Veep Matters

By all accounts Mike Pence vanquished Willie Brown's girlfriend with ease and verve, but in a respectful, friendly Midwestern sort of way. We know Pence won because the media is accusing him of 'masplaining'.  Also, Fox News' Cunt emeritus, Chris Wallace, thinks Harris did fine. 

But does Pence's victory matter? 

Readers will recall that we've long maintained Veep debates don't matter, ask Dan Quayle.

We've spent a lot of time this week testing our poll thesis. If the polls are right, Trump is toast. Can they all be wrong? So we don't think it's unfair to test our Veep thesis. We say Lloyd Bentsen's humiliation of Dan Quayle didn't matter. But Bush/Quayle was going to win no-matter what. The Federalist's Molly Hemingway tweeted last night that Pence reassured conservative voters in the 2016 Veep debate. Biden beat Ryan in 2012, it is said. That's certainly a correlation. Did Biden's win not help Obama across the finish line? Powerline argues that Veep debates help.

So maybe Pence's steady performance and vociferous defense of the administration's Covid policies reset the narrative and will mark the beginning of the Trump comeback.

Politics and Art

So Mike Pence went to see Hamilton, he got booed and then the cast cluttered up the stage and made some big, self important statement.

Yawn...you're really not that important guys.

We all have opinions and they seep into your art regardless. Some people make political art and its brilliant. All in the Family was certainly political art and brilliant. It had a certain honesty to it and even challenged its own beliefs. Family Ties was not expressly political though a running gag was hippy parents   Steve and Elise Keaton raising a Reagan-ite conservative son, Alex. Not once was Alex mocked or made to be the bad guy. Heck, the only political mocking occurred when Steve and Elise tried to revive their old hippy lives; Elise singing folk songs to an indifferent audience or Steven;s disastrous production of his 60's era play, and I swear I'm not making this up, 'A Draft Card for the Burning'.

As noted above, we can't keep politics out of our art even if we try. I don't try. My last novel To Survive the Earth, is the most political thing I've ever written. You know who Sarah Jane Wayne is, right? And yes, I think women with guns is hot.

That said, I've always worked hard to keep blatant political bias out of my books. Democrats like thrillers and alt-history two. This is a review of Operation Arctic Storm:

I was leery when I first saw this book because I thought it was going to be another one of those teabagger right wing fantasies where Democrats, Muslims and other minorities are bad and only the white GOP has any common sense and guts to prosecute a war against the Russians, but to my surprise this author has decided to forego all that right wing junk that permeates novels like this and concentrate on telling a great story.

That would have been too easy