Vice president Fucktard Pence is worse than Trump. Mike Pence is a fucking idiot.
When Pence was in the House of Representatives gave a speech about why magical creationism is true and why evolution is wrong. Somewhere in this blog there is a YouTube video of the whole thing. Click the label "Mike Pence" to find it.
As far as I know nobody in the entire history of Idiot America did a congressman give a speech in Congress about magical creationism.
I wrote this comment at the New York Times: "When Mike Pence was a congressman he gave a speech about why evolution is wrong and why magical creationism is true. I'm not making this up."
There is quite a bit more to know about this stupid fucking asshole for Jeebus so here is the entire article from the New York Times.
Mike Pence, Holy Terror
Are you sure you want to get rid of Donald Trump?
By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist
July 28, 2018
There are problems with impeaching Donald Trump. A big one is the holy terror waiting in the wings.
That would be Mike Pence, who mirrors the boss more than you realize. He’s also self-infatuated. Also a bigot. Also a liar. Also cruel.
To that brimming potpourri he adds two ingredients that Trump doesn’t genuinely possess: the conviction that he’s on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity. Trade Trump for Pence and you go from kleptocracy to theocracy.
That’s the takeaway from a forthcoming book by the journalists Michael D’Antonio, who previously wrote “The Truth About Trump,” and Peter Eisner. It’s titled “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” it will be published on Aug. 28 and it’s the most thorough examination of the vice president’s background to date.
I got an advance look at it, along with a first interview about it with D’Antonio, and while it has a mostly measured tone, it presents an entirely damning portrait of Pence. You’ve seen his colors before, but not so vividly and in this detail.
The book persuasively illustrates what an ineffectual congressman he was, apart from cozying up to the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos and other rich Republican donors; the clumsiness and vanity of his one term as governor of Indiana, for which he did something that predecessors hadn’t and “ordered up a collection of custom-embroidered clothes — dress shirts, polo shirts, and vests and jackets — decorated with his name and the words Governor of Indiana”; the strong possibility that he wouldn’t have won re-election; his luck in being spared that humiliation by the summons from Trump, who needed an outwardly bland, intensely religious character witness to muffle his madness and launder his sins; and the alacrity with which he says whatever Trump needs him to regardless of the truth.
In Pence’s view, any bite marks in his tongue are divinely ordained. Trump wouldn’t be president if God didn’t want that; Pence wouldn’t be vice president if he weren’t supposed to sanctify Trump. And his obsequiousness is his own best route to the Oval Office, which may very well be God’s grand plan.
“People don’t understand what Pence is,” D’Antonio told me. Which is? “A religious zealot.”
And D’Antonio said that Pence could end up in the White House sooner than you think. In addition to the prospect of Trump’s impeachment, there’s the chance that Trump just decides that he has had enough.
“I don’t think he’s as resilient, politically, as Bill Clinton was,” D’Antonio said. “He doesn’t relish a partisan fight in the same way. He loves to go to rallies where people adore him.”
There’s no deeply felt policy vision or sense of duty to sustain him through the investigations and accusations. “If the pain is great enough,” D’Antonio said, “I think he’d be disposed not to run again.”
So it’s time to look harder at Pence. “The Shadow President” does. It lays out his disregard for science, evident in his onetime insistence that smoking doesn’t cause cancer and a belief that alarms about climate change were “a secret effort to increase government control over people’s lives for some unstated diabolical purpose,” according to the book.
It suggests callousness at best toward African-Americans. As governor, Pence refused to pardon a black man who had spent almost a decade in prison for a crime that he clearly hadn’t committed. He also ignored a crisis — similar to the one in Flint, Mich. — in which people in a poor, largely black Indiana city were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead. D’Antonio told me: “I think he’s just as driven by prejudice as Trump is.”
During the vice-presidential debate with Tim Kaine, Pence repeated the laughable, ludicrous assertion that Trump would release his tax returns “when the audit is over” and falsely insisted that Trump hadn’t lavished praise on Vladimir Putin’s leadership — though the record proved otherwise.
The book says that in a high-level briefing about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Pence was told that intelligence officials hadn’t determined whether that interference had swayed the results. He then publicly claimed a finding of no effect.
At Trump’s urging and with taxpayer money, he and his wife, Karen, flew to a football game in Indianapolis just so he could make a big public gesture of leaving in protest when, predictably, some of the players took a knee during the national anthem.
