Vance Depresses Me

Someone took a shot at Donald Trump again, but this time Trump wasn't it and the shooter was captured alive.   I'm actually beginning to worry about Trump and his chances of survival, because well, it's like this . . . he could still be President, but if he's elected and something happens to him before Inauguration Day, that means James David Vance will become President!

Vance depresses me.  He depresses me mainly because he makes Trump look like Robert F. Kennedy - Senior - by comparison.  He has a shockingly vicious attitude toward women - not just dismissing unmarried women as childless cat ladies but belittling the abortion rights movement and wanting to keep women in loveless marriages with abusive husbands by opposing no-fault divorce.  But the most jaw-dropping think that Jaw Drop Vance has done is to dig in on pushing discredited rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, a town between Dayton and Columbus, were eating pets even after this debunked tidbits were leading to bomb threats there and forcing the locals to suffer the consequences.

I ask again . . . why is he a U.S. Senator? 

And how is it that he could be one heartbeat - one beat of a heart congested with high levels of cholesterol - away from the Presidency? 

Vance is a cartoonish parody of a U.S. Senator with his fictitious life story, his faked interest in ordinary people's lives, and his glib, indifferent attitude.  When he first appeared on the national stage in 2016, he put on a good act, hawking his memoir, a book as bogus as those pet-eating rumors, and he even got an interview with the PBS NewsHour (which, incidentally, I still haven't gotten back to watching), presenting himself as a street-smart tech tycoon with a boy-next-door demeanor.  The media took his memoir as seriously as a Zakiya Dalila Harris novel. The real Vance is a fascistic sycophant with an unfulfilled lust for power. 

I've been hearing how Ohio voters have buyer's remorse over favoring him instead of Tim Ryan for Ohio's open Senate seat in 2022.  I don't think so, mainly because Ohio has become so reflexively Republican that when it changed judicial elections form nonpartisan to partisan, Democratic judges that had been elected repeatedly on nonpartisan ballots went down to defeat once they had to identify themselves by party.  But if I'm wrong and Ohioans do have buyer's remorse over Vance if the Trump-Vance ticket loses in November and Vance stands for re-election in 2028, could Tim Ryan defeat him in a rematch?  I think he could, but he won't get the opportunity, because the way the Democratic Party works, the party does not want to nominate a candidate that had been defeated by the Republican incumbent to oppose the same Republican.  Ohio Democrats will likely fear that Vance, having defeated Ryan once, will know how to defeat Ryan again, and therefore Ohio Democrats - assuming there are any left by 2028 - will tell Tim to take a hike.  Chances are they would have told Ryan to do the same had Sherrod Brown not run for re-election this year and had there been an open Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

And yes, I still think it.  Washington Democrats are glad to be rid of Tim Ryan because of his own driving ambition, which led him to an ill-advised challenge to Nancy Pelosi's House Democratic leadership and put him forever in her doghouse and then led him to an ultimately quixotic campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.  I think part of the reason U.S. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan - the chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who served concurrently with Ryan in the House - was happy to find a way to keep the Senate in Democratic hands without helping Ryan in Ohio, because he probably couldn't stand the guy.

But even if you think that Timothy John Ryan deserved to lose his Senate bid and be consigned to the Archipelago of Failed Democratic Candidates, does anyone in Ohio really deserve James David Vance?

And does America deserve Vance as Vice President?