In Brief

PERSONAL life and what my Poor Wife laughing refers to in my case as responsibility intrude, and I start Physical Therapy, or PT, in a few hours, but I did want to share an impression of Indiana's 6th District Congressman Mike Pence. The casual observer may best remember Pence as the man who claimed his stroll through a Baghdad market with just John McCain, seventy-five pounds of body armor, and a small battalion of friends, some hovering overhead, was "like an Indiana market in the summertime"; those of us who know him a bit better say, "think Mitt Romney (v. 2.0) with grey hair, a slight head wound, and a compulsion to refer to his religion that borders on Tourettism". Pence's combination of public evangelicalism, small-town Jaycee hucksterism, and the je ne sais quoi of the Florida real-estate developer proved just the ticket for his eastern Indiana district, just as soon as the Republicans got the chance to redraw the boundaries in 2000.

Anyway Pence--whose website actually touts as evidence of his tough-mindedness on Iraq the fact that in 2003 he inserted an amendment into a supplemental funding bill language which would have required Iraq to treat our "reconstruction" costs as a loan! and adds "I still believe that!"--got another undeserved fifteen minutes during the Petraeus Shadow Puppet Theatre this week, of which a snippet made it on local news. (Pence, we admit, is an absolute master at getting himself on Indianapolis teevee whenever the subject is remotely military. Had the fact that it had a solid, guaranteed Republican Congressional majority for forty years actually managed to prevent the closing of every military base in the state we'd not be surprised to see Pence reading the daily mess' Hot Items Selection List (HIST) every morning. This replaces the earlier part of his career, when he was a master at getting on teevee to tout his Conservative Budget Principles, before they bankrupted half the nation.)

So I catch his soundbite, and (from memory) it runs something like this:

MR. PENCE: Mr. General Burns, Petraeus, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train soundly conducted military exercise based on Christian and Conservative principles. To what do you attribute your popularity wildly popular but still ignored by some Members and the Liberal Media despite it being So Obvious success?

To which we can only add that we look forward to catching the tape of Rep. Pence's next Baghdad market tour, the one where his security is handled entirely by $22 billion (it's a loan!) worth of New Iraq Army. Assuming the camera survives.