Just How Many Times Did Tim Kaine Play the Race Card?
Where to begin with Senator Tim Kaine’s abysmal performance in the vice-presidential debate?
Let’s start here, with this opener:
It is so great to be back at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.
This is a very special place. Sixty-five years ago, a young, courageous woman, Barbara Johns, led a walkout of her high school, Moton High School. She made history by protesting school segregation. She believed our nation was stronger together. And that walkout led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that moved us down the path toward equality.
Stop right here.
How was it exactly that Barbara Johns was forced into a situation that resulted in a segregated school in the first place? Answer: Because Tim Kaine’s political party, the Democrats, had spent the previous 89 years using segregation — racism — as the building block of their party. As Kaine would go on to demonstrate as the debate moved on, playing the race card is still at the core of his party — and the campaign of its latest nominees, Kaine and Hillary Clinton.
Next, incredibly, Kaine said this:
I’ll just say this: We trust Hillary Clinton, my wife and I, and we trust her with the most important thing in our life. We have a son deployed overseas in the Marine Corps right now. We trust Hillary Clinton as president and commander-in-chief, but the thought of Donald Trump as commander-in-chief scares us to death.
Suffice to say, Pat Smith, the mother of State Department Information Officer Sean Smith has a very, very different opinion. Sean Smith was one of the four Americans killed in the terrorist attack in Benghazi. Clinton failed abysmally in taking care of the most important thing in Pat Smith’s life: her son. Smith, in fact, holds Hillary Clinton “personally” responsible for her son’s death. Kaine never mentioned Pat Smith, much less addressed her concerns in the debate.
Kaine never answered the moderator’s question as to why so many millions of Americans think Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy. He responded by praising her passion and career, then, but of course, played the race card by saying this of Trump:
And as a candidate, he started his campaign with a speech where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals, and he has pursued the discredited and really outrageous lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
It is so painful to suggest that we go back to think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States.
This was, of course, a deliberate lie. Trump’s remarks were in the context of illegal immigration, decidedly not a condemnation of “Mexicans.” And all anyone — certainly a sitting US Senator Kaine — has to do to research the subject is check here with ICE, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency. Here’s but one headline from ICE in 2014:
ICE Texas field offices remove more than 800 sex offenders so far this year
More than 2,000 removed every year in past 3 years
The ICE report begins as follows:
DALLAS — The four Texas field offices within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) have deported more than 860 sex offenders so far this fiscal year.
Of the 862 alien sex offenders deported by the Texas-based offices, about 27 percent were convicted of sex offenses against children.
What about this does Kaine not understand? Answer? Kaine does understand and chose to, but of course, play the race card and suggest Trump is a racist for stating what the US government itself states is hard fact. So too have Democrats made the so-called “birther” issue into a race card. The hard fact of history is that this issue has recurred five different times with a sitting president and actual or potential presidential candidates (President Chester Alan Arthur and potential or actual candidates Barry Goldwater (born in the then-territory but not-yet-the-state of Arizona), George Romney (born in Mexico to Mormon missionary parents), Lowell Weicker (considering a run in 1976 for the GOP nod, Connecticut Senator Weicker was born in Paris to parents in the foreign service) and of course Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. (R, 32%), born in the Panama Canal Zone while his Navy-serving father was stationed there. All were white and all Republicans. While I always believed Obama was born in Hawaii, there was and is nothing in the least inherently racist about birtherism — unless, of course, you are a race-card playing Democrat like Tim Kaine.
This is the exact same obsession with using racism as a political ploy that fueled the Democrats’ political power as supporters of slavery, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. Now they use race in the illegal immigration issue or inject race into the ancient previously all-white birtherism ploy. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are now playing the same race cards once played by Kaine’s fellow Virginian and race-card player extraordinaire Woodrow Wilson.
Then there was this Kaine whopper, the reference here to the Bush 43 tax cuts:
The second component of the plan is massive tax breaks for the very top, trillions of dollars of tax breaks for people just like Donald Trump. The problem with this, Elaine, is that’s exactly what we did 10 years ago and it put the economy into the deepest recession — the deepest recession since the 1930s.
This is a flat-out lie. The reason the economy was put into “the deepest recession — the deepest recession since the 1930s” — was precisely because of the Democratic Party’s repeated devotion to forcing banks to give loans to Americans who could not afford them. Those Americans eventually and inevitably defaulted on their loans, triggering the “Great Recession.” This mind-blowing reality was documented in detail in New York Times business reporter Gretchen Morgenson’s book with housing and mortgage investment consultant Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.
The title says it all … and one of those fingered in this cesspool story involving a prominent Democratic Party lobbyist is, yes, President Bill Clinton and his 1994 National Partners in Homeownership policy. But there is Kaine making up out of whole cloth — looking the American people right straight in the television eye — and lying about what caused the Great Recession.
There’s more — much more, of course. The number of outright lies combined with clever sleight-of-hand deceptions by Kaine is stunning. All of this added to Kaine’s widely-panned style that combined arrogance, rudeness, and agitation in varying measure.
A CNN poll after the debate gave the contest to Pence. Most interesting stat from that poll was this:
Still, 29% of debate watchers said what they saw Tuesday made them more apt to vote for Trump, compared with 18% who said it made them more likely to back Clinton.
Thanks to Tim Kaine, and the contrast with the calm, measured, conservative and decidedly truthful approach of Mike Pence, is this any wonder? (For more from the author of “Just How Many Times Did Tim Kaine Play the Race Card?” please click HERE)
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