If some random extremist/crazy person endorsed your candidacy, would you trumpet it all over the intertubes? Of course not. So why is it a good thing if that extremist/crazy person is not random at all, but Vice President Mike Pence? I guess we should ask Rep. Dave Brat and Denver Riggleman (R-VA05) (see their tweets, below, welcoming Pence’s support), and also Rep. Scott Taylor (who will undoubtedly tweet gratitude any minute now).
But wait, you ask, what’s extremist/crazy about Mike Pence? Let us count the ways:
- See below for Jennifer Rubin’s tweet about how Pence is insanely and irresponsibly claiming that it’s “inconceivable there are not people of Middle Eastern descent” in the migrant “caravan” the far right has been hyping the past few days. So either Pence actually believes this, in which case he is completely bonkers. Or he doesn’t believe it, but is cynically saying it anyway, in order to stoke the right-wing “base” for the 11/6 elections. Either option is not good. But apparently, that doesn’t bother Reps. Brat and Taylor, or VA-05 Republican nominee Denver Riggleman.
- Also see Mike Pence, Holy Terror, which explains that Pence is “self-infatuated…a bigot…a liar…cruel.” Then there’s Pence’s “conviction that he’s on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity.” There’s also the fact that Pence was “an ineffectual congressman…apart from cozying up to the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos and other rich Republican donors.” And then there’s “the clumsiness and vanity of his one term as governor of Indiana.” So again, why would anyone want to be endorsed by this freakazoid, let alone tout that endorsement? Again, either folks like Brat, Riggleman and Taylor actually find Pence admirable in some way, which should automatically disqualify them from holding public office, or they are just playing this game cynically, which also is not flattering.
- Also check out The Danger of President Pence, which lays out what makes Pence such a danger. For instance, “In the early nineties, he joined the board of the Indiana Family Institute, a far-right group that supported the criminalization of abortion and campaigned against equal rights for homosexuals.” Also note: Pence “backed ‘personhood’ legislation that would ban it under all circumstances, including rape and incest, unless a woman’s life was at stake. He sponsored an unsuccessful amendment to the Affordable Care Act that would have made it legal for government-funded hospitals to turn away a dying woman who needed an abortion. (Later, as governor of Indiana, he signed a bill barring women from aborting a physically abnormal fetus; the bill also required fetal burial or cremation, including after a miscarriage. A federal judge recently found the law unconstitutional.)”
I could go on all day with this, but you get the point. Pence is a dangerous theocratic extremist, the exact opposite of the “libertarian” claims made by the Dave Brats and Denver Rigglemans of the world. The question is, in the end, will the embrace of someone as crazy and extreme as Pence turn out to be a net positive, net negative, or a wash politically for Brat/Riggleman/Taylor. Let’s do everything we can over the next 14 days to make sure it’s a big net NEGATIVE.
P.S. Oh yeah, almost forgot that Pence endorsed Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA10), the same person who audaciously – and falsely – claims to be some sort of “independent voice.” Hint: she is NOT!
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