Mike Pence's NFL walkout proves our former governor still isn't "worth a bucket of warm piss."

About which we are thankful that Dave Zirin sets matters straight about John Nance Garner's quote. Warm spit never made any sense to me.

Mike Pence’s NFL Walkout Was a Cheap, Transparent Stunt ... For which taxpayers picked up the tab, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Vice President John Nance Garner once said that being the vice president was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” (Many know this quote as “bucket of warm spit.” It’s “piss”.) The current holder of that office, Mike Pence showed on Sunday that Garner, if alive, would owe an apology to piss buckets everywhere.

Pence used the NFL to star in a cheap, transparent political stunt. The narrative Pence tried—and failed—to sell was that he showed up at the Colts-49ers game in Indianapolis and then supposedly left in a huff after being shocked—SHOCKED!—at seeing the San Francisco 49ers kneel. After assumedly taking a whiff of his personal smelling salts, he immediately released a statement that magically was already prepared, which read in part, “I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.”

Except ...

It’s not what happened. It’s how it happened. This was staged: a taxpayer subsidized stunt aimed at attacking dissenting black athletes. It was revealed in record time to be yet another toxic effort by this administration to divide people along racial lines and distract us from a train wreck of an administration, described by Senator Bob Corker as “an adult day care center” that looks after a big orange baby.

Skip to the conclusion ...

This was amateur hour fraud. It was Gulf of Tonkin for idiots: a ham handed effort to isolate people brave enough to dissent in the face of the most powerful people in the world and raise issues of racism that this administration is too craven to discuss. It’s also very disturbing. The very week Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke about Trump’s “respect for the 1st Amendment,” we had a staged spectacle with the highest levels of government attempting to intimidate and coerce people to not exercise those rights. It’s disgusting and another example of Pence’s degradation, his Faustian bargain with this administration. If Mike Pence thinks he can deodorize Trump with a fraudulent photo-op, he should know that even the contents of John Nance Garner’s bucket gives off less of a stench.