Ad-VANCE!

Donald Trump has named freshman U.S. Senator James David Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential running mate.

He makes history by being the first Republican vice presidential nominee since Charles W. Fairbanks to . . . have a beard.

Vance has been a lawyer, a veteran, venture capitalist and an author, sort of a Republican version of Wes Moore.  So far, so good.  When he returned to his native Ohio after having made his fortune in Silicon Valley, he started a charity to help Ohioans with opioid addiction.

Which was a total fraud and a front designed to further his political career.  

Once a critic of Trump and the source of gratuitous insults toward the Orange Man, Vance has since embraced Trumpism and has practically made love to Project 2025, the Mein Kampf-style reactionary  agenda that not only threatens to end democracy in America but guarantees to do so.  He's against legal abortion, believes that women in abusive marriages should stay in them, and says he doesn't care what happens to Ukraine.  

Vance actually makes me miss Steven Symms, the two-term Idaho senator who was so angry about what happened to Ukraine - then a Soviet republic - as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 that he said it was too bad it didn't happen closer to the Kremlin.

Vance has always been a slimeball - his whole appeal is based on white male resentment toward everyone else - and his shape-shifting political posture and his ruthless ambition make him so dangerous that, if this ticket is elected, people will be prying for Trump's good health long after the attempt on his life late last week is forgotten.  Trump only chose him simply to balance the ticket geographically and give him more credibility with the far-right populists in the Republican Party, which is also why he chose Mike Pence in 2016 (Pence . . . Vance . . . Pence . . . Vance . . . even the surnames are similar), but if Trump returns to office, James David Vance will be one Kentucky Fried Chicken breast bone away from ultimate power.

As I type this, some Democrats and left-leaning independents are cursing Senator Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who ran the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in 2022, for not giving any support to Tim Ryan, who challenged Vance for the Senate seat that Vance now regrettably holds. But the anger may be misplaced, as supporting Ryan, who turns 51 today, may have always been a lost cause.  I don't blame Tim Ryan for making Vance's political career possible by losing to him in the 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, because Ohio is so Republican, Vance would have won even if Mother Teresa had been his Democratic opponent.  I do, however, think Ryan was foolish to go for the seat instead of staying in the House and possibly becoming part of the leadership.  (Bear in mind that he challenged Nancy Pelosi for the position of House Democratic leader at the start of the 115th Congress.)  Today he's a hasbeen at an age when the careers of politicians on the national stage are going full speed ahead, and the only way he can get any sort of attention these days is to say that Joe Biden should give up running for a second term and join him in private life.  And so at this point, while House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and House Democratic caucus chairman Pete Aguilar are running the House Democrats and Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts is running the House Democratic vote-whipping effort, all Tim Ryan is running is his mouth. 😛 

As for the Republican National Convention, this is going to be the most mean-spirited GOP convention since 1964.