Former Vice President Mike Pence was on Fox News Monday night, again attempting to get back in Republicanism’s good graces. Pence has been in the doghouse since January 2021. You know, after the unpleasantness of the movement’s leader, Donald Trump, sending a violent mob of extremists to capture or kill him after Pence refused to topple the next United States government based on Donald’s fee-fees and a new theory proposing that, actually, the sitting vice president can decide that some states’ electoral votes don’t count.

Pence was obsequious as usual, appearing on Hannity to complain that too much was being made of a violent attempt to topple this nation’s democracy. 

“I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January. They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believe we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020.”

God, I had forgotten how tedious this guy is. But that’s right: According to Mike Pence, the target of mobs in the U.S. Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence,” the attempted coup was “one day in January.” It was just one day. You don’t see Americans whining about Pearl Harbor or 9/11 after the fact. It’s been months, and law enforcement, the media, and (about half of) Congress that had to escape that day is still going on about an attempt to end democracy?

Why can’t we just let bygones be bygones?

Make what you want of the bit where Pence willingly conflates the insurrectionists who attacked Congress with the 74 million Trump die-hard believers. He’s the one who linked them, of his own accord. His choice.

As for the rest of it, like Pence’s insistence that he and Trump have now made up and are buds again after that whole attempted-murder thing? Yeah. Say what you want about incompetent murderous lying malignant narcissist rapist tax-dodger Donald Trump and his staff of toadies, but they found the perfect patsy when they picked Mike Pence, of all possible Republicans, for the do-nothing number two slot. A perfect performance. No notes.

It’s difficult to find someone so ambitious and so movement-devoted that you can send a violent mob of extremists to kill them and still have that person come back to lick your boots afterward—or at least that’s what we might assume. In actual Republicanism, you can shoot a guy in the face, and he’ll still show up on camera to apologize for getting in the way of your birdshot. So perhaps Pence is more the party rule than the exception. Come to think of it, both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would also show up at your door with make-up flowers if their party’s leader sent a mob of militants to unsuccessfully hunt them down.

So maybe Mike Pence is the perfect sycophant—or maybe Mike Pence is not special, in the newly fascist Republican Party, as we make him out to be.