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Tulsi Gabbard takes cheesy risk by singing for anniversary of John Lennon’s death

December 9, 2019 | | Print Article
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It must be a huge relief to Republican candidates that they don’t have to clamor for the hip vote in the same manner their Democrat counterparts do.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, marked the 39th anniversary of the assassination of rock star John Lennon by sharing the lyrics to the song, “Give Peace a Chance.”

British rock star John Lennon on the anniversary of his assassination 39 years ago, citing the lyrics to one of his most well-known songs.

“Remembering John Lennon today,” Gabbard tweeted Sunday. “‘All we are saying is give peace a chance.'”

Lennon, a member of the superstar Beatles band, was assassinated on December 8, 1980 outside his residence in New York City by Mark David Chapman, who claimed to be a Beatles fan angered by Lennon’s lifestyle and public statements.

For what it’s worth, Chapman was denied parole last year for the tenth time.

“The panel has determined that your release would be incompatible with the welfare and safety of society,” the state Board of Parole told Chapman in a letter.

Gabbard didn’t stop with just one tweet commemorating Lennon’s death.

Later in the day, at the risk of coming across a little too cheesy, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate posted a video of her singing “Imagine,” which was co-written by Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono.

Sitting in the back of her campaign bus alongside her husband, Abraham Williams, who joins in while playing the ukulele, the couple belt out the popular 1971 tune which imagines a world where there is no religion, no countries and no possessions.

Which is not a far cry from what the left-wing faction of the Democratic Party seeks.

Gabbard is sometimes revered on the right for her willingness to stand up to and call out the political class on the left, as embodied by Hillary Clinton, but she did endorse self-avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016.

And a quote attributed to Lennon by author John Blaney in “Lennon and McCartney: Together Alone,” was explicit about the song’s origins.

“‘Imagine’, which says: ‘Imagine that there was no more religion, no more country, no more politics,’ is virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement,” Lennon is quoted as saying.

Blaney said Lennon told the British website New Musical Express, “There is no real Communist state in the world; you must realize that. The Socialism I speak about … [is] not the way some daft Russian might do it, or the Chinese might do it. That might suit them. Us, we should have a nice … British Socialism.”

In reality, Lennon’s political views were complicated — he was embraced by the left because he was a pacifist who protested the Vietnam War. It’s debatable that Lennon still held to the idealism of his youth at the time of his death, at the age of 40.

The reaction online was just as interesting as Gabbard is as a candidate — here’s a sampling of the wide-ranging responses from Twitter

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Tom Tillison
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