Sad to say, but given the depths of depravity to which Corey Stewart has been willing to sink during his campaign for U.S. Senate, it’s not surprising to see him (check out the video, below) join the far-right smear campaign against Jamal Khashoggi, the Virginia resident who was barbarously murdered by a Saudi hit squad on October 2 in Istanbul. In the following video, as Tim Kaine’s communications director Ian Sams describes it, Stewart disgracefully “spew[s] innuendo about a Virginia resident murdered by the Saudi regime” and “disgustingly tries to elicit anti-Muslim sentiment *while admitting* ‘I don’t know if it’s true.'”
In reality, despite Corey Stewart’s bizarre innuendo and smears, the facts about Jamal Khashoggi’s life are well known – he was, after all, “the most famous political pundit in the Arab world and a regular guest on the major TV news networks in Britain and the United States.” Also note that Khashoggi “was fired in May 2003 by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Information because he had allowed a columnist to criticize the Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), who is considered the founding father of [extreme version of Islam] Wahhabism.” As for Osama bin Laden, the Washington Post reports that Khashoggi “knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactions with bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.” And after 9/11, Khashoggi wrote, “Osama bin Laden’s hijacked planes not only attacked New York and Washington, they also attacked Islam as a faith and the values of tolerance and coexistence that it preaches.”
But, of course, Corey Stewart doesn’t care about facts, as he’s demonstrated time and again during his self-described “vicious,” “ruthless” campaign for U.S. Senate against Tim Kaine. Among other things, Stewart has denied climate science; spread bizarre/unfounded allegations about Tim Kaine on a variety of fronts – I just wish that Kaine could sue him for libel/slander, because he’d undoubtedly win that case if Kaine weren’t a public figure; lied wildly about the economy, health care, immigration…you name it. Is this really what it means to be a conservative these days? And here I thought that conservatism was supposed to be about “less government,” “lower taxes,” stuff like that — not the John Birch Society, far-right fever swamps which Trump has resurrected and brought back to the core of the Republican Party, decades after “efforts by those such as conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review led the JBS to be identified as a fringe element of the conservative movement, mostly in fear of the radicalization of the American right.”
Unfortunately, that “radicalization of the American right” today is back in full force, as exemplified by the Donald Trumps and Corey Stewarts of the world. The question is whether the Republican Party will move to reject this cancer yet again. So far, that doesn’t look promising, but here in Virginia, conservatives and everyone else has a chance on 11/6 to show where WE stand, united overwhelmingly against everything that Corey Stewart represents.
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