Republican New York mayoral nominee Joe Lhota has brought a new, urgent issue to the fore in the race to be the next chief executive of the city: Where do the candidates stand on the Nicaraguan civil war of the 1980s?

Inspired by yesterday's heavy-breathing New York Times story about the youthful Central American activism of Democratic nominee Bill de Blasio (a story which almost certainly owed nothing to any oppo work by the Lhota camp), the Lhota campaign today denounced de Blasio's ties to the Marxist Sandinista government of that era:

Bill de Blasio needs to explain himself — and explain himself now — to the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who escaped Marxist tyranny in Asia, Central America, and from behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

Mr. de Blasio’s involvement with the Sandinistas didn’t happen in 1917; it happened 70 years later when the cruelty and intrinsic failure of communism had become crystal clear to anyone with a modicum of reason. Mr. de Blasio’s class warfare strategy in New York City is directly out of the Marxist playbook. Now we know why.

So Joe Lhota is against the Sandinistas and their Marxist playbook. Presumably, then, that would make him for the Contra rebels, their covert United States supporters, and their own accompanying playbook. For starters, straight from the playbook, that means that Lhota believes in hiring professional criminals to foment violence to undermine an elected regime.

But if we're relitigating the '80s, that's only one prong of anti-Sandinista policy. The Lhota campaign also, implicitly, endorses:

• Planting floating mines in harbors, in violation of international law.

• Selling arms to Iranian terrorists who have taken American hostages.

• Intentionally violating United States law to direct funds to the Contra rebels.

• The murder of Catholic nuns.

The Lhota campaign has not responded to emails or phone messages seeing comment about the full extent of the candidate's support of the covert Nicaraguan terror war. Till then, we will assume that killing nuns, like killing kittens, is something Joe Lhota supports.

[Image via Getty]