Regarding Senator Vance, now I’ll have to read Hillbilly Elegy. Until I do, I accept the general view that it is a moving human document. I expect something a bit like Dreams from My Father — better than the average book by a politician, even actually good, and less revealing than the author professes, though more than he intended.
As for Senator Vance himself, I gagged at his remark early in the Ukraine war that he didn’t care what happens to Ukraine one way or another. Prudence or geopolitics often counsel a hands-off policy, but to express indifference to a people suffering a brutal, unprovoked invasion is something else. It is possible that, as glib people sometimes do, he said too much. (He has repented of his 2016 comments about Donald Trump.) Until it becomes clear that that is the case, I find him, even as I provisionally consider him a good author, a scoundrel.
This does not disqualify him for the job he pursues. The vice presidency has been filled by wretches, off and on, since Aaron Burr. Trump at the top of the ticket is unfit for the presidency. I wrote about his term in the home stretch here and found good things among the bad, as the country as a whole prospered. But his performance after his 2020 loss disqualifies him. The march on the Capitol and sitting on his hands through hours of riot should have caused him to be impeached on January 7 and removed from office as fast as Congress could have acted. Their irresponsibility does not excuse his dereliction. It didn’t end there, as he kept blustering about his bogus win, echoed by his online grasshoppers and his elected toads. Pete Rose was a great ball player, but if you bet on the game, you don’t go to Cooperstown.
Politics isn’t the MLB. Binary choice, Biden is senile, circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color, etc., etc. But Republicans should know what they have done.