The Kaine Scrutiny: A Special Report

 

The Kaine Scrutiny: A Special Report

American Spectator - Friday October 7, 2016

by Wlady Pleszczynski

For most of the country, Virginia Senator and Democrat vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine is known merely for a boring and inane convention speech and an obnoxious display — perhaps introducing kainus interruptus to the lexicon? — at Tuesday’s debate.

But there is a lot more to Kaine. All of it is bad. He’s the worst vice-presidential candidate the Democrats have offered since Thomas Eagleton was fired from the 1972 ticket amid doubts about his sanity.

What’s wrong with him, other than his creepy eyes and striking resemblance to The Grinch? Let’s just say The Usual, which, applied to Democrat politicians, amounts to four major items all the worst ones seem to carry with them like Lyme Disease.

A history of anti-American radical leftism? Check.

Remember when Bill Clinton’s past was examined and conservatives scoffed at the idea anyone who spent New Year’s Eve of 1968 in Moscow could ever be elected president? Remember when it was thought impossible that anyone who grew up at the knee of Frank Marshall Davis or launched his political career in Bill Ayers’ living room could lead the country?

Well, with Kaine we might even be deeper into the anti-American sludge. Thanks to a research memorandum prepared by Brian Burch, president of Catholic Vote, we know that Kaine has been a disciple of the anti-American international Left for nearly 40 years.

Kaine can’t claim he was just a kid when the “turning point in my life,” his own words, occurred. In 1980, he took a year off from Harvard Law School to take part in a Jesuit mission to Honduras. And there, he met his own Frank Marshall Davis — a man named Father James Carney, who died carrying a gun as a Cuban-trained Sandinista soldier in a failed invasion of Honduras just three years after Kaine trekked through the jungle over the border on foot to meet him in Nicaragua.

Carney is best described as a violent communist lunatic. He renounced his American citizenship to become a Honduran in 1973, was one of the leading proponents of the Soviet-inspired “liberation theology” doctrine which synthesizes Catholic teachings with dialectical Marxism and ultimately left the Jesuit order over an irreconcilable difference; namely, that you can’t be a Jesuit priest and shoot capitalist pigs at the same time. Carney’s end came, apparently, after he was captured by the Honduran army during the ill-fated Sandinista military adventure. The Hondurans treated him the way an irregular combatant can expect — he was tortured and shot, and his body dumped from a helicopter in the triple canopy jungle across the border in Nicaragua.

And Kaine didn’t just get Carney’s autograph. After Carney died, Kaine befriended his successor in the communist radio ministry he helped establish, Radio Progreso in the Honduran city of El Progreso. That would be Father Ismael Moreno Coto, who is better known in Latin America as Padre Melo. Kaine has maintained a long-lasting friendship with Melo and his organization — from a release his Senate office put out in 2014 after hosting Padre Melo for a D.C. visit comes this quote: “I think of El Progreso everyday. The people, aside from my family, are the most important in shaping who I am today.”

They’re not exactly the Rotary Club.

Complete lack of business or private-sector experience? Check.

Kaine’s bio is immaculate in its reflection of his avoidance of what we squares would call a real job. Following his adventures with Sandinistas and their allies in the jungles of Central America, he returned to Harvard and earned his law degree. And to what use did he put that expensive, exclusive education to work?

Why, suing landlords for racial discrimination, of course.

Kaine practiced “fair housing” law and taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Richmond for 17 years before finally getting into politics as a city councilman in Richmond in 1994. By 1998 he’d managed to get himself appointed mayor of that city, a largely ceremonial position elected by the city council members; Richmond is actually run by a city manager. Kaine took credit for the latter’s success and then ran for Lieutenant Governor, Governor and Senator.

He’s never owned a business, and he’s never signed the front of a check. Little wonder he’s got a lifetime 4 percent score from the Club For Growth.

Shameless invocation of race and identity politics? Check.

And how.

Kaine let slip the mask on his fealty to the tiresome Democrat virtue-signaling on race when, speaking in August at a convention of black preachers in New Orleans, he waxed rhapsodic about his choice to attend a mostly-black church in Richmond. “I’ve never been treated badly in life because of my skin color or my gender,” he said. “I think the burden is on those of us who are in the majority — Caucasians. We have to put ourselves in a place where we are the minority.”

This came only a week after Kaine had blathered away at the National Urban League conference in Baltimore, at which he touted the fact he’d apologized for slavery both as mayor of Richmond and governor of Virginia, and then lectured that it was time to “end the era of mass incarceration” — which is rich considering that Kaine touted as one of his mayoral successes the controversial Project Exile, which referred gun law violation cases to federal prosecutors for harsher sentences. That, of course, led to mass incarceration of a disproportionately black cohort of perpetrators; perhaps Kaine might consider leaving alone the past sins of slavery and focus on his own actions if he’s truly going to pander to the black community.

