God, has there ever been a less impressive vice president than JD Vance? And yes, we were alive for Dan Quayle’s four years aspiring to mediocrity. Vance might be even worse: a smug, condescending, lightweight know-it-all who is wrong about everything, but he’s wrong with such confidence.
What was so pressing on Vance’s mind that he just had to tell the European leaders and dignitaries at the Munich Security Conference about? You’d think it would be something about, you know, security. Pushing back on Russia and its expansionist dreams in Ukraine, maybe, or dealing with climate change before it causes massive political instability across the continent. Shoot, maybe he could just reassure everyone that Donald Trump is not a sundowning dementia patient fixated on invading Canada. Anything.
But no, what was on Vance’s mind was lecturing Europe for not being as dedicated to democracy and free speech as America, which he called “the threat within” that is more dangerous than China or Russia, and for allegedly ignoring the populist voices in their countries that he seems to think represent majority views.
Also there was sneering about Greta Thunberg for some reason, because his speech was nothing if not an extended airing of wingnut grievances:
“Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential. And trust me, I say this with all humor: If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
Ha ha! JD make hooman joke, like normal hooman. Not awkward robot, is JD. You laugh now. Laugh, hooman! Laugh at hooman joke!
The joke-like object occurs at around the 17:10 mark in that video, in case anyone wants to watch how it went over. But trust us when we tell you Vance paused as if expecting a laugh and got absolutely nothing beyond some scattered groans. Come on, hooman! Is hooman joke!
We would certainly love to listen to Vance try to explain how a teenaged environmental activist is in any way comparable in influence and authority to a ketamine-addled Nazi billionaire who has been empowered by the president of the United States to rampage through the nation’s bureaucracy, destroying decades of work that have made America a world leader in scientific research, medicine, space exploration, educational attainment, conservation of public lands, and about a million other areas of accomplishment that are currently being fed to an industrial shredder along with hundreds of thousands of jobs, causing immiseration and desperation for tens of millions of people, but we probably wouldn’t last five seconds before telling the bearded jackass to shut his word hole and go play with his toes while the adults try to figure a way out of this galactic mess he has helped get us into.
Vance might as well have just been an AI chatbot trained on nothing but right-wing Twitter feeds and beamed in from a server farm in Modesto. He did not seem any more substantial than a hologram.
The problem here, which everyone in the room except Vance realized, is that he was pushing for more tolerance of the same far-right xenophobia and bigotry that Europe has had more than enough experience with over the last couple of thousand centuries, thank you very much. Vance had just toured the concentration camp at Dachau. Yet somehow, he is incapable of making the connection.
Then after he finished giving the speech, he met with Alice Weidel, leader of AfD, Germany’s most far-right political party since the Nazis were in power. Germany has national elections in nine days, and we guess Vance wanted to give AfD the Trump administration’s seal of approval.
Vance did not meet with Germany’s Chancellor, which sends a message to German voters, and it is not a good one.
So here is how we can summarize JD Vance’s trip to the Munich Security Conference this week: He toured Dachau, then almost immediately afterwards met with the leader of a far-right German political party full of neo-Nazi sympathizers. Not that we have a hell of a lot of respect for Vance’s intelligence, but does anyone else see a bit of intellectual inconsistency here?
Unless the trip to Dachau was supposed to be somehow aspirational. We would not put it past him. Maybe he’ll go back to the White House on Monday, walk into Stephen Miller’s office, and present him with some ideas for making an even more efficient concentration camp that he jotted down on a cocktail napkin on Air Force Two.
One German leader, Defense Minister Boris Pistorious, was so incensed by Vance’s speech that he later abandoned his own prepared remarks so he could spend a few minutes excoriating the hateful pile of human butt hair:
“This is not acceptable,” Pistorius said. "This is not the Europe, not the democracy where I live and where I conduct my election campaign right now. And this is not the democracy that I witness every day in our parliament. In our democracy, every opinion has a voice.”
No, it’s the Europe of right-wing fever dreams, the Europe JD Vance hears about from Twitter users with names like @cum69420. (Or maybe Jack Posobiec, who was allegedly in Germany as a guest of Pete Hegseth.) The Europe that is supposedly being overrun by foreigners of a duskier hue. The Europe that is ignoring its own (WHITE) people, and not catering to bigotry in ways sufficient enough to satisfy Vance.
So congrats, pile of human butt hair! You charmed everyone with 18 minutes of adolescent whining about a girl who was mean to you. Next time try writing some bad poetry in your journal or fucking a couch, and leave the geopolitical policy-making to the grownups.
[YouTube / The Guardian / Politico]
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God, I wish Greta had influenced our country even a tenth as much as Musk is RIGHT NOW.
Boris Pistorius is a legend, for his righteous smackdown of the couchfucker and for having the coolest name ever. That guy was born to be a defense minister, unlike Petey the Day-drunk Clown.