History Will Remember Mike Pence's Performance for Two Reasons Beyond the Fly on His Head

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

09 October 20

The first was his absolute and obvious contempt for the two women with whom he shared the stage.

ne day, the president*’s Jewish grandchildren will grow up and realize that a big lump of Velveeta with a fly on its head used them as a shield for their howling bigot of a grandfather. That will be a bad day.

That was one of the many alarums and diversions employed by Vice President Mike Pence Wednesday night when he was asked a question he didn't want to answer, which was practically all of them. Senator Kamala Harris was belaboring him with the president*'s undeniable bigotry, and Pence decided that the proper answer was to point out that the president* has Jewish grandchildren and, therefore, not only can the president* not be anti-Semitic, but also that none of the white-supremacists the president* steadfastly has refused to condemn are anti-Semitic, either.

History will remember Pence's performance in the debate for two reasons beyond the fly on his head and the fact that something else appeared to be crawling out of one of his eyes. The first is his absolute and obvious contempt for the two women—Harris and moderator Susan Page of USA Today—with whom he shared the stage. He repeatedly interrupted Harris; the Democratic campaign already was selling, "Mr. Vice President. I'm Speaking." T-shirts, as well as Biden-Harris flyswatters. He simply bulldozed Page on the agreed-upon time limits. He wasn't as grotesque about it as his boss was last week, but he left the rules in pretty much the same shambles. The second was more important, and vastly more telling. He simply would not answer Page's questions as she asked them. And while it is true that Harris ducked a question about what she and Biden might do as regards the Supreme Court, it hardly measured up against Pence's Patches O'Houlihan act.

The most striking example of what Pence was about in this debate came when Page asked him, as a former governor of Indiana, what that state would do if Roe v. Wade were overturned by a newly confirmed 6-3 conservative Supreme Court majority. Now, Mike Pence is not merely anti-choice. He's a damn fanatic on the subject. He introduced the first congressional bill to cut off Planned Parenthood, and he introduced it in 2007. He proposed a bill that would have limited the rape exception for anti-choice laws to cases of "forcible rape." He introduced a federal "personhood" amendment, a concept so far out there that a bill to that effect once was crushed in a referendum campaign in Mississippi.

Moreover, when he was governor of Indiana, he signed no fewer than eight anti-choice bills, one of which would have mandated funeral services for fetuses no matter how they may have died. (This prompted one of the most creative exercises in direct action—the famous "Periods For Pence" campaign, during which women across Indiana called Governor Pence's office during their periods to make sure they didn't have anything for which they might have to throw a funeral.) Pence's anti-choice bona fides were a big part of drawing evangelical voters to a ticket headed by the most thoroughgoing heathen ever to run for president. He is one of the most enthusiastic fetus obsessives in American politics.

And yet, on Tuesday night, this was the answer he gave to Page's question about what would happen in Indiana if Roe were overturned—something that god and man know has been central to this administration*'s judicial selection process from Neil Gorsuch to Amy Coney Barrett.

President Trump and I could not be more enthusiastic about the opportunity to see Amy Coney Barrett become justice Amy Coney Barrett. She's a brilliant woman. And she will bring a lifetime of experience and a sizable American family to the Supreme Court of the United States. Our hope is in the hearing next week, unlike Justice Kavanaugh received with treatment from you and others. And we hope she gets a fair hearing. And we particularly hope that we don't see the kind of attacks on her Christian faith that we saw before. The Democratic Chairman of the Judiciary Committee before when, when Judge Barrett was being confirmed for the Court of Appeals, expressed concern that the dogma of her faith lived loudly within her, and Durbin of Illinois said that it was a concern. Senator, I know one of our judicial nominees, you actually attacked because they were a member of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, just because the Knights of Columbus holds pro-life views.

Mike Pence dodged a question about repealing Roe v. Wade!

This is the equivalent of hearing Joe Biden bad-mouth the good people of Scranton, PA.

Of course, he wants Roe repealed. He's never shut up about that. But now that a repeal seems more imminent than it has been at any time since 1972, support for the original decision is peaking in the high 60s and low 70s. As part of a campaign that is shedding the support of women faster than the White House staff is shedding viral load, Mike Pence has the gallows in his eyes and sees what could be a historic beating on the horizon, and so even Mike Pence's career-long campaign to shred the privacy rights of 51 percent of the American population had to give way to the Hippocratic Oath of political rhetoric: First, Do No Harm. It was epochal. Because of his fealty to a plague-ridden president*, a fly-specked Mike Pence couldn't even answer his simple, customary "yes" to a question he's answered 1,000 times before.

Perhaps of more significance down the line was Pence's refusal to state flatly that he would accept the results of the election, which, of course, is completely in line with what the president* has been saying for months. Instead, he said this, and I quote it at length because there are some tasty nuggets amid the word salad:

When you talk about accepting the outcome of the election. I must tell you, Senator, your party has spent the last three and a half years trying to overturn the results of the last election. So amazing. When Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States, the FBI actually spied on President Trump in my campaign. There were documents released this week that the CIA actually made a referral to the FBI documenting that those allegations were coming from the Hillary Clinton campaign. And of course, we've all seen the avalanche what, what you put the country through for, for the better part of three years, until it was founded. There was no obstruction, no collusion, Case Closed.

And then Senator Harris, you and your colleagues in the in the Congress tried to impeach the president of the United States over a phone call. And now Hillary Clinton has actually said to Joe Biden that under in her words, under no circumstances should he could see the election. So let me just say I think we're gonna win this election. President Trump and I are fighting every day in courthouses to prevent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from changing the rules and creating this universal mail in voting that will create a massive opportunity for voter fraud. We have a free and fair election. We know we're going to have confidence in it. And I believe in all my heart that President Donald Trump is going to be reelected for four more years.

It's all in there, every bit of wormwood with which this administration is attempting to poison the process. In that answer, Pence is catapulting a conspiracy theory on the 2016 election that comes directly from a debunked Russian propaganda campaign. He also read off the administration*'s bogus script about mail-in voting. (Does Indiana have vote-by-mail? Yes, sort of.) Kamala Harris did what she had to do on Tuesday night. Meanwhile, the hollowed-out shell that once was Mike Pence proved conclusively that it has been filled to its top with Donald J. Trump. If I weren't laughing at the fly on its head, I might have found that sad.