By the end of August, his first month as a national political figure, Kaine was decrying Donald Trump’s Ku Klux Klan values — which might not have been such a wildly uncivil and irresponsible charge, for after all Trump did spend some time as a registered Democrat; if Kaine wants to apologize for past racial sins perhaps he can acknowledge the Klan’s status as the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party from its inception to the end of its relevance in the late 1960s.

But it isn’t just black Americans who get to be the targets of Kaine’s pandering; he’s especially fond of Muslims as well. So much so that Kaine offered the idiotic statement in Tuesday’s debate that he doesn’t believe this country has the right to stop or slow the importation of immigrants from Muslim countries — he called such a practice “completely antithetical to the Jeffersonian values.” Which is nonsense, as Jefferson himself was a critic of unbridled immigration from countries with cultures foreign to America.

That Kaine would spew such pabulum about Muslims isn’t much of a surprise since he has a history of selling himself out to the Muslim Brotherhood. There was the appointment of Esam Omeish, then president of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Muslim American Society — which federal prosecutors would call the “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood” in a court filing in the Holy Land Foundation case — to the Virginia Immigration Commission in 2007. Omeish is a board member and former Vice President of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, which is a radical Virginia mosque at which Anwar Al-Awlaki once served as imam. So did Mohammed Al-Hanooti, who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And among the attendees at Omeish’s mosque were 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, not to mention Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Omeish isn’t a terrorist that we know of, though he has been captured on video touting the “jihad way” in 2000 — and when that surfaced he had to resign from the Immigration Commission.

And worse — maybe — there was Kaine’s 2011 appearance at a PAC dinner in honor of another Muslim Brotherhood superstar, Jamal Barzinji, described as a founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States and a close associate of convicted Hamas fundraiser Sami al-Arian. Barzinji himself had an indictment in a terror investigation scuttled by the Obama administration. Why was Kaine on hand to speak to the gathering, for the fourth time? Money, of course, and lots of it. The PAC in question, the Muslim Brotherhood-bankrolled New Dominion PAC, had given over $43,000 to Kaine’s gubernatorial campaign from 2003-05, and more than a quarter-million dollars to the Virginia Democratic Party. Other Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated entities coughed up an additional $9,000 to Kaine’s 2012 Senate campaign.

They know who their friends are. And you’d better not complain or else Kaine will call you a racist.

Long-standing trail of political corruption? Check.

Kaine also brings the stench of corruption with him, something that seems inescapable with any Clinton minion.

What evidence do you need to conclude his real value on the Democrats’ ticket is his willingness to pardon everyone should Hillary Clinton drop dead after the election? We could be here all day.

Let’s start with the fact that as Lt. Governor and Governor of Virginia Kaine accepted some $160,000 in gifts from political donors and companies regulated by that state — including an $18,000 Caribbean vacation, $5,500 in clothing and a trip to see George Mason in the 2006 NCAA Final Four — between 2001 and 2009. Those are precisely the same kinds of gifts that former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was prosecuted for taking; McDonnell was convicted of corruption but had his case thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court. Naturally Kaine was never prosecuted by the Obama Justice Department for his status as a beneficiary. That escape was justified by the claim that Kaine never offered a quid pro quo, but then again Kaine did reappoint James Murray, who gave him the use of his villa in Mustique, to the Virginia Higher Education Commission, and he also appointed S&K Famous Brands clothier Stuart Siegal, who so generously supplemented his wardrobe, to the Virginia Racing Commission.

But of course there was no quid pro quo.

Or we could talk about his use of taxpayer dollars as mayor of Richmond to send activists in buses to the gun-grabbing Million Mom March, which caused no small stir when the public found out about it. Kaine then had to raise private funds to reimburse the city treasury; no word on what the quid pro quo was to get him out of that jam.

But the main item where political quid pro quos are concerned is Kaine’s spot on the ticket in the first place. After all, he was the chairman of the Democrat National Committee in 2011 and suddenly decided to give up that seat in favor of Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who had been Hillary’s 2008 campaign co-chair. Thanks to Wikileaks we already know that Wasserman Schultz rigged the Democrat primary process to insure Hillary would be the nominee. Under the circumstances it’s difficult to envision why else other than a political payoff Kaine would merit the VP nod; Virginia might be a swing state but Kaine offers little in terms of charisma, curriculum vitae, or demographics.

What he does offer, though, is that he’s willing to do things others won’t… as you’d expect from a long-time committed radical.

America shouldn’t be willing to give this man the power he seeks. We’ll deserve what we get if we let him get anywhere near the White House.

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