Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Motown is Joe-Town!

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Usually wrong but never in doubt

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Democrats are back in array!

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Hail to the Hairpiece / GOP Idiocracy Open Thread: Today, Mike Pence Became Truly Vice-Presidential

GOP Idiocracy Open Thread: Today, Mike Pence Became Truly Vice-Presidential

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Somewhere, ol’ Lyndon is saying, “Damn, that’s no way to treat a man who willingly cut off his own pecker so you could carry it in your pocket!”

Truly, this is the strangest timeline, when even Bill Kristol is not reliably 100% always wrong…

Reader Interactions

111Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    How many tax dollars went to security at the Colts game today so Mike Pence could walk out when players did what he knew they’d do?

    Cheaper than flying onto the deck of an aircraft carrier.

  6. 6.

    Epicurus

    And of course, the Asshole-in-Chief tweets that he “made Pence do it.” There are no depths to their depravity.

  7. 7.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Rev. Dr. Barber @ RevDrBarber
    Both VP & Richard Spencer pulled stunts to stoke white rage this weekend. But neither proposes policies that would help poor white people.

  9. 9.

    trollhattan

    Beginning to believe Trump is framing Pence as the non-acceptable alternative to Trump. “Get rid of me, you get Pence. You want this? Really?”

    Might could work, Pence is a lifeform not dissimilar to platyhelminthes. Plus Mother.

  13. 13.

    randy khan

    One thing I don’t get about this is that the only potential upside was solidifying the Administration’s standing with a chunk of the base that I presume already was with them. Why did they think that was necessary? (And, of course, everybody else will see it for what it was.)

    ETA: Of course, they’re stupid. I shouldn’t forget that.

  16. 16.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    @trollhattan:

    Now that would be kind of funny. If Trump can make anybody look less appealing than he himself is, I’ll be truly impressed. ’Course, that would leave Paul Ryan next in line, and there really isn’t anything anybody has to do to make him look unacceptable, and right behind him are the Human Jowls, otherwise known as Orrin Hatch. I guess after that it’s Tillerson, and, Lord, how far we’ve fallen when we have to go five ticks in before we find somebody remotely undepraved, and it’s Rex Tillerson, of all people.

  17. 17.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @randy khan: as ever, I must state that I am not a lawyer, but the news about Fredo and Princess Tackycrap having nearly been indicted for fraud made me wonder if Meuller couldn’t use that info on Junior as part of a pattern of behavior in case the Big Beast isn’t the only one being looked at for obstruction charges. He tends to rage when the lawyers get too close

  18. 18.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Baud: if you’re doing it in proper Fat Albert style, the correct phrading is “you’re like a schoolhouse in the summertime—no class!”

  19. 19.

    Mnemosyne

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    I suspect he did this to draw attention away from Spencer’s pathetic “protest,” but I’m suspicious like that.

    I would love for a civil liberties lawyer to opine about whether or not a federal official is allowed to counter-protest a citizen’s legal protest under the First Amendment.

  20. 20.

    Feebog

    They can’t even pull off a simple political dog and pony show. Tip off the press, check. Use a three year old photo, check. DOLT45 steps on his dick by tweeting it was all pre-planned, check.

  21. 21.

    sdhays

    Regarding the tweet about Trump insulting a prisoner of war, it’s important to remember that he insulted ALL prisoners of war. And the Republican Party yawned.

  22. 22.

    Mnemosyne

    @randy khan:

    If I had to guess, it’s because word is filtering out that the Republican tax plan is a piece of shit that only lowers taxes for the 0.001 percent. They need to shore up their base and remind them that higher taxes are a small price to pay to keep those N’s down.

  26. 26.

    BBA

    @Mnemosyne: Spencer apparently told nobody outside his Bund’s inner circle, so his “protest” couldn’t be disrupted by outside agitators.

    Every time I see him, I think it’s a crime against humanity that his skull remains intact.

  27. 27.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @schrodingers_cat:

    And his evangelical supporters will talk a lot about “saying Merry Christmas”, and will buy tickets to live performances of “A Christmas Carol”, all without irony…

  30. 30.

    JPL

    Bob Corker gave an interview to the NYTimes, and I imagine that Trump will be tweeting..

