Before America can officially move on and forget that Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate ever happened, we needed to hear Samantha Bee weigh in.
“It was an epic showdown between Trump’s conservative beard, Mike Pence, who tried as hard as he could to turn Indiana into a Handmaid’s Tale theme park,” the Full Frontal host said Wednesday night, “and Hillary Clinton’s Care Bear Tim Kaine who, I don’t know, looks like he has his own line of breakfast sausages? Or as she likes to call him, ‘Senator Not Elizabeth Warren.’”
“America’s assistant youth pastor could have won the debate without saying a word,” Bee added. “Sadly, Kaine let the bright lights of the big-boy stage get the best of him and spent the evening barking like a puppy who had been given one too many treats for his speak trick.”
Pence, for his part, “showed himself to be an able running mate in the sense of running away from everything Trump has ever said,” Bee quipped. At one point, the Republican defended Trump by saying he’s not a “polished politician.”
“Yeah, no shit. He’s just a rich asshole who wants to be king of America,” Bee said. While Pence never “lost his cool,” she added, “Caring about the vice president’s calm temperament when an erratic rage quasar is at the top of the ticket is kind of like asking a car salesman about the airbags on a car that is currently on fire.” Meanwhile, “Kaine’s losing strategy was to spend the whole night telling us what we already knew about Trump instead of what we ought to know about Pence.”
But Bee seemed equally angry with moderator Elaine Quijano, whose final question for Pence was a general inquiry about his faith. Bee would have gone with something more direct, she said: “What about your push for anti-gay religious freedom laws and your disgust for the pathological condition of gaydom and your support for gay conversion therapy and your unconstitutional anti-abortion initiatives?”
In the end, Bee guessed that Kaine “got a post-debate phone call from his boss saying, ‘That’s OK, little amigo, get up off the mat and go charm some Miami Cubans,” while Pence, “who committed the unpardonable sin of winning too good, probably woke up to a congratulatory horsehead in his bed, which is the second most horrifying thing the governor has gotten into bed with.”
