Predictably Dumb
There’s a popular TV show about people like Mike Pence who do stupid things.
Pence visited the Mayo Clinic to observe how the clinic is dealing with COVID-19. A photo shows Pence and a group of medical people, all wearing masks, except Pence.
Pence later said he didn’t need a mask because he is tested every day for the virus and he wanted to look patients in the eye. Didn’t he ever hear of false positives and false negatives? The Mayo Clinic knows about false negatives so why not Pence. He’s only the country’s leader in the COVID-19 pandemic. And how about those people whose eyes he looked into?
Remember, this is the same man who said God has chosen him to one day be president. He also out-sycophanted everyone in the room when he slathered Trump with praise during a Dec. 22, 2017, meeting of members of the Trump team and congressional leaders. He commended Trump 14 times while Trump sat, looking for all the world like a cheap copy of Il Duce.
Pence brings to mind the movie, “The Christmas Story,” when after a triple dog dare, Flick gets his tongue stuck on a frozen flag pole.
Or the biker who demands to be free and won’t wear a helmet or the smoker who won’t quit smoking or the people who ignore safe distances or the parents who won’t get their kids vaccinated.
The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. Most of Trump’s advisors were either fired, quit or are in jail. So you wouldn’t expect a top flight guy for VP.
Some of Pence’s past comments are indicative:
Asked about evolution, he said, “Um…I, do I believe in evolution? Ah, I, I, ah…I embrace the, uh — the, uh — the view, ah, that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that’s in them.”
About smoking, he said “time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and nine out of 10 smokers do not contract lung cancer.”
About climate change: “I don’t know that [climate change] is a resolved issue in science today.”
And about same sex marriage: “In the state of Indiana, marriage is recognized as between a man and a woman, and I think that’s how it should remain.”
So Pence toured a COVID-19 unit without a mask. Here are other things he might do:
Swim with millions of jellyfish in Palau.
Slide down the side of an active volcano In Nicaragua.
Dive with a 10-foot long crocodile inside a plastic cage.
Skydive above Mount Everest from 29,000 feet.
And remember Pence didn’t invent stupid. In the early 1900’s people believed that radioactivity was good for you and radium pendants were thought to cure rheumatism, uranium blankets for arthritis, anti-aging radioactive cosmetics, radioactive water, and more.
And Bayer Laboratories developed heroin cough syrup in 1898. The company stopped making it by 1910 when the addictive properties of the drug were determined to be higher that originally thought. Good move.
In the 1950s, people infected themselves with tapeworms to lose weight. Not good.
So does Pence pray for rain? Does he hope the Tooth Fairy and Santa will visit him?
To be fair, although that isn’t what I really want to be, Pence is just the latest in a series of bad-news vice presidents.
Richard M. Johnson was Martin VanBuren’s vice president. Johnson believed the earth was hollow and proposed an expedition to the North Pole so Americans could drill to the center of the world.
Hannibal Hamlin was vice president to Abraham Lincoln. While vice president, the Civil War was being fought against the country. Hamlin, meanwhile, spent most of his time with his family in Maine.
Thomas Marshall served as vice president for Woodrow Wilson. Marshall didn’t attend cabinet meetings and thought the job was essentially meaningless, the proof being that nobody shoots the vice president.
And for pure criminals, don’t forget Spiro Agnew, vice president for Richard Nixon. Late in his tenure, Agnew pleaded no contest to bribery dating from his time as Maryland’s governor.
Which brings us to J. Danforth Quayle, perhaps most like Pence. Quayle wouldn’t release his academic records and the reason became clear with the infamous “potato” debacle. Quayle was visiting a school in Trenton when he told a student it was “potatoe” not “potato.” Quayle’s reputation had nowhere to go but down.