    Exclu: CORKER sez Trump treating WH like “reality show,” is tempting “World War III” & WH staff must “contain him”

    https://twitter.com/jmartNYT Martin has a few more tidbits in his twitter feed, as well as link to the article.

  32. 32.

    Corner Stone

    @JPL: Hey, Corkdog. Here’s a fucking idea. How about the coequal branch Congress do something about this madmanbabychild?

  33. 33.

    jonas

    Holy shit, when *Bill Kristol* is getting in zings at your expense, you know you’ve reached a new, as-of-yet unplumbed level of pathetic.

  35. 35.

    msdc

    I reconciled myself to respecting David Frum a while ago, but god help me if I have to do the same for Kristol.

  37. 37.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @randy khan:

    Why did they think that was necessary?

    Because black people are getting above their station. Pence is as racist as Trump is, just smart enough to not say Nazis are good people. Any political statement that they hate blacks is a ‘Why not?’ rather than a ‘Why?’ for this administration.

  38. 38.

    Spaniel

    @msdc:

    Preach on. When you lose the support of Kristol when it comes to starting half-baked ideas to start wars, you should just take a step back.

  39. 39.

    sm*t cl*de

    Synecdouche (n.). A rhetorical device equating (1) a musical performance, (2) a national flag and (3) soldiers, so that a protest during one is treated as an insult to all three.
    Also by extension, any lying sh1tweasel who uses that rhetorical device.

  46. 46.

    SFAW

    Kristol has disliked Shitgibbon for a while. In fact, as I’ve said before, it was when Bloody Billy stated unequivocally, in 2016, that Shitgibbon would lose the General, that I knew we were fucked.

  47. 47.

    No Drought No More

    When Trump falls, so will Pence, and each know it. Which is why Pence is dancing to the Orange One’s tune like a chained monkey to a maniacal organ grinder. What else can he do? He’s got no where else to go, unless he wants to plea bargain with the special prosecutor’s office. If he was clean, he wouldn’t know Trump’s name.

    Which was the case with Spiro Agnew. I recall that Agnew effectively turned his back on the Trickster during the summer of the Watergate hearings, being extremely reticent in defending his guilty chief (for him, I mean. Agnew was usually loud and obnoxious about every hot button issue that riled the republican base.. but not during those months, he wasn’t). No doubt he was dreaming how cool it was going to be jetting around in Air Force 1 with Frank Sinatra. That is, until his bad deeds came back to bite him in the ass later that Fall.

    But Pence can’t dream that dream, because his bad deeds are being investigated along with Trump’s by Mueller (et.al.) too, and they’ll soon be back to bite him in the ass unless… unless nothing. He’s finished (“got to think, got to think, got to think.. no way out, no way out, no way out..”), and to repeat myself, he knows it.

    Which means tonight it’s Paul Ryan who is dreaming of wrecking other American lives as POTUS in the service of the malicious greed, and mindless mammon, that lays the cankered, poisoned heart of the republican party. They’re wretched people; they’re America’s political trash and scum, all of them, and there are no exceptions to the rule, none that can be plausibly acknowledged as such in 2017. If a person today is a republican voter, that individual is fundamentally anti-American. End of story.

  50. 50.

    Patricia Kayden

    @trollhattan: Lol! You’re brilliant to even come up with that. Never looked at Trump that way since he doesn’t appear smart enough to be so conniving.

  51. 51.

    SFAW

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Have I ever presented that way?

    Well, other than your vow to vote for anyone who names the Pack “America’s Team,” you haven’t.

    Nice win today, by the way.

  56. 56.

    SFAW

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    What do you think about someone who voted for the Iraq AUMF?

    Willing to cut him slack, unless he (or she) is/was a Senator from New York, because Benghazi.

  58. 58.

    noncarborundum

    @Repatriated: I still remember, and am amused by, an episode of Bewitched in which Gladys Kravitz was convinced there was a city in New York called “Kapoopsie”.

  59. 59.

    SFAW

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Woohoo!

    Calm the fuck down. One lucky pass at the end of the game does not mean that Rodgers is the second coming of Josh McCown or Christian Hackysack.

    ETA: Which is probably a good thing, I guess.

  60. 60.

    Corner Stone

    Yes, Cris Collinsworth. The punt return certainly is looking bigger and bigger right now.

  67. 67.

