JD Vance Is Not A Crook

Probably sweatier than Nixon though.

What a week America’s beloved Vice President JD Vance had for himself. He went to Switzerland to pretend he was negotiating a peace deal with Iran. He went on a podcast with his own wife, Usha, during which he seemed so awkward with her that we wondered if they had only been introduced five minutes before the cameras were turned on. He went to the Nixon Library in California, where he pandered to the disgraced dead president’s fans by pooh-poohing the Watergate scandal and praising Nixon for getting America out of Vietnam “from a position of strength.”

The moderator sitting on stage with Vance didn’t press him for details on that last one, presumably because he’s part of the half-century-long GOP effort to rehabilitate Nixon’s presidency and thus self-evidently doesn’t have the brains that God gave the humble cantaloupe.

But first, Switzerland. Vance flew there to talk to Iranian negotiators about various details of a possible peace agreement that would cover how much of a nuclear energy program Iran would have. But somehow, apparently, he managed to not take any nuclear inspectors along, even though Iran allowing inspections of its nuclear facilities was the most obvious way the world would have of enforcing any deal:

Ha ha, it’s funny because we’re winging this very important negotiation whose failure could extend the war and crash the global economy!

Vance also addressed his boss’s nearly blowing up the negotiations before the VP even arrived by threatening Iran’s leaders with blowing up their entire “fucking country” if they tried to take over the Strait of Hormuz:

My dude, trash talking is what the US and Iran soccer teams might engage in if they meet up at the World Cup (which is possible but highly unlikely). Besides, everyone knows it is an empty threat. The Iranians have been firing on ships in the Strait for a couple of days, so clearly they’re not taking Trump’s threats seriously.

Then Vance came home to the States, where he took a minute to make reading a children’s book aloud with his pregnant wife look like something they both resented but had agreed to do under pressure from a marriage counselor.

“Good to see you” (awkwardly pats pregnant wife’s knee while she spreads mouth in a rictus-like grin familiar to anyone who has ever endured listening to a partner go on and on about their fantasy baseball league).

If you have 20 minutes and an assload of anti-nausea medication, you can watch JD Vance read Winnie the Pooh and make it sound about as invigorating as a step-by-step guide to stapling a bunch of paper together.

Having performed his (possibly therapist-ordered) human interaction with his wife, Vance was off to California. There, this bumbling pile of sweaty butt hair pandered to the Nixon Foundation dead-enders, still fighting to rehabilitate Nixon’s reputation like Japanese soldiers still holding down garrisons on South Pacific islands in the 1970s.

This is a big deal in Republican politics, where the party has spent half a century trying to restore the 37th president’s reputation, to the point where many in the party have long happily bought into conspiracy theories that Nixon was innocent of any crimes. No, this alternative history goes, the great Nixon was framed by the “deep state” that hated him for reasons. Since Vance has never met a right-wing cause he wouldn’t glom onto like a barnacle on a boat hull if he thought it would buy him five votes in the 2028 election, he was happy to oblige.

So to paraphrase Mayor Quimby of Springfield in a not dissimilar context, if that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say that JD Vance does not also blow:

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a president is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”

There is a metric fuckton to unpack there! None of it makes JD Vance look good, or smart, or living a full life free of the painful condition of having his head shoved so far up his ass that he can perform his own colonoscopy by eyeballing it. But let’s try.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.”

Vance is right about this, but that’s not because Watergate was really some silly minor tale that got blown out of proportion by the media and the public. Today, Watergate would be a 12-hour story because the Trump administration has about 17 Watergate-level scandals every week.

Ordering federal law enforcement to pursue political enemies on trumped-up bullshit, selling access to his office, using his office to enrich himself and his family to the tune of billions of dollars through shady business deals, rewarding cronies with expensive no-bid contracts, covering up his associates’ crimes that he might also be implicated in ... these are all activities Trump and his minions pursue on a daily basis. They are being pursued in the Trump White House at a scale far beyond anything even dreamed of by the likes of G. Gordon Liddy and H.R. Haldeman.

In fact, one major reason Watergate would be a 12-hour story today is because Fox News would spin it in Nixon’s favor. And Fox News exists at least in part because Roger Ailes watched Watergate happen and wanted to start a news network that would report everything with a Republican-friendly slant.

We don’t know exactly what Vance knows and doesn’t know about all this history. But in this scenario, he’s Spiro Agnew.

“If you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration.”

By the “Deep State,” Vance means an FBI higher-up who blew the whistle when the Nixon administration was doing burglaries and breaking and entering into the premises of the opposition party. He means journalists who published everything they could verify for millions of readers. He means a Congress that thoroughly investigated the Nixon administration. And if he’s unhappy about the latter, hoo boy, do we have some bad news for him about how much time future Congresses might devote to investigating the administration he is part of. There’s enough there to keep thousands of historians busy until the end of time.

Vance wrapped up his Nixon chat by chastising protesters outside the building who were yelling at him in Spanish:

“The vice president can’t understand what you’re protesting about if you don’t speak the language of everybody else here.”

My dude, you are in Southern California. The language everyone else there is speaking is Spanish. But anyway, you’re the Vice President of the United States, surely you can find a translator working in the government. Assuming Trump hasn’t fired all of them, which is a big assumption on our part.

[WaPo / Doomsday Scenario]

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