Americans were briefly introduced to him in January 2011, after a lunatic leftist attempted to assassinate his wife, wounding her badly while killing six other people during a political rally in Tucson.
After that, Kelly sort of faded into the background, but he wasn’t just sitting around on his backside. Hardly.
He was preparing himself for a U.S. Senate bid, a race he launched earlier this year in an attempt to unseat Sen. Martha McSally, a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who was appointed to a seat long occupied by the late GOP Sen. John McCain.
And while both of these Americans served their country with distinction, only one of them — Kelly — is planning to do something patently unAmerican should he win and, in doing so, turn Arizona’s Senate delegation entirely blue for the first time in decades.
Arizona’s critical Senate race has suddenly taken on extra weight since Democrat Mark Kelly could potentially be sworn in early enough to vote on a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg if he wins.
Kelly, a former astronaut and the husband of ex-Rep. Gabby Giffords, is favored to prevail over appointed Republican Sen. Martha McSally. And Arizona law indicates he could be sworn in by Nov. 30, during the lame-duck session of Congress when Republicans may try to push through a Ginsburg replacement if they are unable to do so before the election.
President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ginsburg last week, and analysts predict a hellish confirmation process.
A Kelly victory — the race is currently viewed as a “toss-up” at RealClearPolitics — would narrow the Senate GOP’s current 52-47 majority, at least temporarily (incumbent Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) is not expected to beat Republican contender Tommy Tuberville, whom President Trump has endorsed).
And so, if even a few RINO senators defect, and no actual vote is held on Barrett before Kelly is seated (if he wins), then her appointment is in serious doubt.
But should Kelly even be under consideration by voters in Arizona? Does he have their best interests at heart? In fact, does he have America’s best interests at heart?
In 2003, according to the Washington Free Beacon, Kelly was invited to an all-expenses-paid junket to a countryside resort in China, having left five days later with future spouse Giffords “but also with lucrative regime business contacts.”
The report added:
Kelly attended the annual Young Leaders Forum, a five-day junket cohosted by the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, which is “under the leadership of the Communist Party of China.” The conference allowed Kelly an opportunity to mingle with high-profile Communist Party officials and rising stars in Chinese society. Attendees included Cui Tiankai, now Chinese ambassador to the United States; Fang Xinghai, former director of the CCP’s top committee on the economy; and Zhou Mingwei, the party’s former top foreign propaganda honcho.
According to China analyst Gordon Chang, party connections like the ones that Kelly managed to make are “absolutely essential” in order to secure any business deal inside the Communist nation.
“The Communist Party tries to control everything, whether it’s a state enterprise or a private company,” he said. “And so it’s extremely important to have Communist Party contacts [to do business].”
But the connections didn’t stop there. Kelly continued to cultivate extensive ties to China after becoming a civilian.
World View Enterprise, an aerospace firm he co-founded and in which he still has investments, received at least some funding from Chinese tech behemoth Tencent, a company that censors China’s Internet. He also held a financial interest in a Colorado firm that also obtained investments from a state-funded Chinese tech company.
The last person we need in the U.S. Senate is a China sycophant, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.
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