    SFAW

    @noncarborundum:

    Gladys Kravitz was convinced there was a city in New York called “Kapoopsie”.

    It’s on the Hudson, a little south of Hyde Park (not to be confused with New Hyde Park — Parkville represent!).

  68. 68.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    Just saw on my local news; there was some small gathering in a nearby town, sponsored by the fucking VFW, where they were burning sports memorabilia and mindlessly waving American flags. All white of course. If I had known it was going on today I would have burned an American flag right in front of them to just to spite them.

    A woman, who claimed her father was a veteran, taught her to always respect the flag and the country no matter what. Apparently her father taught her how to be a good little authoritarian.

    So many idiots don’t understand that the flag and the anthem are just symbols. If we don’t stand up for the freedoms and values they represent, then they’re worthless and the flag really is only good for wiping your ass with.

    Very apt song selection from DK:

    Tell me who’s the real patriots
    The Archie Bunker slobs waving flags?
    Or the people with the guts to work
    For some real change
    Rednecks and bombs don’t make us strong
    We loot the world, yet we can’t even feed ourselves
    Our real test of strength is caring
    Not the toys of war we sell the world
    Just carry on, thankful to be farmed like worms
    Old glory for a blanket
    As you suck on your thumbs
    Real freedom scares you
    ‘Cause it means responsibility
    So you chicken out and threaten me
    Saying, “Love it or leave it”
    I’ll get beat up if I criticize it
    You say you’ll fight to the death
    To save your worthless flag
    If you want a banana republic that bad
    Why don’t you go move to one

    Nothing has really changed in 30 years.

  73. 73.

    efgoldman

    @No Drought No More:

    No doubt he was dreaming how cool it was going to be jetting around in Air Force 1 with Frank Sinatra. That is, until his bad deeds came back to bite him in the ass later that Fall.

    Agnew’s crimes were run of the mill bribery and extortion; he took envelopes full of cash from contractors seeking state work, actually across his desk when he was governor of Maryland. He was never charged with wrongdoing when he was VP.

  74. 74.

    SFAW

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Okay. I will back away slowly while not baring my teeth.

    Poli-Grip can help with that.
    Or did you mean something else?

    But I tell you what, to show you what a good guy I am: I’d be willing to take Rodgers in a trade for rising star McCown, AND I’ll throw in Geno Smith as a sweetener.

  78. 78.

    Vhh

    @No Drought No More: Astute analysiS. If true, means 25th amendment prob a no go, as Pence would have to lead it. So we have to hope that Bobby Three Sticks is swinging for the fences, shooting the moon, etc.

  80. 80.

    Lyrebird

    @? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Pardon my ignorance, who’s DK?

    But point taken, and I think it’s more than 30 years’ worth of Not Getting even “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

    Isn’t that latter bit what Kaepernick is doing? Rather patriotic of him!

  81. 81.

    Corner Stone

    @Davebo: Giving them something like 10 of 14 conversions on 3rd down was not going to help the cause. O’Brien punting it down by two TD’s with under 8 minutes in the 4th was the most cowardly stupid fucking decision. We haven’t stopped them all damn game. Give your QB a chance.
    All the PED use catches up to you, eventually.

  83. 83.

    efgoldman

    @Corner Stone:

    We haven’t stopped them all damn game. Give your QB a chance.

    Chiefs are clearly the better team, especially with Watts and Mercilus going out early. Add in the difference in the QB play, and there you are.

  84. 84.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Lyrebird:
    DK=Dead Kennedys, an early-mid 80s punk rock band, originally formed in 1978 in the San Francisco Bay area, I believe.
    @Repatriated:
    Yeah, seems that way.
    @Amir Khalid:
    Yeah people will be people I guess. It’s like some kind of hard-wired thing in our brains.

  85. 85.

    buck2202

    @Starfish:

    More from the post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2017/10/08/vice-president-pence-walks-out-of-colts-game-over-49ers-national-anthem-protests/

    Pence’s office did not answer a request for comment on the price and purpose of the trip. It costs the federal government about $43,000 an hour to fly Air Force Two, according to a 2012 estimate by the Air Force. Assuming a total flight time of six hours for the journey east and then west again, the tab for the flight alone would have topped $250,000.

