Former Vice President Mike Pence released a new campaign video that is supposed to lay out his plan for energy independence. So what does it consist of? Pence filling up his gas-guzzling truck with … gas. If you enjoy the experience of cringing for an entire minute, this is the ad for you!
The video begins with Pence exiting his seemingly brand-new, cherry-red pickup truck while wearing a light-blue button-down shirt, sans a matching red tie. He has a lavalier microphone taped to the center of his chest. (The point of a lavalier microphone is to be able to wear it discreetly, so as to not have a microphone taped to the center of your chest.) Pence introduces himself to the camera while he grabs the fuel nozzle out of the pump and sticks it into his gas tank, then asks the audience, “Remember $2-a-gallon gas? I do.” One of the more magical things about this ad is that the former vice president has clearly found the one pump in America that doesn’t ask for money, doesn’t need you to choose your octane level, and most importantly, doesn’t need you to press the trigger to release the gas into your vehicle!
Notice the beeping sound in the background: That sound is coming from the gas pump because the nozzle has been taken off the dispenser, and the pump is prompting the customer to pay and then choose what kind of gas they want. It’s a pretty amazing fail for an already amazing failure of a person.
Pence blames President Joe Biden and his “war on energy” for gas prices. What’s Pence’s solution? The same solution Republicans have offered for decades: expand drilling and give away federal land to fossil-fuel and mining interests.
Meanwhile, Pence can’t even get the most basic facts right. CreditDonkey.com says the last time the average gas price in America was at or below $2 per gallon was 2004, during the first year of George W. Bush’s unwarranted war in Iraq. The U.S. Energy Information Administration pegs February 2005 as the last time that gas was consistently below $2 per gallon. Since that time, prices have vacillated up and down, but always on an upward trajectory. At the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, there was a brief period when the average cost dropped to below $2. I guess Pence enjoyed the quiet of those grim early days, when the sounds of emergency vehicles and cold storage trucks moving about the streets were the only thing piercing the silence.
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