What Did the Vice President Know, and When Did He Know It?

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Brynn Anderson/AP Images
Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a rally in Miami.

If anyone still buys the notion that Vice President Mike Pence is some kind of a Boy Scout, a spin through the speech delivered on Saturday by President Donald Trump’s biggest fan to a roomful of religious-right activists should disabuse them of that dream: Pence peppered his address with demonstrable lies. If truth were still a thing, I suppose the Pence speech would have been news—scandalous news. But neither the footsoldiers nor the leaders of the right—religious or otherwise—care much for truth; they care more about a federal judiciary filled with far-right judges appointed for a lifetime.

God apparently hates abortion and feminists and gays and transgender people and the enfranchisement of black people far more than he hates liars. It’s all about the net gain—which makes Pence, the performatively pious prevaricator, the perfect embodiment of the Lying for Jesus theological construct that is all the rage among right-wing evangelical leaders.

Communications professionals will tell you not to repeat the false claims made by your enemies, lest you serve merely as their amplifier. That makes it kind of hard to lay out the facts underlying this essay’s assertion that the vice president is a proven liar. So let’s suffice it to say that, in his speech, the vice president lied, once again, about something Joe Biden said in a 2018 speech to the Human Rights Campaign, when Biden condemned some of those who attack LGBTQ people as coming from “the dregs of society.” Trumpers immediately falsely claimed that Biden had applied the term to Trump supporters, leading one to wonder why they would volunteer themselves for that characterization. (But, hey, if the shoe fits …)

And Pence lied when he said Democrats want to kill “babies” that survive late-term abortions, accusing them of infanticide. And he lied when he said that Planned Parenthood had been “selling” fetal remains to research institutions. He lied when he blamed Democrats for the humanitarian crisis on the Southern border, referring to the deaths of Alberto Martinez and his daughter, Angie Valeria Martinez, an image of whose dead bodies, shown face-down in the Rio Grande, was captured in a photograph seen around the world. (It’s the Trump administration, not Democrats, who have made it more difficult for refugees to claim asylum at ports of entry, leading to more attempts by those fleeing violence and hunger in Central America to enter the U.S. at dangerous crossings.)

Read more: https://prospect.org/article/what-did-vice-president-know-and-when-did-he-know-it