    That only accounts for some of the expense. Sam Myers Sr., who spent eight years as then-Vice President Joe Biden’s trip director, estimated Pence’s entourage likely included some 50 staffers. But, he said, “the support when the principal hits the ground is when the costs kick in,” pointing to Secret Service agents deployed from the local field office; police to provide security along the motorcade route and at the perimeter of the event; an ambulance for the motorcade; and extra trauma teams on hand at a local hospital, among others — with many earning overtime wages for working on a Sunday.

  86. 86.

    danielx

    Truly, this is the strangest timeline, when even Bill Kristol is not reliably 100% always wrong…

    I feel the earth wobbling in its orbit.

  87. 87.

    Corner Stone

    @efgoldman: The QB play by Watson was just fine, as he had 5 TD’s. The horrendous defensive play early and the cowardly decision to punt late in the 4th all came together.

  88. 88.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    An interesting NY Mag article from last year I found:

    These Are the 3 Types of American Nationalism

    As Bonikowski and DiMaggio argue in their paper, there’s something of a gap in the sociology literature with regard to American nationalism: Most of the extant research hasn’t approached the subject from a realistic perspective on how individuals cognitively process a big, messy concept like a country in their heads. “There hasn’t been much engagement with nationalism as a set of overarching cognitive structures, as relational networks of beliefs through which people understand the nation,” Bonikowski tells Science of Us. When we think United States, it triggers a web of related concepts — that is, not just some point on a “like/dislike” scale.

    To try to gain a better, more nuanced understanding of Americans’ relationships to their country, Bonikowski and DiMaggio looked at several categories of General Social Survey responses from 2004: questions having to do with respondents’ level of nationalistic self-identification, pride, hubris, and “ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership” (that is, questions about who counts as a “real” American).

    By employing a statistical technique called latent class analysis, they were able to lump the respondents into groups that were statistically similar — that is, groups that tended to answer certain sorts of questions in certain ways. Four such categories popped out, three of them nationalist and the other less so (they’re summarized in this graphic, which is too big to embed but which nicely explains how each category was constituted):

    -Ardent nationalists are, in a sense, your classic flag-wavers. Consisting of 24 percent of the sample in Bonikowski and DiMaggio’s study, they were more likely than any of the other groups to “feel very close to America,” to “report being ‘very proud’ of all 10 potential sources of pride,” and to “strongly agree with all five measures of national hubris.” Based on their responses to the questions about what it means to be a real American, “a large majority apparently viewed Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and naturalized citizens as something less than ‘truly American.’”

    -The disengaged were the smallest group in the sample, comprising just 17 percent of the sample. The researchers gave the group this name because its members “withheld the strongest endorsement of even the most widely held nationalist beliefs and sentiments, because they professed particularly low levels of pride in state institutions, and because they appeared to refrain from wholesale engagement with a national identity.” Only 21 percent of them, for example, “reported feeling very close to the nation, compared to 56 percent for the remainder of the sample.” These folks just aren’t all that nationalistic, in the normal sense of the word.

    -Restrictive nationalists “expressed only moderate levels of national pride but defined being ‘truly American’ in particularly exclusionary ways.” This was the largest group in the sample, at 38 percent, and its members were only moderate in their levels of national identification, pride, and hubris, while almost as restrictive as the Ardents when it came to who does and doesn’t count as a “real” American. This is an interesting combination we’ll return to.

    -Creedal nationalists adhered to a “form of national self-understanding associated with a set of liberal principles—universalism, democracy, and the rule of law—sometimes referred to as the American creed.” They made up 22 percent of the sample, expressed high degrees of pride in the U.S., and were open-minded about what it meant to be an American.

    Donald Trump seems a lot like a Restrictive. He has, for the most part, eschewed standard presidential talk about how great America is. Rather, Trump has focused on what he views as the country’s long, steep downward slide. In the Trumpian view, the United States has been overrun by illegal immigrants and criminals, and is really falling apart. The nation needs a strong man (or a strongman) to put it back together again, and part of that strength comes from recognizing that only certain people can be real Americans. “It does appear there is some similarity between the profile of this group in terms of the attitudes toward the nation and what we see among Trump supporters: ethno-cultural exclusion, along with a low level of pride in the state,” says Bonikowski, though he was careful to add that there was no way to prove, based on this data, that Trump draws disproportionately from Restrictives.

