Tim Kaine, ignoramus
You may recall that Tim Kaine was Hillary Clinton’s VP running mate. What is it with these Democrat VP candidates named “Tim”?
Not his finest hour:
This is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen from a Senator.
Tim Kaine apparently just discovered the idea of inalienable rights and thinks the defining principle of the Declaration of Independence is “extremely troubling”. https://t.co/k1im7y8cF6
— AG (@AGHamilton29) September 4, 2025
Most of the criticism I’ve seen of Kaine rests on his ignorance of the Declaration of Independence, some of the most memorable lines of which are these:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …
Self-evident? Not to Kaine. Nor was it “self-evident” to Obama, who sometimes would omit the “Creator” part. But the Declaration makes it clear that the rights come from God and are only secured by governments.
And of course some governments don’t secure them at all.
But Kaine’s ignorance of the words of the Founders, which form the basis of our government, is only the beginning of his stupidity. Does he really think that the mullahs of Iran believe that there are any inalienable rights that come from God – except the duty (not the right) to worship Him as the mullahs dictate? Iran is a theocracy, and as far as I know there are no rights guaranteed there at all. Certainly there is no freedom of religion and generally no liberty.
Does Kaine think that invoking God as a foundation for something like rights is the equivalent of creating a totalitarian theocracy? How absurd. If a government believes that the deity controls everything, but secures no rights at all to the government’s citizens, then the belief in God would be the only commonality between that dictatorial theocracy and a government that secures many rights that are endowed by God. Such governments would be opposites, not similar.
Kaine’s failure is basic. But it’s not arbitrary. It’s in the service of saying it’s only government that you can rely upon, that it’s government that decides what’s a right and what is not.
ADDENDUM: I just found this rebuttal to Kaine, from Bishop Robert Barron:
I’d like to respond to a disturbing contention from Senator Tim Kaine, during a recent confirmation hearing. pic.twitter.com/hvaYlQQybi
— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) September 4, 2025
Thomas Hobbes is a potted plant (to whom we owe a enormous debt of gratitude).
Even as a potted plant Hobbes towers over Tim Kaine in any sane ranking of political thinkers.
I’m looking real hard at the portion of the Declaration Neo quoted but I don’t see the word ‘God’, Senator Kaine.
It doesn’t matter if you substitute ‘God’ or ‘Big Bang’ or ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ for ‘Creator’, the point of the sentence, as Neo notes, is that humans have natural rights that exist prior to the formation of any government and the proper position of government is to preserve and protect those rights. Government does not create them, does not grant them, and sure as hell can’t limit them except by the imposition of tyranny.
For leftists it really isn’t different. They believe that rights are giving by god.
The only difference is they believe that Government is God.
Carrying on from Martin’s statement, if leftists elevate government to the position of a deity, they fail to understand that said government is made of fallible people.
We dodged two bullets in both 2016 and 2024 not having Tim Kaine and TamponTim Walz as vice president elects (to say nothing about Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris as president).
Kaine and his wife met at Harvard Law School, in case you were wondering just what that august institution produces.
The State IS God, to CommieCrats. Mussolini had a few choice words about it.
Art Deco:
It also “produced” Ted Cruz, who responded to Kaine.
Brooklyn Boy, in both cases one boxwine-fueled stumble from the presidency.
I just finished listening to Robert Heinlien’s “For Us, the Living.” He wrote it in 1939, and put it in a drawer and never published it. It was found, and published, about 20 years after his 1988 death.
It’s a long treatise on economics and government. Heinlien was an Annapolis grad who was booted out of the Navy because he caught tuberculosis. He was extremely well read and became a writer because it paid well for what he considered easy work.
Its protagonist is a military pilot who finds himself 150 years in the future after accidentally driving off a cliff. He’s now in a world where everyone gets a government check, in order to make sure all goods get purchased. Health care is free and unlimited. Government has the power to sterilize defectives.
America stands alone at the top of the heap; Europe had a terrible continental war that killed 9 of 10 and is now an untouched wilderness with few people. Any expeditionary war can only happen if the warfighters themselves vote for it, and doing so enlists the voter. National defense is really set up as defense only.
It’s interesting because rocketry is on a level with the Germans in 1944. 150 years later men are just getting close to sending a rocket to the moon and back without landing. Atomic weapons are not known; odd because Heinlien would have had some knowledge of their possibility.
If one misbehaves, there are two options. Psychological readjustment is one, and he clearly believes this art will be much advanced in effectiveness. The other is to take what one can carry and enter Coventry, a large fenced preserve where one can do what he likes; no laws or rules apply inside.
It’s an odd polemic. Later in life Heinlien was known to be very conservative and libertarian. This book reads like a love letter to the New Deal. 1939, sure, people and circumstances change. But this is what a very smart, very well-read libertarian-minded man thought about the future–before Hitler, ICBMs and when analog ballistic computers for battleships were the apex of technology.
“Does Kaine think that invoking God as a foundation for something like rights is the equivalent of creating a totalitarian theocracy?”
Yes. And he wants a “Dem-ocracy” where he and fellow socio-fascists in the Democratic Party play god and grant or take away rights by fiat.
Kaine’s comments reveal his abysmal ignorance of both the American foundational documents and of Islam.
physicsguy “… they fail to understand that said government is made of fallible people.”
They do fail to understand. I think they do so on purpose. I don’t think they actually acknowledge that they are ever wrong. The crazy libs I am most acquainted with have a tendency to have no recollection of what they thought about something yesterday if it is at variance with todays beliefs. One of them was an older guy and he failed to recollect his past positions so much for awhile I was concerned he was going senile. Then I figured out he was just denying what he did that was a poor choice because he was always right.
