Vance can't dance
For Barack Obama, it was “they cling to guns or religion.” For Hillary Clinton, it was “basket of deplorables.” And for JD Vance, it’s "childless cat ladies.”
Or should I say James Donald Bowman. Or James David Hamel.
But whatever name the junior senator from Ohio goes by these days it’s clear that, just like the subject of a John Fogerty song:
Vanz can't dance, but he'll steal your money
Watch him or he'll rob you blind
In this case your rights — although there’s a plan for your money too.
How else to explain his doubling down on a now infamous remark he made to Tucker Carlson in 2021, talking about Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg:
"We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too."
Obama and Clinton had enough common sense to try to walk back those remarks they made respectively about small-town Pennsylvania voters and Trump supporters.
In the tried and true manner of the guy at the top of the Trump-Vance ticket, he claims he was merely being sarcastic. And apologized to cats. Then he expounded:
“It’s not a criticism of people who don’t have children. I explicitly said in my remarks ... this is not about criticizing people who for various reasons don’t have kids. This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”
It should be noted that Harris is known as Mamala to her two step-children and Pete and Chasten Buttigieg have adopted twins.
It’s all part and parcel of the life story of Vance, who grew up in a dysfunctional family in a southern Ohio steel town and spent summers in a failing Appalachian hill town. He did manage to rise above those challenging roots to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School, a path he described in his best-selling book.
Where he met billionaire tech bro and anti-democracy activist Peter Thiel who helped start him on a career as a vulture, er, venture capitalist.
“Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.”
It’s probably not a great political strategy to double diss an estimated 43 percent of American couples without children either by choice or for medical reasons. But then again, neither was it a bright idea to boast about grabbing women by a colloquial name for a cat.
Yet here we are.
Apparently, “pro-family” in the minds of “New Right” Republicans behind Project 2025 amounts to:
“…proudly stat[ing] that men and women are biological realities," and that ‘married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.’"
It also looks to eliminate medical abortions by stripping federal Food and Drug Administration approval for the safe and effective mifepristone and invoke an 1872 law that would prohibit it from being sent through the mail.
Trump proudly boasts of appointing the three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and insists he would leave it up to the states to determine their own abortion policies. No such hedging from Vance.
All part of the Republican plan to get government out of the board room and into the bedroom.
Trump is expert at dancing around the truth. Vance can’t dance.