And, following Trump’s lead, he rallied behind the unhinged former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. In a speech he called Arpaio a “tireless champion” of the “rule of law.” This was after Arpaio’s contempt-of-court conviction for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop using illegal tactics to torment immigrants. The conservative columnist George Will seized on Pence’s speech to write that Pence had dethroned Trump as “America’s most repulsive public figure.”
You can thank Pence for DeVos. They are longtime allies, going back decades, who bonded over such shared passions as making it O.K. for students to use government money, in the form of vouchers, at religious schools. Pence cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate to confirm her as education secretary. It was the first time in history that a vice president had done that for a cabinet nominee.
Fiercely opposed to abortion, Pence once spoke positively on the House floor about historical figures who “actually placed it beyond doubt that the offense of abortion was a capital offense, punishable even by death.” He seemed to back federal funds for anti-gay conversion therapy. He promoted a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
“He is absolutely certain that his moral view should govern public policy,” D’Antonio told me.
D’Antonio then recounted two stories that he heard from college classmates of Pence’s after the book had gone to bed, so they’re not in there. One involved a woman in Pence’s weekly college prayer group. When she couldn’t describe a discrete “born again” experience, “he lectured her on her deficiencies as a Christian and said that she really wasn’t the sort of Christian that needed to be in this group,” D’Antonio said.
Another involved a college friend of Pence’s who later sought his counsel about coming out as gay. D’Antonio said that Pence told the friend: “You have to stay closeted, you have to get help, you’re sick and you’re not my friend anymore.”
According to D’Antonio’s book, Pence sees himself and fellow Christian warriors as a blessed but oppressed group, and his “hope for the future resided in his faith that, as chosen people, conservative evangelicals would eventually be served by a leader whom God would enable to defeat their enemies and create a Christian nation.”
I asked D’Antonio the nagging, obvious question: Is America worse off with Trump or Pence?
“I have to say that I prefer Donald Trump, because I think that Trump is more obvious in his intent,” he said, while Pence tends to “disguise his agenda.” D’Antonio then pointed out that if Pence assumed the presidency in the second half of Trump’s first term, he’d be eligible to run in 2020 and 2024 and potentially occupy the White House for up to 10 years.
Heaven help us.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Frank Bruni has been an Op-Ed columnist since June 2011. His columns appear every Sunday and Wednesday. He joined The Times from The Detroit Free Press in 1995, and is the author of three New York Times best sellers. @FrankBruni • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 2018, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Mike Pence, Holy Terror. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
"Producing a biography of a living, controversial politician is always difficult. D'Antonio and Eisner have succeeded in this well-documented, damning book. Cue the outrage from Sean Hannity et al." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In this well-rounded, deeply-investigated biography, the first full look at the vice president, two award-winning journalists unmask the real Mike Pence.
Little-known outside his home state until Donald Trump made him his running mate, Mike Pence―who proclaims himself a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third―has long worn a carefully-constructed mask of Midwestern nice. Behind his self-proclaimed humility and self-abasing deference, however, hides a man whose own presidential ambitions have blazed since high school. Pence’s drive for power, perhaps inspired by his belief that God might have big plans for him, explains why he shocked his allies by lending Christian credibility to a scandal-plagued candidate like Trump.
In this landmark biography, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael D’Antonio and Emmy-nominated journalist Peter Eisner follow the path Pence followed from Catholic Democrat to conservative evangelical Republican. They reveal how he used his time as rightwing radio star to build connections with powerful donors; how he was a lackluster lawmaker in Congress but a prodigious fundraiser from the GOP’s billionaire benefactors; and how, once he locked in his views on the issues―anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro big-business―he became laser-focused on his own pursuit of power.
As THE SHADOW PRESIDENT reveals, Mike Pence is the most important and powerful Christian Right politician America has ever seen. Driven as much by theology as personal ambition, Pence is now positioned to seize the big prize―the presidency―and use it to fashion a nation more pleasing to his god and corporate sponsors.
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Some more stuff I found about this book:
KIRKUS REVIEW
Award-winning, veteran journalists collaborate on a well-researched and moderately toned yet searing biography of Vice President Mike Pence (b. 1959).
