PENCE LIED AND IT'S TIME FOR A NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY

Mike Pence won the Vice Presidential debate!  Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, even went so far as to say we were probably looking at the 2020 Republican Presidential nominee.

Boy.  That must have been some debate performance.

I clearly missed it.  I was sitting in a parking lot waiting for my 17-year-old son to finish soccer practice, and while I heard some Vice-Presidential debate on the radio, I clearly heard the wrong one. 

In the debate I heard, Pence lied. I said this to my son.  “But he lied.”

“Yeah, dad, he lied.”

“I mean, he just openly lied about all the things Trump has said.  He denied it all. That doesn’t matter?”

“Of course it doesn’t.  Let’s go.”

So we drove off, and I wondered if I now belonged to a generation of idiot values; telling the truth being right up there with the Prospective Boyfriend asking dad’s permission to date the daughter, or a neighbor offering two cows in payment for sleeping with your wife. 

Because Pence did lie.  He lied over and over and over again.  Yet the press put the gold medal over his head anyway.  Style over substance. No one cares.  We’re supposed to ignore that Pence denied everything Donald Trump has said, just like we’re supposed to deny the fact that just about everything Pence himself stands for is insane.

Pence has battled against civil rights for LGBT’s, pushed for forced funerals for fetuses so women who have had an abortion can be tortured and traumatized, demanded that public schools teach creationism, supports “conversion” therapy for gays, and thinks we ought to deny citizenship for babies born in the United States. 

In short, Mike Pence is an intolerant, right-wing bigot controlled not by a belief or interest in the constitution but by his religious agenda.  That is the prism through which he sees the world and it’s entirely un-American.

I think.

I could be wrong.

Because it’s always possible Mike is lying.  Why not?  Maybe that stuff is just like Pence and Trump spouting that Putin is a better leader than Obama and then denying it, or denying that Trump calls women fat, or that Trump is open to using nuclear weapons on a hell of a lot of people. 

Let’s assume for a second that Hillary Clinton is as crooked as Richard Nixon, as incompetent as Warren Harding, and as beholden to special interests as the Tammany Hall hacks.  Or, to put it so the religious zealots can understand it -- Satan.  Okay.  She’s Satan.

Pence is the antidote?  Trump is the antidote?

This is where the rubber hits the road and I rail against the mainstream media and the comment Matthews made, much as I enjoy the Matthews show and his writing.

The mainstream media has no business accepting such odious and smarmy creeps as Pence on any level.  In so doing – and always in the name of fairness – they welcome The Creepy Corps into the real world, and so here we are, with Trump and Pence one heartbeat away from controlling an ungodly chunk of this planet.

Because it's that serious.  The mainstream press needs to call it for what it is, just as they need to stop avoiding the core of the Republican party problem, which Matthews’ comment about the 2020 race suggests isn’t there.

The Republican party problem is this: when it comes to 2020, the Republican party has no business fielding any candidates at all, Mike Pence or any of the other dwarves.  It has sacrificed its own legitimacy as a party, and should have no role in national politics period.  Why?  Because it incubated and coughed up the demagogue Donald Trump, a man universally accepted as unfit for the Presidency or any political office. 

Trump is a monster.  He isn’t Huey P. Long, the dodgy populist who understood how to govern and how legislation is made, and he isn’t George Wallace, who showed he could evolve in his beliefs, and he isn’t even Strom Thurmond, who had actually fought for his country.

He is something new. 

He is a repellant creature supported by a Republican party so blinded by their hatred of the opposition that they didn’t care what they were turning into. This isn’t the party of Reagan, or Eisenhower, or Theodore Roosevelt, or Lincoln.  It certainly isn’t the party of George H. W. Bush or Gerald Ford.  Those were and are honorable people, guided, I suspect, by a true interest in their country and the people who inhabit it.

In raising Donald Trump up from the ooze, the GOP has shown us they don’t care about their country; they don’t care about the consequences, and they don’t care about us. 

Thus, they have forfeited their right to national party leadership.  

This is a Lovecraft story.  The Republican Party is the strapping young lad who has morphed into something utterly unrecognizable and cruel.  It has disgraced and embarrassed this country.  The best thing for all of us would be to call it for what it is and start again with a strong and reasonable body that stands in opposition to the Democrats.