What Worlds and What Profit
At National Review Online, Ramesh Ponnuru asks, “How pro-abortion does Tim Kaine have to be?” He means how pro-abortion does Tim Kaine have to be in order to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate. It shouldn’t surprise you that the answer is “very.” Hillary Clinton feels roughly the same about unborn humans as Andrew Johnson felt about freed blacks, and it’s doubtful she’ll accept as her vice president anyone who views defenseless preborn human beings with any less contempt than she does.
So Kaine is kind of scrambling, as evinced by his response to a recently-proposed Democratic platform that would demand full taxpayer support of elective abortions:
“I haven’t been informed of that change, but I’m going to check it out,” Virginia senator Tim Kaine, a potential running mate for Hillary Clinton, told TWS on Wednesday. “I have traditionally been a supporter of the Hyde amendment, but I’ll check it out.”
You can already see the cowardly shift in priorities: Kaine claims he has “traditionally been a supporter of the Hyde Amendment,” a statement that leaves a mile-wide avenue for him to change course in the near future. Maybe, like President Obama with gay marriage, Kaine is “evolving” on the Hyde issue at the precise moment that it’s electorally opportune for him to do so. Can you blame him? He’s come a long way, from the trenches of the terminally dysfunctional Richmond City Council to the halls of the United States Senate. Why stop now? What’s a few million dead babies?
Tim Kaine is an intellectual and moral fraud when it comes to abortion rights—he is one of those risible fellows who “personally opposes” abortion (presumably because he believes it to be murder) while also believing it should be legal (because who really cares about murder?). He has maintained this facade for quite some time, presumably to look like a conscientious, deep-thinking sort of fellow, a bipartisan “moderate” who can hold Catholic teachings on the sanctity of human life in one hand and support for industrial-scale human butchery in the other. But that doesn’t really hold up anymore; the modern Democratic Party is rapidly consolidating precisely along the kind of line that politicians like Tim Kaine have been able to straddle up until now. You can’t really be “personally opposed” to abortion anymore—certainly not on Hillary Clinton’s ticket, and not in the party she intends to lead.
Kaine probably has a bright political future ahead of him. He is likable, charismatic, intelligent. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that he might even be president himself one day. The same cannot be said for the hundreds of thousands of unborn children killed every year, innocent and defenseless little lives that Kaine has decided are expendable for his own selfish purposes.
