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Pence said the president should resign for lying about adultery. Just not this one.

Mike Pence Focus on the Family
A longtime opponent of LGBTQ equality, Mike Pence has been the target of numerous protests. Here he is speaking at Focus on the Family in 2017. Photo: YouTube Screenshot

Mike Pence likes to style himself as Mr. Morality. After all, this is the man who won’t have dinner alone with another woman other than his wife. Of course, working for a man who is a serial philanderer and rampant liar presents problems. But Pence has solved them.

They’re only problems if the president is a Democrat.

In a series of columns that have recently come to light, Pence expounded upon the high moral ground that the President must hold.

“If you and I fall into bad moral habits, we can harm our families, our employers and our friends,” Pence pointed out. “The President of the United States can incinerate the planet. Seriously, the very idea that we ought to have at or less than the same moral demands placed on the Chief Executive that we place on our next door neighbor is ludicrous and dangerous.”

“Throughout our history, we have seen the presidency as the repository of all of our highest hopes and ideals and values,” Pence continued in one column. “To demand less is to do an injustice to the blood that bought our freedoms.”

Of course, this was the late 1990s, when Pence was a conservative talk show host. The president in question was Bill Clinton, and Pence was fulminating about Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton’s lies made it incumbent upon Congress to remove him from office, Pence wrote in another column.
“Our leaders must either act to restore the luster and dignity of the institution of the Presidency or we can be certain that this is only the beginning of an even more difficult time for our land,” he wrote. “For the nation to move on, the President must move out.”
For hypocrisy, Pence’s writings are hard to top. He has praised Trump with bootlicking alacrity. Although Trump lies on average nearly eight times a day, Pence has willingly checked his moral sensitivity at the Oval Office door in service to his own ambition and the religious right agenda.
Of course, that makes Pence no different than the rest of the religious right, which has gleefully put aside its emphasis on Biblical values in pursuit of political power. Nothing Trump does can’t be excused, from his relationship with Stormy Daniels to his praise for white supremacists. All that matters to them is the Supreme Court.
It would be fun to see how they explain their flexible morality when they get to the pearly gates.
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