The Moral Collapse of J. D. Vance

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.

By Tom Nichols

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.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/moral-collapse-jd-vance/619428/

[kentuck]

1. He was never moral.

His book was a piece of shit, in my opinion.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. There's been no change. He's always been such.

[GusBob]

3. Half way thru that crappy book I figured he was a self serving jackwagon

He will make a perfect Trumpish politician

I'd bet this guy is a closeted pedophile or sex freak, another perfect GOPish thing for his resume

[Hortensis]

4. He's hardly the only two-faced deceiver feeding an electorate

what they want to hear so they'll vote for him, or her as the case may be. This behavior strongly suggests to me he was never the liberal some took him for and is almost certainly merely a variation on what he did for self aggrandizement in other spheres.

I'm just glad he's not running as a Democrat, which he probably would have done if the electorate was blue.
If only that was the case for all of them.

[Solly Mack]

5. He overestimated his appeal and he was never appealing.

[themaguffin]

6. I really hate that it pushes the narrative of him as a "truth teller" of his "community. Bullshit.