Tone-deaf Pence crashes and burns

The 1980s called; they want their foreign policy back

I’ve never cared much for Mike Pence. It’s not just that he’s one of the most uninteresting successful politicians I can think of, it’s also that he represents the Republican Party of a bygone era that deserves to be gone.

The party’s future, if it chooses to have one (and the jury’s still out on that), is in rejecting the globalists’ forever wars, ending the American empire and the lies that go along with it, challenging the pharmaceutical and weapons industries’ choke-hold on government, and championing a return to a Republic that is responsive and accountable to its own citizens. It includes working for election integrity so that, like most developed countries that have rejected electronic balloting, people can have faith that they will get the policies and politicians they vote for.

Mike Pence doesn’t fit that mold. He’s an oh-so-careful man who wants to please the party’s traditional constituents — Wall Street and the military-industrial complex — while spouting homespun rhetoric that George Bush would’ve found familiar in 1988.

During an campaign event today in Iowa attended by all the major Republican presidential candidates save Donald Trump, newly freelanced media personality Tucker Carlson grilled the candidates one by one. Setting aside what you think of their policies and personalities, some of them handled it relatively well (Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis), while others (Pence, Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson)…did not.

It was Pence who succeeded in scoring the most devastating own goal of the day. Challenged by Carlson on his undiminished enthusiasm for sending billions of dollars in weapons to a defeated Ukraine while American cities fall apart, the clearly irritated Pence gave one of the most remarkable responses I’ve ever heard a presidential aspirant give: “It’s not my concern.”

While this car-crash moment was seized upon on social media as an act of political suicide, if you listened to his full answer, it turned out Pence didn’t literally mean what he said. He went on to explain that we could do both — continue to arm Ukraine to the teeth and fix America’s ills.

But the damage of that initial phrasing was done. And well it should have been. Because even if it was taken out of full context, the truth is he does care more about enriching America’s arms manufacturers via Ukraine than he does about addressing matters that Americans really care about. Because you can’t do both, and he has to know that. And yet he still advocates sending billions. More billions.

America’s total public debt is now over $32 trillion, with $1 trillion added in just the last month when borrowing limits were lifted. The cost to service that debt in this age of higher interest rates will soon consume such a large share of the federal budget that no amount of borrowing or money-printing will allow us to fund both guns and butter, at least not without another bout of rip-roaring inflation that will further impoverish crisis-weary Americans.

Pence must know this. He’s not dumb. So the alternative is he’s dishonest. By no means is he the first politician with that vice, but most of them can read the room well enough to know that in today’s world a 1980s militaristic rah-rah America foreign policy is not going to get you elected to Hunter Biden’s coke house. People are waking up.

The odds that the Republican grassroots are going to nominate someone next year who openly advocates doing everything in his power to get America into a hot war with Russia, in Russia’s own back yard, no less…is zero. That Republican Party should have died with John McCain. It lives only in the person of a few war hawk relics who don’t realize the political winds have blown all the sand out from under their feet (I’m looking at you, Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney).

Pence was equally adrift when given an opportunity to make good on election integrity. Carlson pointed out that only a few years ago many Democrats questioned the security of electronic voting machines, before the Covid era came along and brought us The Most Secure Election in History™. Almost every major western democracy shared that concern, and they still do. Most of them considered and rejected machines and still use hand-counted paper ballots for national-level elections.

So as Pence’s campaign staff lick their wounds and update their resumes, other candidates can draw lessons from today’s fiasco. When Tucker Carlson’s question begins to run on and take on that high-pitched squeak that tells you he knows you’re about to hang yourself, don’t take the rope he’s offering.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.