In honor of the Blogmaster’s current travels, local politics from Doghouse Riley:
INDIANA inaugurated Mike “Choirboy” Pence its fiftieth governor earlier this week– apparently we had to–and while I can pretty much swear I’ll have nothing nice to say about the man from here on out, I will grant that he gave every impression of a man who was wearing a tuxedo for the second time in his life.
I’ve lived here most of my life–in my defense, I am congenitally indolent–and Mike Pence is the sort of man I’ve been expecting to have to survive the governorship of for most of the last forty years. He’s a religious huckster with no other discernible qualities. He was essentially ushered into the Governor’s mansion by his predecessor–who gave then Lt. Governor Becky “GED” Skillman the same chronic and asymptomatic disease Mark Souder’s wife came down with right after Souder was caught dipping into the office help and needed to spend more time with the family–so that Pence wouldn’t either a) come back to Indiana and challenge Dick Lugar in last year’s primary or b) come back to Indiana and wait out Lugar’s last term.
Pence had been the #3 Republican in the House, in case that tells you anything you didn’t already know about Republicans in the House, but quit his post after the 2010 elections because the party wasn’t mixing enough Religious with its Mania anymore, and said that would be his final term. […] The talk at the time was that Pence was planning his own Presidential run, perhaps as a stalking horse for Herman Cain, at a time when Daniels was still milking his own non-candidacy. Then, suddenly, the whole thing arrived like Athena. Or the 2000 candidacy of George W. Bush. Pence suddenly wanted to be governor, Skillman suddenly wanted to be barely ambulatory, and Daniels wanted to tote up some more “campaign” contributions.
Pence’s campaign for governor basically consisted of him assuring concerned Hoosiers that he was a practicing heterosexual. As a result he managed to win by 70,000 votes in a state Mitt “Remember Me?” Romney won by a quarter million….
Late Night Open Thread: Indiana’s New Guv, As Seen By A NativePost + Comments (44)