D’Antonio (A Consequential President: The Legacy of Barack Obama, 2017, etc.) and Eisner (MacArthur's Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II, 2017, etc.) begin with Pence’s middle-class, Catholic, politically moderate Indiana upbringing before tracing how the ambitious, polite young man turned toward increasingly exclusionary politics during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. As for the religious component, Pence’s mainstream Catholicism morphed into evangelical zealotry with a heavy emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible. Pence came to believe that God decided the path of every human; while still a student, he also adopted the notion that God would elevate him to the presidency. Of course, at such an early age, he did not foresee that serving as vice president to Donald Trump would constitute part of God’s plan. When that became reality much later, Pence tolerated Trump’s vitriol and scandals as preordained by God, simply a means to an end. The authors devote the final third of the book to the Trump-Pence partnership. In the middle sections, they document Pence’s marriage; an unfocused, meandering work history during his 20s; and impatient attempts to join the House of Representatives by defeating an entrenched Democratic incumbent. Pence lost twice before starting a career as an Indiana radio personality, which, a decade later, provided the name recognition he needed to become a Congressman. The authors provide copious evidence of Pence’s lackluster legislative accomplishments in Washington, D.C.; nonetheless, Pence won the governorship of Indiana in 2012. He demonstrated a low level of interest in actually governing, and he was often evasive or heartless when confronted with hot-button issues. Trump showed little interest in Pence’s legislative record, focusing instead on Pence’s patina of inoffensive behavior, pleasant physical appearance, and faith-based zealotry.
Producing a biography of a living, controversial politician is always difficult. D’Antonio and Eisner have succeeded in this well-documented, damning book. Cue the outrage from Sean Hannity et al.
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Vice president Pence is batshit crazy. I found this article about Pence. When he was governor of Indiana he tried to force women to have funerals for fetuses. I'm not making this up.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a law this year that mandated funerals for fetuses
By Emily Crockett@emilycrockettemily@vox.com Updated Oct 3, 2016
It’s no secret that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate, opposes abortion rights. Pence basically invented the Republican Party's war on Planned Parenthood while he was in Congress. He wants Roe v. Wade to be overturned. He signed every anti-abortion bill that crossed his desk as governor of Indiana.
But Pence signed one anti-abortion bill in March of this year that was so extreme, even some pro-life Republicans opposed it. And it was eventually blocked from going into effect by a federal judge for violating women’s right to choose.
The law did something truly bizarre. It would have basically forced women to seek funerary services for a fetus — whether she’d had an abortion or a miscarriage, and no matter how far along the pregnancy was.
The law Pence backed would have required all fetal tissue to be cremated or buried, an unprecedented measure in state law. The law also banned abortion if the fetus had a "disability" — which would have denied women the right to end a pregnancy even in case of serious fetal anomalies.
The wording of the burial provision meant that technically, even if a woman had a miscarriage at eight weeks of pregnancy at home, she would have to keep the blood and tissue, take it to a hospital or clinic, and have it buried or cremated by a funeral home. The law would have also dramatically increased the cost of an abortion, since providers would have had to spend time and money on arranging the funerary services.
And since about half of miscarriages happen shortly after a fertilized egg is implanted, and occur at roughly the same time a woman would expect her period, many women could be having a miscarriage and not even know it — and thus, technically be violating the law if they didn’t cremate or bury the resulting tissue.
As a protest against the new law's extreme requirements, women who opposed the law started a Facebook group called "Periods for Pence." Members of the group started calling Pence’s office in droves to tell him about their periods in graphic detail.
"Any period could potentially be a miscarriage," wrote the anonymous founder of Periods for Pence in an introductory post. "I would certainly hate for any of my fellow Hoosier women to be at risk of penalty" if they don't properly dispose of or report a potential miscarriage.
The idea of women reporting their periods as a legal precaution sounds absurd and Orwellian. But it's also what happens when you take a law as bizarre and medically incoherent as Indiana's to its logical conclusion.
Anti-abortion laws like the one Pence signed are often criticized for being medically incoherent — for requiring doctors to do things that make no sense from a medical perspective, or restricting abortion in ways that fail to account for the medical realities of pregnancy.
Pence also fell afoul of medical reality in 2015, when Indiana faced a devastating HIV outbreak. Pence arguably helped prolong the outbreak by waiting two months to authorize a clean needle distribution plan. And Pence's budget cuts that shuttered a rural Planned Parenthood arguably helped cause the outbreak in the first place.
Trump often comes across as incoherent and inconsistent on the issue of abortion. But Trump's choice of Pence as running mate helps indicate that Trump is willing to go all in on banning abortion in America.
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