Speaking of Vice-Presidents, yecchh.

Our current VP was subjected to a CBS “town hall” over the weekend where a series of generally none-too-bright questioners peppered Vance with questions that he hesitated to answer with the clarity and forcefulness necessary. I thought Vance’s strength was supposed to be communication. Maybe Trump can get rid of him…

You can read the transcript here, but my main nausea came from Vance’s weenie responses to two questions regarding illegal immigration. CBS set him up to some extent with the first one, asked by a nun, Sister Nancy Sylvester. The Veep is Catholic, of course, and spoke as if he felt he owed some kind of deference to Sister Nancy despite the fact that her question bypassed law and policy and went straight to toxic empathy. She asked…

“Mr. Vice President, we are sisters who minister at the southern border in the United States, as well as here around Detroit, and they are constantly seeing families who are affected by our immigration policies. They see the trauma of children who are separated from their parents, sometimes on a moment’s notice. They go to school and they come back and they’re not there. And they have to sort of fend for themselves. And so they, the sisters see the kind of effect, the fear and violence of the ICE behavior. We know the complexity of this issue, but what really pains us is how it’s being implemented in such ways. And so I’m going to, sort of know that both of us share the same faith. We may not always agree, ’cause I understand you don’t always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to, though, wonder what would you say, how would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who try to follow the gospel, how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified to, in terms of the kind of values we live, wanna live by, and also what policies would you advocate to try to promote more compassionate and respective behavior toward our immigrant sisters and brothers?”

Elected officials and responsible citizens can’t accept the false premises underlying such a question, but Vance did. He replied, after wasting time showing his concern for the Pope’s health and pandering to his fellow Catholics,

“So let me say, one, we’re trying to strike the right balance. And when you have a country where approximately 25 million illegal aliens have come in over the past 30 or so years, many of them completely unchecked and unvetted, we’re trying to strike a balance between how do we do law enforcement, but how do we also do it humanely, and how do we not do so little law enforcement that you actually empower some of the worst people in the world. And so—I think that it is constantly a work in progress. When you’re talking about millions and millions of people and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, you know, we’ve even just in the past year or so increased training protocols. Because I do think that men and women of ICE, by the way, it’s like the men and women of law enforcement. Most of them are amazing people who are patriots and they want to do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up. And obviously we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up.”

Clear as mud, and incompetent. His duty was to begin by saying, first, that the Sister was talking about illegal immigrants, and the “immigration policies” of enforcing the law. These aren’t “immigrant sisters and brothers,” but illegal immigrants who should not benefit from taking what isn’t theirs to take, It’s nice that she and her colleagues are trying to ease the burdens law-breaking illegals have inflicted on their own children, but that is not the fault of the United States or its primary concern, nor should it be. “Following the gospel” means, as the wonderful Pope has made clear, open borders, and the disastrous consequences of that are blazingly evident in Europe and increasingly in the U.S. You cannot govern competently and responsibly with faith and the the idealistic teachings from a culture 2,000 years ago. Law enforcement wouldn’t have incidents of overreach, bad decisions, accidents and mistakes if lawbreakers didn’t force the government to deal with their destruction.

I have a dear friend and occasional commenter on EA who thinks like Sister Nancy. This is the poison well of misplaced Christian charity that creates the “Good Illegal Immigrant” myth and the absurd parallels between Mary and Joseph and the millions of illegals the Biden administration encouraged to first break our immigration laws, and then to engage in further lawbreaking.

Then CBS host Tony Dokoupil introduced another questioner, a naturalized citizen named Niv Agarwal. Sister Nancy had just asked, “I’m interested in how, from your very core of your faith, how would you want to be, how do you want to treat immigrants? Because in many cases, we get, they all are called terrorists sometimes by people. They are—like, how does, what, what would you want? What would you want to do?” Great: Shut up, Sister, you ignorant slut. Tony segued to Niv, whose infuriating question was along the same lines. He said,

“Hey, my name is Niv. My family and I immigrated here about 20 years ago, and I became a citizen about five years ago. So you were the first person I voted for, actually….One reason, because of the reasons you just mentioned, I was concerned about border safety, as in the trafficking and the drugs, not because I think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, but after seeing ICE behave like military police, and you recently call H-1 visa workers foreign indentured servants. I think Americans are anything but safe. So I’m just curious, why, why are you scapegoating immigrants for the issues you’re supposed to be solving as a Vice President?”

Immediately, Vance should have said,

“Let’s get two things straight once and for all, Niv. First, the issue is illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants like you. Stop letting open borders advocates confuse the issue by adopting their dishonest rhetoric. Second, if an illegal immigrant has a job in this country, by definition he or she is taking that job away from an American, because if that illegal wasn’t here, an American would have that job. So if you don’t think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, you’re confused. Nobody is “scapegoating immigrants.” Again, we are talking about illegal immigrants. I would think, as an immigrant yourself, you would insist on that distinction. We are correctly pointing out the harm done to the nation, society, the economy and law-abiding citizens when foreign citizens come here illegally, and ICE acts exactly as law enforcement has to act when criminals are being protected by rogue state and local governments and misguided Americans who have accepted pro-open borders propaganda as you have.”

If the Republicans get clobbered in the mid-terms, a main reason will be their incompetence and rhetorical cowardice.