertiser, Gabbard said after the vote:
After doing my due diligence in reviewing the 658-page impeachment report, I came to the conclusion that I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no. I am standing in the center and have decided to vote Present. I could not in good conscience vote against impeachment because I believe President Trump is guilty of wrongdoing. I also could not in good conscience vote for impeachment because removal of a sitting president must not be the culmination of a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country.
In November, O’Brien slammed President Trump, as she told The Daily Beast, “What drives me more nutty than the president—who I think is obviously a terrible human being in a lot of ways—is the way in which the media does not know how to handle him. Quoting people who are saying lies is a really bad strategy. When President Trump says the moon is made of cheese, well, it’s not. … What drives me really crazy is to see all the mistakes the media makes around [the problem of], how do you report on somebody who’s a liar, who won’t hold press conferences in a place where you can ask real questions?”