The Tangerine Prince

Not surprisingly, I don’t have many Trump supporters on my Facebook feed, but I do have a few, and yesterday afternoon, a Facebook friend emblazoned his wall with TRUMP 2016!!!

The responses were, shall we say, divisive:

“Has your account been hacked?”

“Of the two available, he is the only one who will stand up against these Islamic murderers and defeat political correctness that has built the presidency over the last 8 years. I have no choice.”

The two party system is screwed!!! Those are NOT your only two choices!!! [Link to Johnson/Weld website]

Also [Trump’s] the only one for the 2nd Amendment. He has actually stated he would like to see a National right to carry. Hillary on the other hand has said she will use executive orders to make it much more difficult or impossible to own a gun.

[Sigh]

Anyone who thinks because Donald Trump lacks discretion, blusters, and blurts out whatever suddenly pops up in the tawdry casino of his imagination means that he will be a strong leader needs to look no further than his wishy-washy Hamlet-like[1] vacillation about whom to choose for his vice-presidential candidate, leaking that it was Pence, but then equivocating, but eventually opting for the Indiana governor an hour before Pence faced a deadline to file reelection papers. This inability to make up his mind underscores the fact that Trump is not a man of his convictions because he has no convictions. Take a peek at his various stances on abortion, or on Hillary Clinton for that matter, over the years. It’s as if he’s playing a game of Ping-Pong with himself, serving the ball and then rushing to the opposite end of the table to return it.

Sadly enough, the original Thursday press conference announcing Pence was pre-empted by the terrorist attack in Nice and the Saturday announcement overshadowed with the attempted coup in Turkey, two events that should give pause to anyone in a swing state thinking about throwing away a vote on Johnson or Jill Stein.

Anyway, Pence, who doesn’t believe in evolution nor that smoking kills, will, according to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, fix Washington, even though he had the chance when he spent 12 years there in the House of Representatives from 2001-2013, those glorious years which brought us the Iraqi War (which he supported) and the Great Recession, not to mention his views on gay rights, which correspond more closely to Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei’s than to Pope Francis’s.

Pence, according to conventional wisdom, will bring a sense of seriousness to the Trump extravaganza, help win over hesitant evangelists.

Here’s a snippet from a 2009 interview with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: I think you believe in evolution but you‘re afraid to say so because your conservative constituency might find that offensive.

PENCE: No, I‘ve said to you, Chris, I believe with all my heart that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that is in them.

MATTHEWS: Right.

PENCE: How He did that, I‘ll ask him about some day.

As my spiritual advisor James T Crow might say, “Okay then.”

[1] If Hamlet were an anti-intellectual and was known as “the Tangerine Prince” instead of “the Inky Prince.”

Uh, Lord, would you mind answering a couple of questions about your methodology in creating the universe?