Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

SO "Choirboy Mike" Pence is abandoning the impure Republican party just as he gets his opportunity to a) say something that means something and/or b) get put in a position where he'd have to choose between his public principles and the dirty business of governance. Pence chooses, instead, to resign, or, in other words, to double down on Empty to preserve the Rhetoric.

Of course the story gets played as "Mike Pence running for President and/or President of Indiana", which I hope to Allah is true; in fact I'm pulling for him to be elected, and Jesus to return just after he takes the Oath, after which there's a sudden, intense burst of light, and I wake up in the shower and the last forty-five years turn out to've been a dream. Shunted off to the margins is the fact that as part of the "New" Republican Leadership he'd'a been forced to get behind their apparent--or at least presently bruited about--willingness to cooperate with the White House and other agents of the Infernal to make themselves look like something more than perpetual scolds. (The Over on this plan is Groundhog Day, but it ain't gonna surprise me none if somebody tries to impeach Obama during the Lame Duck session. At any rate, asking Mike Pence to be something other than a perpetual scold is like asking Lady Liberty to take a seat.)

As far as running for Governor is concerned, well, anything is possible once the blood gets up, but personally I'd advise against it, quoting Woody Allen's dictum to the Stevenson fundraiser stage manager in Annie Hall: "You don't have a comedian follow another comedian".

Indiana's fucking doomed, Brother Pence; everything that could be slashed, given away, or fucked up beyond all endurance in an effort to get the unemployed to move someplace warmer has already been enacted, or is about to be with a two-house Republican majority. Not to mention the fact that there's already twelve real and hopeful Hoosiers for every one imaginary job that Mitch Daniels has created. Follow your Dream.

President's a much better bet; you can always declare announce a war if things get rough. And look what it got The One True Religion in '92 and '96, this playing ball with the heathens. The real problem with Republican Purity Tests is that they haven't been pure enough.

As for the rest of you, I'd like to remind you once again that when you reward the Republican party Indiana is the rash it breaks out in. Dick Lugar, in '68, the Nixonian mayor of Indianapolis bound for beige-er things, who is to the Overton Window what Barbara Walters at ABC's anchor desk was to proper diction; Dan Quayle, then Dan Burton, Potatoe Head and Pumpkin Splatterer, spawns of Reaganism; Mark "Abstinence For Thee" Souder of the Gingrich Revolution; Mitch Daniels, Bush OMB Director now come to save the Common Man, and now Pence. I'm pretty sure we can keep this sort of thing up forever, America. I'm just not sure that you can.