I’ve written a lot about Yemen over the past few years. And I knew the US Senate would never vote to end our direct participation in the Saudi war crime there that has led to the worst humanitarian crisis since WWII. I knew they – like 60 Minutes and the rest of the US — would kowtow to the extremist religious autocrats who rule over the most repressive regime on the face of the earth (with the possible exception of North Korea). I knew our leaders were bought and sold by Saudi money, which has also helped finance and arm violent extremists all over the world, for years. I knew they wouldn’t vote against America’s bipartisan participation in this genocide – and they didn’t.
But sickening as this was, it was the statement by one of the senators who DID vote for the measure to end US involvement in Yemen that caused my gall to overflow: the sanctimonious prig Tim Kaine – the man who would’ve been vice president. After casting a vote that he knew wouldn’t matter (many Democratic “leaders,” like Chuck Schumer, didn’t even vote until the 51-vote approval threshold was passed), Kaine put out a smarmy, pious statement lamenting the millions of Yemenis who may starve and the tens of thousands already killed in a war that, he says, the US “stumbled into.”
It was this arrogant, arrant, brazen, soulless lie that outraged me to the top of my bent. Kaine knows — as does anyone who has simply read the news in the past few…