In article <v7h2as$3lp2j$5@dont-email.me>, X@Y.com says...
>
> The Moral Collapse of J. D. Vance
>
> Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has
> become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.
>
>
> What do we call a man who turns on everything he once claimed to believe?
> For a practitioner of petty and self-serving duplicity, we use ?sellout? or
> ?backstabber.? (Sometimes we impugn the animal kingdom and call him a rat,
> a skunk, or a weasel.) For grand betrayals of weightier loyalties?country
> and faith?we invoke the more solemn terms of ?traitor? or ?apostate.?
>
> But what should we call J. D. Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned
> Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist
> turned Senate candidate? Words fail. His perfidy to his own people in Ohio
> is too big to allow him to escape with the label of ?opportunist,? and yet
> the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand
> him a defector or a heretic.
>
> My friend Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District
> of New York, tried to describe Vance recently and came up with ?pathetic
> loser poser fake jerk,? but that is a lot of words. To distill the essence
> of Vance as a public figure, the word that enters my mind is an anatomical
> reference beginning with the letter a.
>
> I do not use that word lightly or comfortably. I am, in the formal sense, a
> man of letters. I have been an officer of instruction at several
> institutions of higher education (and I remind you here that I do not
> represent any of them and speak only for myself). I would not advise my
> students to use the term.
>
> But the word is apt when I consider Vance?s silly and yet detestable moral
> collapse. Some people back in Vance?s home region of Appalachia thought his
> memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was hollow and inaccurate, but for a time, other
> people?including me?were intrigued by his writing and public speaking.
> Vance lived as a child in a steel town in Ohio and spent his summers in the
> hills of eastern Kentucky, while I grew up amid the rotting factories of
> New England, solidly in the working class but not poor. I welcomed his
> willingness to cast a critical eye on his (and my) people, especially after
> years of conservative hand-wringing focused solely on the dysfunction of
> minority communities.
>
> Vance gained early support in the political center, particularly among
> conservatives. The American working poor, no matter where they are, do in
> fact need civic representatives from the center-right, people who can talk
> candidly about the limits of government and who can make a moral case for
> tough love and personal responsibility, but one based on a sense of shared
> experience, common values, and genuine compassion. Someone like Vance could
> be that candidate.
>
> Cassie Chambers Armstrong: ?Hillbilly Elegy? doesn?t reflect the Appalachia
> I know
>
> Someone like Vance, perhaps, but as we now know, not Vance himself. Not so
> long ago, he talked about the self-defeating bias against education among
> poor whites. He acknowledged the self-destructive habits of some of the
> people he grew up around. Vance wrote, in this very magazine, that Donald
> Trump ?is cultural heroin??a powerful charge from someone who hails from
> the epicenter of the opioid epidemic?and provided a ?quick high? that could
> not fix what ails the country. All of that vanished once Vance decided he
> wanted to go to Washington?and after the Trump supporter Peter Thiel
> dropped $10 million into a political action committee.
>
> Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has
> become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown. His attempts at
> authenticity are so grating because they are so blatantly artificial. His
> recent tweets, for example, attempting to ingratiate himself with rural
> Ohioans by slagging New York City were embarrassingly amateurish; we can
> only wonder which social-media consultant thought them up. ?Serious
> question,? Vance tweeted. ?I have to go to New York soon and I?m trying to
> figure out where to stay. I have heard it?s disgusting and violent there.
> But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4??
>
> When the Republican commentator Liz Mair called him on this inane fear-
> mongering, he responded that ?these people??which is everyone but him, one
> assumes?have no sense of humor about what he claimed was only a joke.
>
> Again, this is why a certain word immediately springs to mind.
>
> Worse, Vance has not only repudiated his earlier views on Trump, but has
> done so with ruthless cynicism, embracing the former president and his
> madness while winking at the media with a What can you do? shrug about the
