And Now for a Brief, Vital History Lesson on Mike Pence

And Now for a Brief, Vital History Lesson on Mike Pence

He wasn't always "the future."


http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/

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By Charles P. Pierce
Oct 5, 2016

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Hate to keep going back to Mike Pence, by universal acclaim the "winner" of Tuesday night's vice-presidential debate. It is fairly well known around the Congress that Pence is not the brightest bulb in the legislative chandelier. There was a moment in Tuesday night's hootenanny, when he and Tim Kaine were talking about the plight of Syrian immigrants, when Pence's inner ideological meathead came out for a curtain call.

KAINE: Or instead of you violating the Constitution by blocking people based on their national origin rather than whether they're dangerous.

PENCE: That's not—that's absolutely false.

KAINE: That's what the Seventh Circuit decided just—here's the difference, Elaine.

PENCE: The Seventh Circuit...

Oh, he wanted to go all talk show host at that moment and start railing against activist liberal judges, but the Seventh Circuit has six judges appointed by either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush, and the court did more than throw out Pence's case, it called him a big ol' 'fraidy cat while it did so, as The Atlantic tells us.

"The governor of Indiana believes, though without evidence, that some of these persons were sent to Syria by ISIS to engage in terrorism and now wish to infiltrate the United States in order to commit terrorist acts here," Judge Richard Posner wrote for the panel. "No evidence of this belief has been presented, however; it is nightmare speculation."

Instead, Pence decided to brazen it out, arguing that the court had not really kicked him in the teeth.

PENCE: But, look, if you're going to be critical of me on that, that's fair game. I will tell you, after two Syrian refugees were involved in the attack in Paris that is called Paris' 9/11, as governor of the state of Indiana, I have no higher priority than the safety and security of the people of my state.

KAINE: But, Governor Pence...

PENCE: So you bet I suspended that program.

Presumably, Pence rushed back to Indianapolis after the debate to declare a state of emergency and tell all his fellow Hoosiers to head for higher ground in case the Wabash breaks its banks because there might be a hurricane in Florida. All of which brings to mind Matthew Yglesias' 2008 story in ThinkProgress about his encounter with Mike Pence when the latter was in Congress.

And I can tell you this about Mike Pence: he has no idea what he's talking about. The man is a fool, who deserves to be laughed at. He's almost stupid enough to work in cable television.

That's cold.