Mike Pence minced in The New Yorker: "(Ed) Clere remains bitter about Pence."

Together occasionally, if not forever (photo credit).

Yesterday there was just enough time for us to fire off a link and tease readers a little bit.

In the NAC posting "Be careful what you wish for: 'The President Pence Delusion,' including a pivotal cameo by a New Albanian we all know," a long and very worthwhile read in The New Yorker was linked.

The President Pence Delusion, by Jane Mayer (The New Yorker)

Trump’s critics yearn for his exit. But Mike Pence, the corporate right’s inside man, poses his own dangers.

 ... (Vice President Mike) Pence likes to say of himself, “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” But Clere is not alone in questioning Pence’s political purity.

Yes, the questioner in question is none other than State Representative Ed Clere, the New Albanian we know so well, whose cameo is a critical component of an essay no doubt being consumed nationally even as I write.

Here is the passage.

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In 2015, Ed Clere, a Republican state legislator who chaired the House Committee on Public Health, became aware of a spike in the number of H.I.V. cases in southern Indiana. The problem appeared to be caused by the sharing of needles among opioid abusers in Scott County, which sits across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. In a place like Scott County, Clere said, “typically you’d have no cases, or maybe one a year.” Now they were getting up to twenty a week. The area was poor, and woefully unprepared for a health crisis. (Pence’s campaign against Planned Parenthood had contributed to the closure of five clinics in the region; none had performed abortions, but all had offered H.I.V. testing.) That same year, the state health commissioner called Indiana’s H.I.V. outbreak a public-health emergency.

Clere came of age during the AIDS crisis, and had read Randy Shilts’s best-selling account, “And the Band Played On.” He tried to get the legislature to study the possibility of legalizing a syringe exchange, which he felt “was a matter of life and death,” and could “save lives quickly and inexpensively.”

But conservatives blocked the idea, and Pence threatened to veto any such legislation. “With Pence, you need to look at the framework, which is abstinence,” Clere said. “It’s the same as with giving teen-agers condoms. Conservatives think it promotes the behavior, even though it’s a scientifically proven harm-reduction strategy.” In March, 2015, Clere staged a huge public hearing, in which dozens of experts and sufferers testified about the crisis. Caught flat-footed, Pence scheduled his own event, where he announced that he would pray about the syringe-exchange issue. The next day, he said that he supported allowing an exchange program as an emergency measure, but only on a temporary basis and only in Scott County, with no state funding. Clere told me that he spent “every last dime of my political capital” to get the bill through. After Scott County implemented the syringe exchange, the number of new H.I.V. cases fell. But Republican leaders later stripped Clere of his committee chairmanship, a highly unusual event. “I commend Representative Clere for the efforts to help the state deal with this,” Kevin Burke, the health officer in neighboring Clark County, told me. “But he paid a price for it.”

Clere remains bitter about Pence. “It was all part of his pattern of political expediency,” he said. “He was stridently against it until it became politically expedient to support it.” Clere, a Christian who opposes abortion, told me that he now finds Pence’s piety hypocritical. “He says he’s ‘pro-life,’ ” Clere said. “But people were dying.” When Clere was asked whom he would rather have as President—Trump or Pence—he replied, “I’d take Trump every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”

Be careful what you wish for: "The President Pence Delusion," including a pivotal cameo by a New Albanian we all know.

Absolutely vital reading in The New Yorker. It is impossible to summarize several thousand words with just one paragraph. I've chosen to highlight the essay's conclusion.

But you're curious aren't you?

Well, if you want to know which New Albanian was interviewed for the article, you'll just have to go look for yourself.

The President Pence Delusion, by Jane Mayer (The New Yorker)

Trump’s critics yearn for his exit. But Mike Pence, the corporate right’s inside man, poses his own dangers.

... Many Americans have debated whether the country would be better off with Pence as President. From a purely partisan viewpoint, Harold Ickes, a longtime Democratic operative, argues that—putting aside the fear that Trump might start a nuclear war—“Democrats should hope Trump stays in office,” because he makes a better foil, and because Pence might work more effectively with Congress and be more successful at advancing the far right’s agenda. Newt Gingrich predicts that Pence will probably get a chance to do so. “I think he’s the most likely Republican nominee in 2024,” he said. Ron Klain, who was chief of staff to the former Vice-President Joe Biden, is skeptical of this, given Trump’s accumulating baggage. “There is no success for Mike Pence unless Trump works—he cannot run far enough or fast enough to not get hit by the falling tree,” Klain said. “But he may think he can.” Evidently, the next chapter is on Pence’s mind. Over the fireplace in the Vice-President’s residence, he has hung a plaque with a passage from the Bible: “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the lord, ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”

Mike Pence: "The effect is that of an unctuous church elder selling pyramid schemes to credulous parishioners, never doubting he is doing God’s work."

As a lifelong Hoosier, I'm compelled to warn those of you currently existing on an steady diet of "Impeach Trump" that waiting in the wings is someone far worse, primarily because Mike Pence actually believes the religious mumbo-jumbo to which The Donald pays only bored lip service.

Three entertaining pieces follow. Many thanks to my friend C for these links; his eye for the polemic remains exemplary.

Leading off, why none of Pence's three simple identities qualifies him to be dogcatcher, much less chief executive.

Mike Pence: The servile schemer who would be president, by Richard North Patterson (Boston Globe)

ON THE EVIDENCE of a lifetime, America’s vice president is not a complex man. Instead he is three extremely simple ones: an incompetent ideologue, an obsequious toady, and a self-serving schemer.

As a side note, Patterson offers what is my single favorite paragraph of the year to date, which might be only slightly refashioned to describe Deaf Gahan and his stuffed board of toady housing bootlickers.

It was utterly in character, then, when Pence kicked off the most excruciating display of synchronized sycophancy in memory — the chorus of praise from cabinet members upon their first meeting with America’s Dear Leader.

Awesome. Patterson covers older ground in this column from April.

Mike Pence and the rise of mediocrity (Patterson; Globe)

(Pence's) public persona reeks of smarmy sanctimony — every untruth, evasion, and vacuous bromide delivered in a portentous pipe organ voice accompanied by squints, nods, and shakes of the head which, Pence clearly imagines, convey a pious gravity. The effect is that of an unctuous church elder selling pyramid schemes to credulous parishioners, never doubting he is doing God’s work. Every self-serving self-deception reveals the depths of his shallowness, the breadth of his hypocrisy.

His salvation is not ours.

Indeed. Finally, to end on a deeper and more prosaic note:

Vice President Mike Pence stays loyal to Trump, but it could come at a cost, by Noah Bierman (LA Times)

The Republicans’ signature healthcare bill was in peril in Congress and President Trump was busy warring against media foes on Twitter.

Vice President Mike Pence, wearing a brown suit and his usual earnest expression, was far from the fray last week, here at a warehouse outside Cleveland amid metal rods and wooden crates for a “listening session” with small-business owners. Sitting at a drafting table, he ignored the camera lights as well as the trouble in Washington, dutifully hearing out complaints about healthcare, taking notes on a legal pad and promising the Ohioans that the Trump-Pence administration was close to replacing Obamacare.

This is how Mike Pence copes with the drama that defines life as Donald Trump’s sidekick: acting as though everything is normal, boringly normal.