Yeah, yeah, Democratic vice-presidential nominee and beagle on bath salts Tim Kaine lost, blah, blah, blah, go fuck yourself. That ain't really the story of last night's debate between him and Mike Pence, the Republican VP nominee and what you get when a Klansman fucks an armadillo.
Elections and their accompanying debates in a (mostly) two-party system are supposed to be about a conflict of ideologies and proposed policies. It's like "Oh, hey, there's poverty. How the fuck should we fix it? Jobs programs or more tax cuts for the wealthy so they can trickle down on the poor?" See how that works? You can say that one side is bankrupt morally or philosophically. You can say their platform sucks donkey balls. There are always hedges and hyperbole on all sides. But, at the very least, both sides seemed to exist in a generally-accepted version of what we might quaintly call "reality."
This election is different because the two presidential candidates and their vice-presidential sidekicks are operating on competing versions of reality. The Democratic side at least has a foot in the empirical world. The Republican side is operating on a glibly metaphysical level and will tell you that perception and reality are just an illusion, man. Or, you know, they fucking lie to our faces.
So it was that Kaine and Pence met and, yeah, if Kaine were a Republican, we Democrats would be pissed at how he couldn't shut the fuck up in the first part of the debate. Still, Kaine reliably fed the Hillary Clinton campaign lines when he wasn't being Johnny Interruption. But what we should really take away from the evening is that Mike Pence is one scary motherfucker because, in addition to the incredibly appalling things he believes (like forced burial or cremation of aborted fetuses), he can say shit that is just demonstrably wrong with an eerie calmness. Unlike his running mate, who is all sputtering bluster like the worst poker player in history, Pence is the kind of guy who will gently sing you lullabies while he cuts open your belly and dances with your intestines. In serial killer terms, Pence is the dead-souled Jeffrey Dahmer to Trump's batshit Ed Gein.
You can go through the various times that Pence claimed that Trump didn't say something that Trump absolutely said. It was as if Pence thought he could play a Jedi mind trick on the nation, waving his hand and saying, as he really did to Kaine, "Most of the stuff you've said, he's never said." And, except for the fact that Trump did say pretty much everything that Kaine said he said, Pence was totally not a filthy fucking liar, like his running mate.
But something that all the analyses are missing about the debate is that it wasn't actually between two potential vice-presidents. No, because we know from John Kasich that Mike Pence would actually be taking care of the duties of the presidency, like, you know, domestic and foreign policy, it was between a VP and someone who will essentially be president in all but title in a Trump administration. So when Pence was lying about things that are factually untrue, it was alarming in a way that, say, Sarah Palin blathering about some fucking dumb thing wasn't.
For instance, Pence said, "Less than 10 cents on the dollar of the Clinton Foundation has gone to charitable causes," which is such utter bullshit that Jesus Christ himself should have walked on stage, said, "Other cheek this motherfucker," and kicked him in the taint before taking a shit on him and telling him to never call himself a Christian again.
Beyond the lies, the actual policies Pence proposed seem to come from a different reality or they just fucking contradict themselves. "I come from a state that works," Pence said early on. "The state of Indiana has balanced budgets. We cut taxes, we've made record investments in education and in infrastructure, and I still finish my term with $2 billion in the bank." Later, talking about what he sees as a shitty economy (when it isn't), Pence offered, "People in Fort Wayne, Indiana, know different. I mean, this economy is struggling." So Pence is saying that he wouldn't spend any of that $2 billion to help Fort Wayne not be the shithole that it is? You can't have it both ways, Governor Twatflea.
Prior to saying Fort Wayne can go fuck a dead dog, Pence got pissy with Kaine for using, you know, facts to back up the improved economy under Obama. "You can roll out the numbers and the sunny side," Pence weaseled, "but I got to tell you, people in Scranton know different." Well, fuck, not to take out the big ol' number board, but the unemployment rate in Scranton was up around 10.5% in January 2013. Then it plunged to 4.7% by January of this year, before heading back up as more people got back into the work force. But you can bet that the people of Scranton and Fort Wayne are fed a nonstop stream of Rush, Breitbart, and Fox until they no longer have any connection to reality. Like the Trump campaign.
If, as some have said, Pence was setting himself up for a 2020 run, well, that skeevy fucker wouldn't win the presidency if he wore a mask made of Ronald Reagan's face.
