My two US senators, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, are horrible in diverse ways. The former is a grotesque wannabe oligarch with a history of defrauding social programs and an unquenchable thirst to redirect any funds the government might spend on the common good into his own pockets. Rubio is an empty husk of deflated ambition and surrendered dignity.
But I wouldn’t trade either for JD Vance, the remote-controlled meat-sack operated by actual vampire squid Peter Thiel. The Ohio senator is evidently vying with a cadre of obsequious crackpots to land the VP slot on the Trump ticket, and he may have secured the gig with a deeply paranoid screed about the bipartisan senate bill to fund Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel.
Vance’s extremely dumb theory checks all the MAGA Cinematic Universe plot points, affirming Hair Furor’s benevolent view of Putin, amplifying his delusional claims he can instantly end Russia’s war against Ukraine and alleging certain Republicans are in league with Democrats to sandbag Trump. It was too much even for National Review hack Noah Rothman:
Vance sees (the bill) as a cleverly laid trap designed to compel a future president Trump to implement policies he doesn’t like. “Though few have noticed, buried in the bill’s text is a kill switch for the next Trump presidency…”
The crux of Vance’s claim rests on a mechanism in the bill that ensures the availability of the funds Congress appropriates through the fall of 2025. This fairly standard provision is unlikely to be necessary — those funds will almost certainly be under contract well before that date. After all, if Vance believes the funding horizon for Ukraine is too long and hamstrings future presidents, that was not a reservation he expressed in his support of a House-backed bill providing for Israel’s defense through September 2025. We’re fast running out of good-faith explanations for Vance’s latest claim.
Indeed, the senator’s enthusiastic effort to read malignancy into the attempt to take the issue of Ukraine off the agenda for the remainder of the calendar year could be construed as misplaced zeal if it didn’t contrast with Vance’s inability to see malice on the part of the country whose aggression made this initiative necessary.
The Ohio senator spent a good portion of a weekend he will never get back making excuses for the delusions under which Russian president Vladimir Putin operates, all while casting his domestic opponents as a threat to liberty akin to Putin’s regime.
I don’t know how Stefanik, Lake, et al., top that. For the sake of my own tenuous peace of mind, I’m telling myself an opportunistic fart-sack like JD Vance will rise no higher in US politics than the height to which he’s already preposterously ascended. But he’s ready for his MAGA close-up.
Open thread.
