Via the Free Beacon, did I tell you the Harris/Gabbard war was coming or did I tell you? “Gabbard might be an attack dog for Biden onstage tonight,” I wrote last night, “and if she is, the theories of why she’s allied herself with him will be flying tomorrow.” Anyone want to chip in with a theory for why Tulsi is on a seek-and-destroy mission against Harris?

It can’t be that she’s aiming to be Grandpa Joe’s VP. She’s too young and too far out of sync with Biden on foreign policy. He’s not going to spend his campaign hearing every day that he’s put an Assad stooge on the ticket. Is she eyeing some other administration job?

Ed quoted a small bit from this Harris post-debate interview in his post earlier but you need to watch it to appreciate the disdain. Contempt practically drips from the screen.

That’s the sound of a candidate who’d just gotten her bell rung on national television and was still smarting from it. The next round of polls will measure the damage Gabbard inflicted on her. But the tragedy of Tulsi’s candidacy is that Harris is right: She’s an Assad apologist and proved it again more than once last night. Anderson Cooper pressed her afterward about whether she considers Assad a torturer and a murderer and she dodged several times before croaking out the obviously correct answer. Earlier, in her closing argument onstage, she dropped this depth charge on Trump, straight out of the Assad regime’s talking points playbook:

Tulsi Gabbard: "This current President is continuing to betray us. We were supposed to be going after al Qaeda, but over years now, not only have we not gone after al Qaeda … our President is supporting al Qaeda" #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/RM5q7yb5aE — CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 1, 2019

Trump is “supporting Al Qaeda”? Because he twice ordered token strikes against Assad for … gassing civilians?

She said this a few hours after Bin Laden’s son, who was allegedly being groomed to lead Al Qaeda, was reported dead, mind you. It should tell you how far out on the limb she is in accusing Trump of supporting AQ that even the other hardcore Trump-hating Democratic candidates won’t go there. The claim is too absurd even for the opposition party; the only place you’re apt to hear it is from, well, Shiite propagandists.

What a shame. It’s easy to imagine a world in which Tulsi Gabbard is a rising star in her party and already a formidable national candidate at the tender age of 38. She’s smart and excellent in delivering a message; she laid Harris out last night on criminal justice without missing a beat. She’s also beautiful, a veteran, and an eloquent spokesman for an anti-interventionist foreign policy that has lots of interest in both parties in 2019. Over on Earth 2, Gabbard decided a few years ago that maybe she’d be better off *not* traveling to Syria and becoming a mouthpiece for the subhuman who’s in charge there and consequently she’s attracting all sorts of mainstream media interest right now as next-gen threat to the 2020 top tier. Back on Earth 1, though, Harris is well within rights to dismiss her as a crank on foreign policy. Who’s going to lay Harris out at the next debate if Gabbard has marginalized herself to the point where she can’t make the cut?