During the second Democratic debate, Tulsi Gabbard confronted Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor for the state of California. Senator Harris’s assessment of that exchange reflected a grasp of something that, in this particular situation, proved to a judicious move and a cautionary note to all of us: don’t take the bait. Gabbard attempted to bait Harris into a sixty-second defense of matters far too complex to have deconstructed right there and then. She wanted to drag the senator into the weeds on her criminal justice record as San Francisco’s District Attorney and then as California’s Attorney General. To be fair, the senator does need to do an in depth interview on why she did the things she did: Harris does need to parse her role as “prosecutor” vs. as “progressive activist.” But there will be time for that and that moment was not the time or place, so Harris wouldn’t go there. In my view, notwithstanding the intensity of the moment, it was an overwhelming fail for Gabbard in the long haul as the congresswoman is not the candidate best qualified to call anyone else out on any earlier policy positions.

I think most reasonable people take it on faith that anyone who has taken incoming fire on the ground in Iraq — as Gabbard has — has earned the right to have a strong opinion about the United States military presence there. I concede that point. But the congresswoman from Hawaii seems to feel that her military service has inured her to a deeper dive into her own dark political closet which might nullify her unique standing to criticize other Democrats on all kinds of things. She speaks out loud and proud about getting American troops out of Afghanistan:

Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable. We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan…We have spent so much money. Money that’s coming out of every one of our pockets…We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began. This is why it is so important to have a president — commander in chief who knows the cost of war and is ready to do the job on day one.

And on the merits of that stance alone there are those unequivocally prepared to move Tulsi Gabbard into the Oval Office tomorrow. She was so decisive, in fact, that if you take her at her word, you’d never suspect that — when she calls Kamala Harris out for dissembling on criminal justice reform — she’s casting stones in a glass house. If, however, you look a little more closely, and actually source that “all hail mom and apple pie” nonsense, you’d find it was taken from Danny Sjursen’s article, “The Tulsi Effect: Forcing War Onto the Democratic Agenda,” in The American Conservative. In that June 29th article, in a pretty rightwing publication, Sjursen essentially calls all the other Democrats on that debate stage pathetic with the bizarre shining exception of Tulsi Gabbard.

And I have one really elemental question about removing all U.S. troops from the region, and I don’t have an answer for it: when we leave, who fills the void? None of us are fans, at this late date, of staying in Afghanistan indefinitely and God knows, we can use the money elsewhere. But as Barack Obama discovered, “What comes to take our place?” is an existential question. Perhaps it will simply be any or all of the terrorists organizations we’ve been working so hard to contain for the better part of two decades. Or maybe it will just be the Russians. Gabbard’s got to know that there is no good answer, so maybe that’s a question worth posing to her when her spastic, frothing crowds are spent.

If you look even closer, rhetorical flourish and ballsy attitude notwithstanding, that is not really the way she voted when it comes down to it. The honorable congresswoman has a long, mutually beneficial relationship with entities benefitting from this war machine, having accepted thousands of dollars in contributions from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and BAE Systems.

In fact, Gabbard has a bit of a history of voting against measures that would reduce military spending. In 2013, Gabbard voted against measures to save money on aircraft carriers, reduce funding for submarines, cut wasteful war spending, take steps toward closing Guantanamo Bay, and reducing Pentagon spending. In 2014, Gabbard voted against an amendment that would prohibit U.S. combat operations in Iraq and against an amendment that would prevent funds being used for the 2002 AUMF in Iraq. The following year, Gabbard voted against reducing the number of required aircraft carriers the Navy was required to keep, cutting nuclear missile program funding, and a continuing resolution introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) to remove U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria (so much for opposing ‘counterproductive wars of regime change’). Then in 2016, Gabbard voted thrice against repealing or blocking funding for the 2001 AUMF, which is what currently gives American presidents a blank check for starting more endless wars.

After secretly meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2016 without telling party leadership of her intentions, Gabbard called US-backed rebels “terrorists,” then essentially sided with the Russians and the Iranians in voting against an anti-Assad House resolution. She remains defiant in her refusal to call Assad a dictator.

No doubt she had her reasons, and they might even have seemed like high moral ground to her. But that is definitely a debatable stand; more debatable, in the eyes of many, than any decision then Attorney General Harris might have made. That is in the eye of the beholder and this beholder suspects that there was something more in it for Tulsi Gabbard. Especially knowing what we do now about Assad, his relationship with Vladimir Putin, and by extension, Putin’s relationship with Donald Trump. She remains dug in on that choice and utterly unapologetic about it. Like Trump, Gabbard does not do self-appraisal or apology.

Which brings up another conspicuously odd choice that the congresswoman remains defiant about: her meeting in 2016 with Donald Trump at Trump Tower during the transition, ostensibly to discuss Syria and other such matters.

President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face.

No one really knows what happened in that meeting, because no one ever really knows what happens in any of Donald Trump’s meetings, but there was some chatter that Gabbard might join his cabinet. This is the same woman who so disliked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton that she stepped down from her post at the Democratic National Committee to support Bernie Sanders. Then thought it advisable to meet privately with Trump about Syria, knowing that the investigations into his campaign’s Russia connections were already underway. And we did know that at that point. So again, seriously?

