By Richard Brookhiser
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Regarding Senator Vance, now I’ll have to read Hillbilly
Elegy. Until I do, I accept the general view that it is a moving human
document. I expect something a bit like Dreams from My Father — better
than the average book by a politician, even actually good, and less revealing
than the author professes, though more than he intended.
As for Senator Vance himself, I gagged at his remark
early in the Ukraine war that he didn’t care what happens to Ukraine one way or
another. Prudence or geopolitics often counsel a hands-off policy, but to
express indifference to a people suffering a brutal, unprovoked invasion is
something else. It is possible that, as glib people sometimes do, he said too
much. (He has repented of his 2016 comments about Donald Trump.) Until it
becomes clear that that is the case, I find him, even as I provisionally consider
him a good author, a scoundrel.
This does not disqualify him for the job he pursues. The
vice presidency has been filled by wretches, off and on, since Aaron Burr.
Trump at the top of the ticket is unfit for the presidency. I wrote about his
term in the home stretch here and found good things among the bad, as the
country as a whole prospered. But his performance after his 2020 loss
disqualifies him. The march on the Capitol and sitting on his hands through
hours of riot should have caused him to be impeached on January 7 and removed from
office as fast as Congress could have acted. Their irresponsibility does not
excuse his dereliction. It didn’t end there, as he kept blustering about his
bogus win, echoed by his online grasshoppers and his elected toads. Pete Rose
was a great ball player, but if you bet on the game, you don’t go to
Cooperstown.
Politics isn’t the MLB. Binary choice, Biden is senile,
circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing
color, etc., etc. But Republicans should know what they have done.
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