The Mike Pence Comedy Tour

Trump, not him, is the real conservative

I try to find the comedy in politics. Otherwise I couldn’t stand it.

Take the Mike Pence Comedy Tour. Here’s a tweet by him that summarizes his campaign:

A great week in New Hampshire! The Republican Party is at a fork in the road and it’s our time of choosing whether we will remain the Conservative Party or an echo of the Democrat Party by embracing populism. We must choose Conservatism every time! 🇺🇸

It includes a video from his Wednesday speech in the Granite State where he brags about his achievements as vice president:

We revived our economy. We achieved energy independence for the first time in 75 years. We secured our border and gave the American people a new beginning for the right to life. We got government out of the way. We governed as conservatives, and the American people thrived, because of a conservative agenda, not in spite of it…. Donald Trump and his imitators often sound like an echo of the Progressives they seek to replace.

But Trump-Pence won in 2016 on a populist agenda! That’s what MAGA was and is!

And remember all Trump’s MAGA rallies, attended by tens of thousands, in the 2020 campaign for Re-Elect Trump-Pence?

Here’s Pence – if you can stand the boredom – in his Wednesday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Republican voters face an important choice next year. It will determine both the fate of our party and the course of our nation. Will we be the party of conservatism, or will we follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles?

The divide between these two factions is unbridgeable.

Are he and his speechwriters that ignorant? Or they just pulling our legs so they can keep their ludicrous campaign going and the checks flowing? First off, populists – MAGA – are a large part of the GOP base, maybe 30% or even 40%. So you can’t win without them. You’ll end up like Bush I in 1992, with a pre-MAGA insurgent like Buchanan in the primary, then a populist like Ross Perot in the general, where he won 19% of the votes.

Second, even a glance at American history shows we deal with populist movements by absorbing them into one of the two major parties. A good example is Dr. Townsend’s Townsend Plan from 1933, under which every American over 60 would get $200 a month, maybe $4,000 today, paid for by a 2% national sales tax. He held populist rallies around the country, attracting thousands. He created more than 3,400 Townsend Plan Clubs.

Did newly elected President FDR denounce “the siren song of populism” and attack Townsend? No. He created Social Security. He told Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, “"We have to have it. Congress can't stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance system.”

I’m sure you remember the populist 2010 Tea Party movement, which protested the general oppression of the federal government. President Obama and VP Biden were so upset by it they sicc’d the IRS on it. It led to what’s now called the IRS Targeting Controversy. It was a precursor to the Biden regime’s repression of conservatives, including the four indictments of Trump and his associates.

And remember the Dark Brandon speech a year ago, with the demonic red background, where Biden threatened MAGA with the full force of the federal tyranny? Why isn’t Pence defending these good Americans instead of attacking them himself?

As to conservatism, Pence, or his speechwriters, are ignorant. The founder of modern American conservatism is Russell Kirk and his 1953 book “The Conservative Mind.” I took classes from him at Hillsdale College 1975-77 and he became my mentor and friend. When I got out of the U.S. Army in 1982, I became his assistant until I went to D.C. and restarted my journalism career.

Kirk himself was far from a populist, but recognized its place in American politics. In 1992, he was the Michigan chairman of Buchanan’s populist campaign. Of course, he supported Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 campaigns, which had a strong populist element. Kirk supported the effort to stand off the Soviet Union and expansionist communism, but otherwise was a noninterventionist. He co-wrote a book on noninterventionist Sen. Bob Taft.

When the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, he joined with libertarian noninterventionist Murray Rothbard in the 1992 Buchanan effort. Unfortunately, Kirk died in 1994 and Rothbard a year later. It was a brief union of what were called “paleolibertarians” and “paleoconservatives.” Their No 1. issue was to bring the boys home, and not rest until the last galoot’s ashore.

By contrast, Pence is a hyper-interventionist. He wrote in the WSJ, “Republican populists would abandon American leadership on the world stage, embracing a posture of appeasement in the face of rising threats to freedom.” He means that demonic Ukraine War he backs along with Brandon and the leftists in the Democratic Party, which actually is destroying Ukraine. And how is risking global nuclear annihilation with Russia a conservative “value”?

There’s more amusing tommyrot. He concedes, “Populist movements have long been part of America’s politics. They have most often been led by Democrats and leftists, such as William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long and Bernie Sanders.”

No, Bryan wasn’t a leftist. Although Long often is described as a leftist, the Kingfish actually was more a unique American character, like Bryan; and his public works programs became part of FDR’s Second New Deal, again showing how America tames populism by absorption. Both men were noninterventionists, especially after the nightmare of World War I. And although Bernie certainly is a leftist, he’s also on the same side as Pence on the Ukraine War.

The only way Pence could gain the nomination would be if Trump was jailed and the Republican National Committee dumped him for Pence, who then would get 25% of the vote, with Brandon – or Newsom – easily winning re-election as MAGA stayed home or went third party.

Mike Pence is a fake conservative. He could have stood by Trump and helped repair this badly wounded country – but nooooooooooooo!