Miss McConnell In A Tizzy

Neither of these China suck-ups is Chinese

Miss McConnell, who was booted out of the Army after just one week for fondling a private enlisted man's private parts, has some kind of a Republican "marriage" to former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. This kind of stuff isn't allowed to be written about in the Village. Outré, outré, outré... so outré. It's like when people used to talk about Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley having a hankering for teenaged boys or Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig enjoying himself regularly in public toilets. "How dare you!" the Villagers would bellow. "How dare you!" No, not at Foley or Craig... at anyone who wrote about it. It's just not how we do things... in the Village. No doubt! But we call the old pervert from Kentucky Miss McConnell anyway. Enjoy it... or ignore it.

May 20 is my sister's birthday. I think it was a 2007 post on May 20 when we first started looking seriously into Miss McConnell getting wealthy from his business dealings with Red China. It was the first of many.

Yesterday during a live blog session with Kentucky activists about Tuesday's gubernatorial primary, there was a brief conversation about how the Bush Regime's chief Senate obstructionist Mitch McConnell is a closet queen. Cliff Schecter pointed out, perhaps facetiously, that McConnell sometimes emerges from the closet to do business with his Chinese communist partners. "A review of financial assets held over the past six years by Elaine L. Chao and her husband, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, reveals that the labor secretary-designate serves as director of an insurance company that jointly owns a Lippo Group subsidiary with the Chinese government... McConnell, has received steady campaign contributions during his years in the Senate from Lippo partner American International Group Inc., and its chairman, Maurice 'Hank' Greenberg."

McConnell "is China's biggest Republican booster in the Senate, fighting to liberalize trade with Beijing."

The Post story claims that "dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too." There is no mention of Mitch McConnell and the agenda he and his "wife," U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, have pushed, quite relentlessly, an agenda that has helped to make them enormously wealthy and powerful... at the expense of some dead dogs and cats and some people getting sick. The Post claims that so many U.S. companies are involved with China now that there is little that can be done about it. That's how McConnell and Chao planned it.

Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of course, as evidenced by the many lawsuits that U.S. pet food companies now face from angry consumers who say their pets were poisoned by tainted Chinese ingredients. Until recently, however, many companies and even the federal government reckoned that, on average, those risks were worth taking. And for some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out of business with its rock-bottom prices.

China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."

The always cynical and self-serving McConnell was key in rejecting a bill that would have allowed senior citizens to purchase inexpensive Canadian drugs because, he claimed, the U.S. couldn't guarantee their safety. When someone brings up the safety of Chinese products to McConnell he turns into a veritable dragon lady, screaming and hissing and cursing about "Free Trade."

McConnell, Chao and the Bush Regime are literally allowing their partners in Communist China to poison the American public. "So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods. 'Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations,' said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as 'current thinking on a particular subject,' are not binding. Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the White House Office of Management and Budget."

Yesterday the Villagers were all up in arms because someone at ProgressKentucky, a state good government PAC, tweeted something inartfully about Elaine Chao being Chinese (which she is). "Liberal" Villagers like nothing more than pinning the racism tag on progressives. There was inartfulness but no racism, none. Zero. ProgressKentucky is doing yeoman's work against McConnell's reelection but the Villagers want a pound of flesh now for the outrage, the outré, outré, outré. This was the PAC's first spirited defense yesterday:

Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager, Jesse Benton, has accused Progress Kentucky of race-baiting by retweeting a Twitter message that mentioned McConnell’s wife’s nationality.

“Progress Kentucky strongly denies that the organization has engaged in any such thing,” said Shawn Reilly, executive director of Progress Kentucky. “Benton’s statements are an attempt to divert attention from the fact that Mitch McConnell has engaged in the selling of the American middle class overseas for decades.”

Here are the facts:

In 1997, McConnell pushed for trade relations favorable to China resulting in American jobs going overseas. McConnell and his father-in-law James S.C. Chao, who is president of Foremost Maritime Corporation, met “privately with Chinese officials, including Jiang Zemin, then general secretary of the Communist Party of China. (Chao’s father and Jiang were schoolmates in China.),” according to the Herald-Leader.

On November 9, 2006, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao formally thanked Chao in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, for his role in developing the Chinese shipbuilding industry "at a rapid pace."

In January 2013, the Courier-Journal reported that eight members of the Chao’s family each gave $10,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party in the final weeks of 2012.

“When the Premier of China publicly thanks an industrialist for his role in developing Chinese industry, then that industrialist and his family contribute $80,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party, it is fair to question whether McConnell is selling out the middle class of America,” said Reilly.

Personally, James S. C. Chao has contributed $15,500 to Mitch McConnell's campaigns, $30,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party, and $17,500 to the Republican National Committee.

   Senator Mitch McConnell has a conflict of interest that many are afraid to talk about, and Progress Kentucky is not.

That isn't what the Villagers define as a pound of flesh. It just pissed them off even more. Pissed, pissed, pissed. Yesterday ended with another press release from ProgressKentucky, the apology the Villagers demanded-- but won't ever be satisfied with:

Progress Kentucky is dedicated to ensuring the people of Kentucky have the kind of representation in the US Senate they deserve. In an effort to educate KY voters as to the varied interests of Sen. McConnell we provided information about connections between the senator and business and government interests in China. This information included an inappropriate comment on the ethnicity of the former Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, the senator’s wife.

We apologize to the secretary for that unnecessary comment and have deleted the tweets in question. In addition, we have put a review process in place to ensure tweets and other social media communications from Progress KY are reviewed and approved prior to posting.

Senator McConnell’s record deserves a thorough and legitimate airing. We believe that after fair examination of it Kentuckians will agree that Senator McConnell has been wrong over and over on the issues that matter. We will continue to inform Kentucky voters the important issues at stake in this election.

Here's a self-aggrandizing clown who hasn't bothered to find out what really happened. I don't follow him but it was retweeted by the NRSC, which is how I did see it: