It’s a special kind of obscenity when multimillionaires, who have never been asked to bear the costs of war and know they never will, attack a veteran for a policy position adopted after bearing those costs herself.

Tulsi Gabbard, who served two tours in the Iraq War, has explained many times to many cable TV personalities that her anti-interventionist position is the result of seeing people maimed and killed while serving. Lately, their response to that position is to lose their shit. Shit has been lost on MSNBC, CNN and ABC. The shit-losing goes roughly like this:

Tulsi Gabbard says she thinks regime change intervention is counter-productive because it always leaves the population of the target country worse off, always leaves us worse off, wastes a ton of money that could be used to meet domestic needs, and breeds anti-American violence.

Then, because those facts are clearly demonstrable and impossible to dispute without sounding like a sociopath, the TV personality accuses her of sympathizing with Bashar Al-Assad, on the grounds that she’s said he isn’t a threat to US national security and therefore is not an enemy. They also question her motives for meeting with Assad in 2017, a meeting that’s been misrepresented as being the reason for her trip to Syria, even though she’s clarified repeatedly what her motives were and that she had not initially planned on meeting him.

Sometimes the TV personality is so dense it’s hard to believe. On CNN, Alisyn Camerota actually said this: “But isn’t anyone who uses barrel bombs or cluster bombs indiscriminately against hospitals, and against schools and who uses chemical weapons on children and their own people by definition an enemy of the US?”

Alisyn Camerota either doesn’t know or is ignoring the fact that US ally Saudi Arabia uses US-provided cluster bombs on Yemeni civilians, schools and hospitals, and that when Saddam Hussein gassed his own people in 1988, he was a US ally. It’s hard to say whether her not knowing those things or ignoring them would be worse. Such atrocities continue with the support of our tax money largely because figures like her never talk about them.

Other times, the TV person is totally illogical. On The View, when Gabbard argued that US violence hasn’t helped the Syrian people, Meghan McCain interrupted to counter that Assad’s gassing them “has not helped either.” In no way does that contradict Gabbard’s point. McCain’s point — which she doesn’t articulate because it is barbaric— is that we ought to add to the misery of those people by dropping some bombs of our own. That her statement doesn’t contradict, but ultimately supports Tulsi’s view (unless you engage in the fantasy that we could topple Assad without killing more civilians, which she didn’t) did not seem to register.

Still other times, the TV person is just sloppy. Ana Navarro asked if Gabbard puts “military intervention on the same level as economic and diplomatic efforts,” lumping economic sanctions, which can devastate civilians, together with diplomacy, which by definition is not devastating and totally different. And she asked this after literally sitting next to Gabbard for the entire segment, during which the answer to that question was already made crystal clear (it is “no, she does not.”).

The point is not to nitpick, but to understand the way this kind of language sets assumptions, shapes the messaging that’s blasted into everyone’s awareness, and directs public concerns and discussion. If Ana Navarro — someone who’s on TV and supposed to be worth listening to — lumps economic sanctions together with diplomacy, how many people come away thinking those things aren’t all that different? If Ana Navarro thinks anti-interventionists might just be isolationists who hate all diplomacy, how many people come away thinking that’s a rational concern to have?

At least some of this distorting, misleading, misrepresenting, and badgering is probably unconscious. These people exist in the world of TV, which is habitually dishonest, and someone saying something true and in plain language is probably genuinely hard for them to understand. Especially when it’s about politics, the discourse around which is designed to conceal unpleasant truths, like the fact that our wars are unnecessary, profit-driven humanitarian crimes which hurt our security.

It’s worth mentioning quickly that Navarro’s question was in regard to Venezuela (that’s why it’s clear the economic “efforts” she was referring to are economic sanctions). She, like virtually all US media, presents as unassailable truth the pro-regime change position that Nicolas Maduro’s presidency is illegitimate and that Juan Guaido’s self-declared presidency is somehow democratic. A responsible press would examine that position, and if it’s problematic, raise those problems for discussion. That is NOT to say that the press or anyone else should side with Maduro. It’s to say that when considering whether the US should involve itself, facts need to considered, but instead are willfully and almost uniformly ignored by the media.

This is the claim Ana Navarro parrots as fact: Nicolas Maduro is a brutal dictator who’s torturing his people by refusing humanitarian aid, and Juan Guaido has been chosen by the Venezuelan people to replace him.

As briefly as possible:

The most egregious omission, however, is not what some of us think about potential intervention, but what Venezuelans think about it. It’s omitted because on that issue they are not split, and it immediately shuts down any argument in favor of US involvement by anyone claiming to care about democracy. Because they, the people of Venezuela, overwhelmingly want us to stay the fuck out of it.

They don’t like foreign countries meddling in their government, a sentiment our media shares to the point of obsession.

None of this means Nicolas Maduro should remain president. It means TV figures shouldn’t be campaigning for an intervention Venezuelans don’t want by presenting pro-regime change talking points as undisputed facts. It’s dishonest, immoral and hypocritical. With our epidemics of gerrymandering and voter suppression, and our history of superdelegates, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court handing victories to those who lose the popular vote, all of which swirls in the toilet bowl of our last election, would China be justified in declaring our president illegitimate, imposing crippling economic sanctions, and sending spies to fund, arm and train an opposition force to overthrow our government? How about if their National Security Advisor went on TV and said they want our oil?

The idea that mainstream political commentators are insightful, neutral observers whose job it is to educate the public is false. Their job is to make the morally repulsive act of mass murder in the form of war palatable to you, me, and the rest of the population who pays for it. It is not to lead an honest discussion about mitigating human rights abuses. If it were, they’d regularly have on experts from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and other humanitarian organizations. But they hardly ever do. Instead, they constantly have on military officials, CIA analysts, ex-generals and ex-spies — people who do things like bomb Doctors Without Borders hospitals. That’s the point of view that TV pumps into living rooms day and night. The point of view of those actually working for human rights doesn’t get pumped anywhere.

Tulsi Gabbard probably didn’t go on these shows to expose their warmongering. She went on to express an opinion that many people who aren’t on TV share. We know that because of polls. And because when they hear it, they don’t look like they’re watching a kangaroo get an enema.

As long as people who own the major media profit from war, people wanting an honest discussion of it will have to look elsewhere.