> stupidity of Ohio?s voters. ?If I actually care about these people and the
> things I say I care about,? he told Time, ?I need to just suck it up and
> support him.?
>
> Well. One can only imagine their gratitude now that Vance the wealthy
> venture capitalist has deigned to accept Trump as his political savior.
>
> Read: Ohio is now fully Trumpified
>
> These incidents are not isolated missteps. The writer Tim Miller recently
> noted in The Bulwark that within the space of a week, Vance not only
> tweeted his performative fear of New York, but also ?defended a Nazi from
> being kicked off of twitter ? shared a thread defending election fraud
> conspiracies ? fantastically claimed Google was ?hiding? his website? and
> ?mocked reporters for saying they were traumatized by the Capitol riot.?
>
> Vance?s rhetoric is even worse than Miller?s description. For example,
> Vance minimized Nick Fuentes, the leader of a white-nationalist group, by
> referring to him merely as ?a giant troll? who should not have been kicked
> off Twitter by one of the ?tech companies? that want to ?control what we?re
> allowed to say in our own country.? And, more recently, he ventured onto
> the former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka?s crackpot videocast to claim that
> the ?Democrat? Party?a usage common among educated right-wingers trying for
> working-class cred??is a party of childless people? who therefore do not
> value the future.
>
> Vance has struck back at his many critics across the political spectrum by
> referring to them all as ?degenerate liberals,? which is exactly the kind
> of thing a smarmy and pretentious asshole would say.
>
> I apologize. I had hoped to avoid the word, but nothing else will do.
>
> In fairness, Vance is hardly the most offensive Republican out there. He is
> no Louie Gohmert, the Republican congressman from Texas, or Marsha
> Blackburn, the senior Republican senator from Tennessee, people who create
> an electrostatic field of stupidity around themselves when they speak. Nor
> is he even the most craven candidate in Ohio; his primary rival Josh Mandel
> recently filmed himself burning a surgical mask in the name of freedom. The
> Republican Party is chock-full of such performative buffoons.
>
> But what makes Vance so awful is that he knows better. His intentional
> distancing from his earlier views shows that he is fully cognizant of what
> a gigantic fraud he?s become.
>
> I suspect that Vance is also reading his own press, which would explain why
> a young man who attained early fame is convinced that he can jump right to
> national office. Take, for example, the Trump-friendly columnist Henry
> Olsen of The Washington Post, who wrote that Vance scares America?s elites
> because ?he hasn?t surrendered his mind to polls or to the donor class in
> an effort to fit in.?
>
> But following the polls and capering to a jig played by rich donors is
> exactly what Vance is doing. His gooberish tweets, his recent declaration
> that the most important issue for Ohio is securing the southern border, his
> multimillion-dollar support from ?ordinary folks? like Thiel?these all show
> that Vance is as mossy a creature as the swamp ever produced.
>
> This hypocrisy makes him indistinguishable from other figures in American
> politics, such as Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, who are products of
> privilege and elite education and who now pretend to be tribunes of the
> Forgotten People. (Vance, predictably enough, has recently expressed his
> admiration for both.)
>
> Vance, so far, is less of a hazard to American democracy than aspiring
> authoritarians like Cotton or Hawley. Nor does he seem to have developed
> the full dedication to being a soulless careerist like Elise Stefanik, the
> Republican congresswoman from New York. Mostly, he?s just a ? well, you
> know.
>
> Instead of a candidate who?s willing to speak hard truths to his people,
> Ohioans now have a native son who has returned to weaponize their
> resentment and cultural dysfunctions. His ambition is fueled by the money
> of others who would never deign to live in the Midwest. And like other
> populist charlatans, he has convinced himself that he should be anointed to
> lead the rubes out of their misery.

He admitted he was wrong and manly admitted to it. Something the left
can't do.
>
> Vance would no doubt welcome terms such as populist, savior, native son.
> But when thinking of a plastic fraud trying to harvest their votes, poor
> and working-class voters might come up with a different word.

They love him and you hate that.
>
>
> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/moral-collapse-jd-
> vance/619428/

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