Mike Pence, our theocrat-in-waiting Vice President and a man I now call “the Spanish Inquisition,” went on Fox & Friends in the face of international outcry about Trump’s Paris Accord decision. He whinged that climate change was only a problem for the left, since apparently the right wing lives on another planet. Can we go there once this planet is ruined?
It’s become more and more apparent that the Trump administration’s sole guiding principle is to reverse Obama’s legacy and piss off their political opponents, no matter how many people will suffer and die as a result. Hence the all-out attacks on Obama accomplishments like healthcare and the Paris Agreement executive order—Trump and the GOP don’t care what they’re doing as long as it’s a “win” page in their Obama burn book. And their followers have been trained not to register what’s happening so long as it results in “liberal tears,” which presumably are formed from melting snowflakes.
Pence stared straight into the camera with his Deatheater grimace and said that climate change, you know, the threat of complete world catastrophe and devastation because we’ve fucked the environment, was merely “a paramount issue for the left,” not, you know, the entire world. Pence’s statement is also demonstrably false: sure, it’s totally a paramount issue for the left, as well it goddamned should be. But considering that 190 other countries on Earth have all agreed to the Paris accords save Syria and Nicaragua (which didn’t sign because it thought Paris didn’t go far enough to combat climate change), the issue can hardly be termed a left/right divide. Is Pence calling Russia and China and Saudi Arabia “the left”?
Mike Pence, who always looks like he’s about to outlaw the X-Men, actually went on national TV, per the Telegraph, and stated that “he didn’t understand why climate change had become such an issue for the Democrats and the left.” Why, Mike Pence? Why? Are you really so convinced of your place in the afterlife that the whole “stewardship of the Earth” part of your doctrine is worth tossing aside? Are you longing for a redo of the biblical flood? Are you really that spectacularly inept?
The truth is, I don’t think Mike Pence is so stupid that he doesn’t understand why people are upset worldwide about the threat of impending doom based on man-made conditions that are under our control to alleviate. This is what makes Mike Pence dangerous and even more terrible than we knew: he’s intellectually lazy and an outright liar. Mike Pence is purposefully peddling the snakeoil GOP and Trumpian tactic—scream “the left, the left, the liberals, the snowflakes, the social justice warriors, the Democrats,” until all their followers can hear is noise and rage—sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The GOP are wizards—necromancers—at convincing their voters to vote against their own interests, and now they’re selling the wholesale wrecking of the planet because somewhere it might make a hippie in a Greenpeace shirt sniffle on his way to save the whales. This represents the complete and total moral bankruptcy of the Republican party. There are many issues that I understand as partisan and divisive, but climate change should not be one of them, and history will end up harshly condemning Trump for this decision. I’m pretty sure that history will not remember Mike Pence very much at all.
(via The Telegraph, image: Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock)
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