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Monday, April 10, 2017

Rooted in Bachmannistan.

full story, here

Keep Trump alive. This guy should be made to wear a sign, "Do Not Impeach." A reminder of what lurks.

UPDATE: Fleshing out The Beast

In the 107th Congress (Pence’s first, covering 2001 and 2002), for example, out of 435 members of the U.S. House, Pence ranked #428 – meaning that 427 members were to his left, putting the Hoosier on the far-right-wing fringe. The results were roughly the same in the 108th Congress and the 109th.

By the 110th Congress, Pence was at #432, putting him to the right of nearly everyone in the chamber. The results were roughly the same in the 111th Congress and the 112th.

Let’s put this another way: during his congressional career, Pence wasn’t just more conservative than Paul Ryan. His voting record also put him to the right of Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin, Steve King, and even Louie Gohmert. That’s not an exaggeration. Bachmann, Akin, King, and Gohmert all had voting records less extreme than Mike Pence.

The problem is the gap between perceptions of Mike Pence and his actual record. To use Politico’s phrasing, the Hoosier is seen as “normal” and “conventional.” But on a substantive level, we’re talking about a politician whose claim to fame is an anti-LGBT law that did real harm to his state. Pence is a climate denier. He rejects the idea that cigarettes are deadly. He doesn’t believe in evolutionary biology, but he does support “conversion therapy.”

Long after it was obvious Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, Pence was still insisting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Soon after, when the Bush/Cheney administration pushed partial privatization of Social Security, the Indiana Republican was outraged – because he said the plan wasn’t nearly right-wing enough. In 2011, just a few months after the GOP took control of the U.S. House, Pence’s big idea, to the annoyance of his party leaders, was to shut down the federal government.

Pence also once accused Disney of hiding political propaganda in an animated film to convince people that women can serve in the military.

By most sensible standards, Mike Pence has earned a reputation as an extremist. If this guy is what passes for “normal” and “conventional” in Republican politics in 2016, standards have shifted in a politically unhealthy direction.

This link. Do not give this creep a free ticket to ride. He's an extremist down to the center of his small black heart.