Thursday, April 6, 2017

Pence: Mediocre

"Pence and the Rise of Mediocrity". The headline kinda says it all.

"He began as a talk show host in 1994 in small-town Indiana, fulminating about the global warming 'myth', the perfidy of Washington, and the verities of an evangelical Christianity menaced by cosmopolites.... A quarter-century later, Pence remains as small as his beginnings."

The article in "The Boston Globe" is positively scathing.

"As [Indiana] governor, Pence spearheaded a “religious freedom” law allowing business owners to deny service to LGBT citizens. Struggling to defend this, he gave an incoherent interview to George Stephanopoulos which exposed his excruciating inability to transcend robotic talking points. More than narrow, he looked dense," Richard North Patterson writes.

"Equally mindless was his opposition to a needle-exchange program, provoking an outbreak of HIV-AIDS in an Indiana county.... In the cul-de-sac of his mind, he plays to the only audience he knows — people who think like him."

Pence's "public persona reeks of smarmy sanctimony — every untruth, evasion, and vacuous bromide delivered in a portentous pipe organ voice accompanied by squints, nods, and shakes of the head which, Pence clearly imagines, convey a pious gravity. The effect is that of an unctuous church elder selling pyramid schemes to credulous parishioners, never doubting he is doing God’s work. Every self-serving self-deception reveals the depths of his shallowness, the breadth of his hypocrisy."

Is it any wonder that, facing almost certain defeat in his re-election bid as Indiana governor, he grasped 45's offer of an "honorable" escape? Unfortunately, 45 won the election and if/when he's impeached, guess who's next in line for POTUS.