Mike Pence is not a competent executive official. His gubernatorial experience is rift with failure, most people forget that Trump picked Pence out of a terrible political position, one headed toward a tough reelection fight as a Republican in Indiana with terrible approval ratings. He was not seen at the time as a successful up and coming Republican superstar.

Under Trump, all Pence has done is look upon Trump with unwavering love and admiration, certainly not done anything substantive.

Now Pence has been tasked with heading up the Coronavirus Task Force – which even under the best of circumstances will require clearheaded strong leadership, not something associated with Mike Pence.

Oh, and he’s not done well with past epidemics, as Rawstory does a nice job compiling:

When Pence was governor of Indiana, he oversaw an entirely preventable AIDS disaster in Scott County. Pence dragged his feet on implementing a recommended needle exchange program, out of a religiously motivated belief that doing so would make him a party to intravenous drug use — even though studies show clean-needle programs do not increase drug use. By the time Pence finally relented and let the program go forward, over 200 people had contracted HIV – in a county of less than 24,000 people.

I guess we’re left to hope that there isn’t something the fundamentalist community can construe as sinful about this virus – kissing? – or we’re finished. He cannot be a party to it.

Since Pence became vice president, he has been one of the administration’s foremost architects of health care policy. Several staffers and advisers from his Indiana days came with him to the Department of Health and Human Services, like Secretary Alex Azar, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and Medicaid and Medicare Administrator Seema Verma — and they have spent a great deal of energy imposing their ideological beliefs against the interests of public health. Verma, for example, spearheaded a push for states to require Medicaid recipients to provide proof of employment to keep their coverage, a policy which led to tens of thousands of people being kicked off the program in Arkansas alone.

If there is a way to impose their ideological beliefs, especially the belief that there exists something called a “biblical work ethic” (and many of these people do believe that such a thing exists or can be defined), he and his staff will find it, and increase the suffering in order to impose the ideology, just as done with AIDS.

Just about the only health care policy Pence enacted that had any positive effect was expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in his state as governor — and even then, he has since endorsed Republican bills that would have savagely cut that same coverage.

See? If Mike Pence believes that someone poor somewhere might be getting something for nothing, he’ll make others suffer to pay for it. Nice areas in very red states will get a ton of help in fighting this epidemic, but reservations in Arizona will not, nor will the south side of Chicago, and none will be spent on migrant workers in Texas.

But even on top of the ideological concerns, there is simply the fact that Pence is absolutely underqualified and clearly an ideological pick. Trump needs to appoint someone who has studied epidemics and has headed up healthcare task forces previously. But he cannot resist raising the political profile of his “team.”

MIKE PENCE:

– His budget cuts in Indiana led to the spread of HIV there

– Wrote articles about how smoking does NOT cause cancer

– Calls global warming a myth

– Was put in charge, by trump, of the Coronavirus response

UNBELIEVABLE.#CoronaVirusUpdates

— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) February 27, 2020

It is also quite possible that Trump wants someone to blame and “cut” if this doesn’t go well. Trump knows that his political life is largely riding upon how he handles this virus. So what does he do? Appoint someone he can blame and cut off from the ticket. Trump will want everyone mad at Pence if this gets out of hand. Had Trump appointed some incredibly competent but totally unknown person to head the task force, it won’t have a “face” of failure and people will turn back to Trump.

We are the only ones guaranteed to lose, unless the virus plays nice about it all with us.

Also, there is always a tweet:

Obama just appointed an Ebola Czar with zero experience in the medical area and zero experience in infectious disease control. A TOTAL JOKE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2014

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom