Virginia is for lovers....of the Death Penalty

I live in Virginia...and that's not a very comfortable place for a rug-biting* liberal to live in most of the time, but especially during election season.

Our last Governor (James Gilmore) left the state with a hell of a mess...and our current Governor, Mark Warner (remember that name) turned the state around, with hard work and sacrifice, in a single term. Thanks to his leadership, Virginia is now the best managed state in the country.

You'd think that would be the kind of thing that would make his Lt. Governor (Tim Kaine) a shoe-in for his replacement next month, when the election is held.

Not in Virginia. Tim Kaine's opponent, Jerry Kilgore, is the guy who campaigned against everything that has worked and worked so well in Virginia when he ran against Mark Warner and lost.

Again, you'd think that something like that would dog a candidate, regardless of party. For a southern state, we sure have short memories.

The problem is, that in Virginia, only two things matter: Keeping gays single and protecting the death penalty. Well, three if you count abortion, but again, both candidates are against it...although, of course, Kilgore is against it to a fault.

So, I often have to hold my nose and support Democrats who sound like Republicans. Every Democrat in the state has to run ads saying they are opposed to gay marriage and will enforce the death penalty. They have to say this even before the Republican accuses them of advancing a dangerous homosexual agenda and being soft on crime.

Of course, the Republicans in Virginia make Republicans elsewhere look liberal, but that's a whole other issue.

This flogging of the Death Penalty by professed ardent Christians has, however, reached a point of absurdity.

Kilgore kicked off the campaign with the most negative attack ads I've ever heard. He actually has a series of ads where he trots out the family members of murder victims and they tell Virginians that Kaine tried to keep the people who killed their wives, brothers, etc. from being put to death after conviction, so Kaine can't be trusted.

There is even, I kid you not, one ad where they actually say that Tim Kaine would help Hitler avoid the death penalty.

Wait, I thought MoveOn.Org was the only organization depraved enough to exploit Hitler's legacy to win votes....Guess I was wrong. Has anyone else noticed how Republicans tend to accuse Democrats of doing what they don't mind doing themselves? If Republicans hate Democrats who do it...and for crying out loud, Durbin was just trying to get American troops to stop torturing people, not win an election...why do they tolerate it when their own candidates do it? Could it be that they are not...sincere?

And to counter these creepy and extremely misleading ads, Kaine has had to run ads saying that, literally, Jerry Kilgore is attacking his religious beliefs because as a Catholic he is morally opposed to the death penalty. He cautions, however, that as an elected official he will work to uphold existing laws...including the death penalty. "I'm a Christian, but secular law comes first." What a stupid position hypocritical Christian Republicans have put Tim Kaine in. It melts my brain.

Boil it down, folks. Kilgore is basically saying "I'm the vengeance candidate. I'm a Christian, but not Christian enough to halt an exectution the way Jesus did. Tim Kaine is just too Christian to be trusted in office."

Kaine has to then say, "I want to assure every Virginian that I'm Christian enough to be personally opposed to the death penalty but my convictions aren't deep enough to keep me from killing people for you if you tell me to."

How do you counter the Hitler thing?

"Uh, Jerry, Hitler is already dead, you can't kill him."
or
"Jerry Kilgore thinks that if elected Governor he will kill any foreign head of state you don't like, living or dead, and that's delusional."

The whole thing is insane.

Of course, I get the subtext. We've all been trained to see Hitler and Hussein as interchangeable, so the subtext is that Kaine wouldn't keep Hussein from being executed...but Kilgore isn't ballsy enough to actually say that.

Yet. Wait for the next round of push polling to happen.

Rest assured, though, they both want to keep Gays from lifelong legal commitment to monogomy and unable to adopt children.

So, it isn't a matter of who do you think will continue the forward progress which has made this the best managed state in the country...it is who do you most trust to keep the fags down and to kill the bad people? (That being, I guess, the true measure of a modern American Christian.)

I wish we'd keep religion out of politics, because if you don't, there isn't a one of us that can avoid the charge of hypocrisy.

And until fate pulls me somewhere less bloodthirsty, I'll have to keep being subjected to the daily reminder that the overwhelming majority of people in this state need to be constantly assured that their government is a killing machine.

No wonder voter turnout is so low.


*For you young'n's out there, "rug-biting" and "carpet chewing" used to be terms for hystrionic orators....and as an old fart, that's what I mean. It probably dates to the Second World War, when Hitler's generals called him "Teppichfresser" due to his tendency to fly into uncontrollable rages and, according to the story, take a bite out of the nearest carpet. It does not infer, as I am told young people use the phrase today, anything related to rug burns and sexual activity. Sheesh!