Pardon me for saying so, but in the video Tim Kaine looks & sounds like he’s operating with some degree of cognitive impairment. He’s only 67, but for about half of that time he’s been a politician; that could explain it. He’s a Harvard Law School grad, and must certainly have been exposed to readings or discussions on the subject of the origin of rights. He could have skipped that part, but it’s more likely he was in some kind of brain freeze while carrying out his senatorial functions. Not uncommon.
He isnt merely a fool look further down
https://www.lchaimmagazine.com/4523/
His ties to islamist figures like omeish and the heads of the al hijra mosque,
What government gives government can takeaway, ego they are not rights but are instead privileges.
@Christopher B:
The immediate preceding sentence refers to “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God…”
No one would have seen your point has making the slightest sense. That is what “Creator” meant.
And I will point out that the only one of the lot against whom the “Spaghetti Monster” nonsense would have the slightest relevance would be Jefferson himself (who did think God must have a body.)
The ‘legal’ basis for leftists like Kaine’s assertion that our rights come from the government is twofold; neither the word “inalienable” nor “unalienable” appear in the text of the U.S. Constitution. Plus, the amendment process also applies to the Bill of Rights with Prohibition establishing that precedent.
The premises mentioned in the Declaration of Independence are deemed by Kaine and his ilk to be the personal opinions of the signers.
The left claims their position to be buttressed by the fact that, “No delegates signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776; the document was adopted on that date, with most of the 56 delegates signing the official engrossed copy on August 2, 1776, and the rest over the following months and into the next year.”
So every one of the Bill of Rights is legally open to revision or even outright repeal. There is no room in the left’s godless State for anything which the State cannot do with as they will.
Only a creator that transcends the subjective opinions of mankind can form the basis for asserting there to in fact be inalienable rights. The irony of course is that rejection in the belief in a creator to whom we are accountable for our actions in this life, removes ALL basis for a claim to have rights at all.
As, a later consensus of men may declare an earlier consensus to be invalid and thus there are only revocable privileges… including ‘possession’ of our very lives.
Recently demonstrated in Canada, in which it is illegal to carry the means essential to defending your life, where even pepper spray is illegal. Even threatening multiple house invaders with an unloaded shotgun is against the law.
The Democrats’ greatest talent is getting truly stupid sophists elected, repeatedly. Kaine, Whitehouse, Hirono, Blumenthal, Murphy, Liawatha, Bernie et al.
Don’t even get me started on the House Dems.
“What is it with these Democrat VP candidates named ‘Tim’?”
You kinda beat me to it, neo. I noticed that at some point a few weeks ago.
Going forward, I am now, and for the balance of my natural life, extremely wary of any presidential candidate selecting as a running mate a near girly-man named “Tim”.
— Gordon Scott
The emboldened part is not surprising, since RAH was a New Dealer and an FDR man back then.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, RAH wrote an essay called The Last Days of the United States, in which he cogently assessed many of the implications of nuclear weapons, and prescribed world government as the solution. In the essay he advocated for ending the veto power in the UNO Security Council, turning the UNO into a real world state, abolishing national armaments entirely, pretty much the standard world federalist wish list.
Yes, Robert Heinlein called for that. Recall too that he wrote a fictional story before Hiroshima called Solution Unsatisfactory in which the USA gains a nuclear monopoly and ends up founding a world dictatorship because there was no other choice.
The later, older RAH would have his spokes character Lazarus Long advocate for the position that the best possible course of action in most political situations is to simply do nothing at all. His views changed radically over time.
(There’s an old SFnal joke that you can find pretty much any political or social position advocated for by a highly confident spokescharacter in some RAH story somewhere, and the exact opposite position equally certainly advocated in some other RAH story.)
My personal view of RAH, formed after reading his fiction and non-fiction over the course of decades, is that he’s a fantastic storyteller, a very smart and perceptive man, and also something of a wack job.
(When he got rich and popular in later life and was free to indulge his tropes, his stories got weird and perverse. In one of his novels from the 70s, there is a bizarre scene where the main characters engage in what amounts to a combination incestuous orgy and political/social/historical panel discussion. Yes, at the same time. It’s truly surreal and I am not making it up.)
I most certainly do not consider his fiction a reliable guide to how to live a successful life in the real world, any more than Ayn Rand’s stuff is a guide to how actual businessmen think and act.
— neo
Highly doubtful.
I don’t believe for a moment that Kaine is that ignorant. Some of the Dems in Congress, yes, but not Kaine. Ditto Schumer. Both of them are many things, many of them bad, but neither man is stupid or ignorant.
The thing is that Kaine, like most of the Dems right now, is playing to his base, and the modern Dem base is hyper-secular liberals.
They’re playing to that base partly to keep them energized for the 2026 elections, and partly to keep them from attacking them for not stopping Trump. They’ve fed the monster for decades, ever since the Clinton years, and now it’s breaking its chains and demanding things the Dems can’t currently deliver. So they have to feed them red meat and hope to keep them focused on Trump and the GOP.
Kaine lost his shot at the governorship of Virginia because the same phenomenon. Remember he had a gaffe where he commented that parents shouldn’t decide what their children were taught in school. I honestly, to be fair, don’t think he meant it to come out precisely the way it sounded.
But once he had said it he couldn’t take it back or modify it, because the Dem base, and esp. the teachers’ unions, ran with it and insisted that it be a core tenet of the campaign, even as normally Democratic-leaning parents revolted. He was ‘woketrapped’, and so we got Governor Youngkin (who isn’t perfect but is orders of magnitude better than Kaine would have been).