    There’s an interesting catch, though — while white Restrictives may well constitute some of Trump’s key bloc of support, there are also a bunch of black and Latino Restrictives who, while endorsing the same general genre of nationalism, got there for very different reasons and who are very unlikely to be Trump supporters. In fact, African-Americans were “strongly overrepresented” in this group, the researchers wrote — 68 percent of the African-American respondents in the sample fell into this group, for example, and they were mostly Democrats. Their relative lack of pride in and identification with America probably comes from a very different place: In many cases, it could stem from unhappiness about how the U.S. has treated racial minorities, said Bonikowski. So, zoomed out, these black and Latino Restrictives look similar to their white counterparts, in that they answer certain questions in similar ways, but their politics are probably very different.

    Bonikowski and DiMaggio also looked at data from the same survey in 1996 and 2012, and they noticed something interesting when it came to how those years differed from 2004:

    Restrictives and Ardents were significantly higher percentages of the population in 2004 than they were in other years. “In the paper, we make the argument that this is consistent with a post-9/11 effect,” says Bonikowski. “There’s a lot of research that shows that during moments of crisis, and especially national-security crises and attacks from abroad, there’s a rally-around-the-flag effect where people come together and have higher degrees of trust in political institutions and political leaders” — as well as heightened outgroup hostility. That’s what the 2004 portion of the graph seems to show. Then, in 2012, things reverted a bit to where they had been.

    All of which raises an obvious question: Could the Trump campaign, a complete outlier that has featured some of the darkest, angriest rhetoric in modern electoral history, have a similar shock-to-the-system effect that rejiggers the United States’ nationalistic complexion? “It’s a little hard to say,” says Bonikowski. “I think the one thing that I would say is that these four ways of understanding the nation have been around for a long time, at least since 1996, although presumably earlier, though we don’t have data on it. There’s already kind of fertile ground for the kind of appeals that Trump is making.” He says he and DiMaggio are collecting more data and will hopefully know soon whether Trump’s campaign has led to an increase in ardent or restrictive nationalism — as opposed to, in effect, tapping preexisting stockpiles. Either way, though, according to Bonikowski, “What seems to be the case is that Trump’s discourse is mobilizing people around a certain way of understanding the nation: one that’s culturally exclusionary, and one that sees America as being in deep trouble.”

  92. 92.

    noncarborundum

    @Gin & Tonic: IIRC, Abner kept telling her it was pronounced “Poughkeepsie”,* but she would have none of it.

    —–
    * but now that I think of it, is Poughkeepsie really pronounced “Poughkeepsie”?

  98. 98.

    gene108

    @Corner Stone:

    Why? He’s the same POS he has always been. He just hates Trump for saying it out loud.

    Kristol seems self aware enough to realize, when a bunch of Trump supporters are shouting “Jews will not replace us”, he might be in trouble, even if he backs Trump.

  99. 99.

    ArchTeryx

    The image of Trump busting through a wall reminds me not so much of the Kool-Aid Man but Mutoid Man from the old arcade game Smash TV.

    NO WAY!!!

  100. 100.

    joel hanes

    POTUS and I will not dignify any event

    No shit.

    No worries on that front, Mike: neither you nor he, Trump, has so much as a millligram of actual dignity to your name; you’ve both been seriously overdrawn in that account for many years.

    This event was less dignified specifically because you pretended to attend. If you want to dignify events, stay far away from them and don’t bring them up in conversation, because you are incapable of dignifying anything at all.

  101. 101.

    Mike J

    @joel hanes: What’s sad is that the best way to make this backfire on them is to play up the quarter of a million dollars this stunt cost rather than the loss in dignity to the country,

  105. 105.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud:

    Cheaper than flying onto the deck of an aircraft carrier.

    I suppose the Air Force could’ve repurposed one of the complicated parachutes normally used for dropping heavy pallets of emergency supplies, but no way either Trump or Pence was gonna risk famehumpers like Tweety Matthews remarking on how the flightsuits didn’t enhance their… packages.

  108. 108.

    SFAW

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    it cost a billion an hour.

    A billllion a hour? Goddam lie-berals, making the sainted Veep spend his hard-earned cash, just to show that them coloreds ain’t patriotic ‘Muricans like’n the rest of us

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