[Commentary]: Good Riddance to Mike Pence
Vice President Mike Pence’s proximity to presidential power will come to a poetic conclusion on January 6, 2021, when he fulfills his constitutional obligation to formally and finally declare President-Elect Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.
Afterward, Pence is tentatively scheduled to board Air Force Two for a week-long trip to Bahrain, Israel and Poland “to bolster already-strong credentials with the Christian right, which strongly supports Israel. And it allows Pence — once again — to put distance between himself and Trump’s complaints about the election outcome that are likely to intensify after Congress affirms Biden’s win,” Politico reported on Thursday.
If Pence’s self-serving international tour gets extended, which an aide told Politico is a possibility, he will return just in time to witness the inauguration of his successor, Kamala Harris, a liberal Democratic Senator from California and the first female/black/Indian vice president of the United States.
“By no means is this going to be an easy moment for the vice president or president to stomach,” the official said.
Good. He deserves it.
Pence, a former right-wing radio host, six-term Republican Congressman, and one-term governor of Indiana whose collapsing political career was saved in 2016 when then-candidate Donald Trump – at the behest of his campaign manager, the disgraced traitor Paul Manafort – selected Pence as his running mate, has brought nothing but disgrace and shame to the office he had no business occupying and will shortly abdicate.
Despite Pence’s abysmal performance as head Hoosier, hallmarked by him sparking a devastating HIV outbreak, Pence’s infamous homophobia and sanctimonious religious hypocricy has long-solidified him as a darling among white, culturally-conservative, evangelical Christians.
No individual, however, has battened themselves as a fiercer champion or more stalwart defender of Trump’s parasitic presidency as has Pence, and no single person has magnified the misery Trump has inflicted upon the American people moreso than the soon-to-be former veep.
We should all be so fortunate to find a man who gazes upon us as worshipfully as Pence ogles Trump. No commander in chief in recent memory – be it Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama – has boasted a satrap whose loyalty is as insuperable as Pence’s is for the president.
From the instant he latched onto the Republican presidential ticket four excrutiatingly enervating years ago, Pence has dutifully expulcated Trump’s cornucopia of meniacal misdeeds. He has beamed at Trump’s flank – in wondrous awe – as Trump has descimated confidence in American democracy and gutted the structural integrity of our governing institutions. He has conjured up preposterous alibis for Trump’s bigotry, corruption, and sexism. He has parrotted lie after lie after lie to the delight of the Republican Party’s repugnant political base. He has stood by in silent reverence as immigrant children were ripped from the arms of their parents and left to rot in concentration camps. He has exascerbated the erosion of his country’s reputation among the international community, and he has dignified Trump’s merclelss, pathological vengeance toward anyone who dares to oppose the president’s malevolent agenda.
But Pence’s gravest sin – for which he must be held criminally accountable and never forgiven – is his abject denial of science and deliberate deception about the dangers and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, which thanks to his and Trump’s intentional duplicity, has shattered the economy, killed more than 300,000 Americans, and continues to worsen.
Pence’s legacy will be eternally associated with ignorance, suffering, and death. He is the embodiment of evil – a facultative false prophet who has betrayed his countrymen and his Constitution in the most egregious and reprehensible of manners.
Thus, may Pence’s dastardly disservice to the nation and unpardonable crimes against humanity be dumped to the gong pit of historically deplorable blunders into which they rightly belong.
If Biblical Hell exists – and Pence certainly believes that it does – a special spot awaits him the moment he departs our earthly realm. For now, though, a lengthy prison sentence will have to suffice.
Good f*cking riddance.
Thirty-four days until the inauguration.