Even when Gabbard goes through the motions of contrition it appears forced. As a young person Gabbard worked with her father in his organizations — Stop Promoting Homosexuality and The Alliance for Traditional Marriage — to stop pro-gay lawmakers and oppose gay marriage. Mike Gabbard identifies as a socially conservative Catholic who established himself as a leader and a zealot, supporting the loathsome cruelty of conversion therapy.

As Gabbard’s political ambitions have ascended, she’s repented the error of her ways. I have no reason to question her sincerity other that the fact that she has a canny track record of politically expedient “come to Jesus” moments; that is neither here nor there as long as her becoming results in the congresswoman’s voting like someone who shares the interests of the LGBTQ community, even if only transactionally. Sometimes that simply has to be enough. But again, shall we drag your past out into the light, Tulsi? Forgive my skepticism.

And my personal fave, the reason that I was finally compelled to write this article — as I genuinely have to feel like my head will explode if I don’t say what’s on my mind before I will commit words to page — is Tulsi Gabbard’s “fan girl” fest with Julian Assange.

There is an argument to be made for exploring other remedies for Edward Snowden, “freedom of the press” perhaps being the least of it. Personally, I suspect the mere fact of spending the rest of his life sleeping with one eye open may be punitive enough for the liberties he took when he leaked all the data he’d heisted from the National Security Agency in 2013. The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post all clearly thought the security breech he orchestrated was in the public interests when they published it and in the beginning only identified Snowden as a “confidential source.” And it is conceivable that Edward Snowden’s acceptance of help from Julian Assange, the mastermind of Wikileaks, in 2013 was more out of desperation than kinship. But he ended up on a plane to Russia with piles of data that Vladimir Putin would kill for, and he’s still a man without a country. Only he can say whether or not he would do it all again.

But Julian Assange is a different animal. He took all manner of leaked data from the NSA and private servers then posted it on Wikileaks, which is arguably still within the scope of the “First Amendment,” freedom of the press and all that. Assange identified himself as a “journalist” with all the protections that implies to try to distance himself from the consequences of his raw, brazen opportunism.

While I may not agree, it can be argued that the initial action was an act of conscience. But after that Assange operated from his room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London — where he had sought asylum since 2012 — to conspire with Russian operatives facilitating hacks and leaks of information from both the Clinton and the Trump campaigns in 2016. Then Julian Assange sold out to the highest bidder: in this case, Russia. Who then triggered the release of information benefiting Trump, because Trump was “Putin’s boy” in the American elections. Specifically, at times which were at least at Trump’s allusions, if not his direct requests, to distract from all manner of criminality or pure depravity that — if exposed — might have been Donald Trump’s undoing in the ’16 election.

At that point, Assange was nothing more or less than a mercenary for hire. That doesn’t even factor in the warrants out for his arrest in Sweden on rape charges: he’s just a creepy guy. So if Tulsi Gabbard won’t make that distinction, one really has to ask which team she’s playing for. At the very least, merely as a political matter, she could have simply let it slide but apparently, she just couldn’t keep from voicing her “good love” for Julian Assange. I don’t think she’s that stupid: she knows what she’s doing. I do, however, think she may think we are that stupid.

So Gabbard’s “in your face” attempted takedown of Kamala Harris in that second debate got some loud cheers and high praise from her followers in the room, and she trended above all the rest on Google and Twitter that night. But in interviews in the days following the debate Congresswoman Gabbard either would not answer questions about why she refused to call Assad out for the brutal dictator that he is, or she becomes brazenly combative with a reporter for pressing her on the subject. She told that interviewer that MSNBC was conspiring with Kamala Harris to discredit her. Really? She said that.

That all begs the question, why did she choose to go after Senator Harris so ferociously when, at least in the polls, Joe Biden is by far the greatest threat to Trump’s re-election? Harris is in the middle of the top tier. Biden’s vote on that now broadly criticized 1994 Criminal Justice Reform Bill is going to be a major bone of contention for him in months to come. Any astute strategist seeking to move up in the polls with some legitimate points to make would have confronted Biden. Perhaps other interests see the efficacy of casting suspicion on Kamala Harris’s skill and expertise because she is such a “prosecutorial” threat to Donald Trump in the “big picture,” but that big picture is still a year away. Why now? So why would Tulsi Gabbard, who knows her chances of getting the Democratic nomination are slim to none, go so hard — and so specifically — after Kamala Harris this early? Just sayin’.

Why, you might ask am I entitled to speculate on what I perceive as the candidate’s real agenda? Well, that’s my point: I’m just as entitled as Tulsi Gabbard is to stand up “in front of God and everybody” — as my Pappy would say — and declare anything I want to, and stomp my feet, and insist that it’s the gospel truth without acknowledging any opposing narrative, and that I don’t have to have any evidence absolutely proving a word I’ve said. Donald Trump does it every day. That don’t make it so. And it doesn’t mean that opposing points of view cannot be held by reasonable people. But apparently, Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard do expect us to believe every word they say without question, and furthermore, expect that we should VOTE for them because they say so.

So the candidate can dish it out but when it comes to taking it, to articulating herself concisely, to responding to reasonable concerns about why she did the things she’s done in the past — the way Kamala Harris surely will do in the months to come — Tulsi Gabbard is proving to be little more than a troll with a glass jaw.