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Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Veep Bleep

Hoping I'm back home from lecture in time for the Vice Presidential debate, which is expected to draw an historically small audience after the last Presidential debate which drew an historically large audience -- proving the deep seriousness of a voting population that licks its chops at the prospect of a brainless bigotry circus and rolls its eyes at the prospect of wonks disagreeing about policy. By the way, the narrative of a clash of boring wonks is bad enough, but better by far than the grotesque equally popular framing of the debate to come as a clash of boring sit-com dads in a straight white middle-class suburban weekend backyard in a fantasy 1950s sparring over a grill in floppy chef hats with a laugh track provided via live-tweets.

Of course, Mike Pence passes for a boring wonk (let alone sit-com dad), only because too many of my fellow citizens don't seem to know anything about the terrifying misogynist racist homophobic theocratic authoritarianism of his actual views. I have been shocked at the blase assignment for years and years of the term "wonk" to Paul Ryan, who spews utter arrant nonsense about economics on a regular basis and gets treated as some lovably pedantic details-guy by the pundits -- and don't get me started at those who imply the doll-eyed dolt is a "young gun" sex symbol in even the remotest construal -- but the thought that a rabid extremist like Pence who has actually made something of a public fool of himself as governor of Indiana can be transubstantiated into an easy-going reassuring mainstream professional politician simply by standing next to the reality tee vee hate talk con-man circus freak Donald Trump in the media is actually nearly as terrifying to me as the fact that one of our two major parties no longer has the intellectual and organizational resources to ward off a takeover by Trump in the first place.

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