Just because liberals devote a massive amount of attention to the current POTUS doesn’t mean that they neglect his VPOTUS. In a Tuesday Nation piece, Joan Walsh disclosed, “You probably have these debates with your friends, too: Do we want Donald Trump to resign, or be impeached, which would leave us with Vice President Mike Pence in charge?...Would the low-charisma Pence, who looks like a B-movie producer’s idea of a president, be easier to defeat [in 2020], especially given the GOP fratricide that would commence with Trump’s departure, however it came about?”
Walsh speculates about such matters, but lets us know that she’d rather not (bolding added):
I try never to care about the political implications of whether Trump should stay or go. He should go, because he’s a racist authoritarian who got help from a foreign adversary to become president. He should go, because he’s more likely to stumble into war than Pence is.
But I never let that obscure the truth, either: Pence is a far worse person, because of his creepy Handmaid’s Tale patriarchal approach to women’s equality. But also because he usually knows he’s lying about Trump, and their administration’s agenda, and he lies anyway.
According to Walsh, Pence “appropriates American decency to defend his own indecency, and his boss’s.” She cited something Pence said on Tuesday’s Today show:
When I walked, back in 2010, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis, arm in arm, and we remembered Bloody Sunday, and the extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement, I can’t help but think that rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do, rather than tearing down monuments that have graced our cities all across this country for years, we ought to be building more monuments.
Walsh called Pence’s remarks “Word Salad à la Sarah Palin, only with better grammar,” and went on:
I don’t think he gives a damn about the folks who protest these shameful statues. What was most galling about Pence’s comment, though, was that he used his bond with Lewis to clean up Trump’s despicable equation of Nazis and white supremacists with their opponents, who are the modern-day incarnation of John Lewis. (Oh, and by the way, who are supported by John Lewis.)
There it is again, that brazen Republican attempt to duck the reason Trump is president: that the GOP has played on racial fear and resentment for 50-plus years -- all the way back to Selma. That’s why we have Trump, and Trump is why we have neo-Nazis and white supremacists trying to march through our streets. “Trying” is the operative word, as Boston showed last weekend, after the tragedy of Charlottesville. We are stronger than they are, and we will push them back. Everywhere.
