I winced at the idea of watching Lester Holt’s interview with Vice President Mike Pence on NBC, but I did it anyway. South Korea is finally opening new channels with the North.  That’s a good thing.  And then there’s Mike Pence.  So I listened to his calm, reasonable, and fatherly voice intoning utter barking madness.  Remember: this is the man who might become President.

Pence continued his perpetual stranglehold on his speaking points.  There was no fact so strong it could ever overcome that man’s single-minded determination.  Pence seems resolved to never — Never! — allow any idea into his mind that wasn’t declared to be completely and majestically white and pure.

LESTER HOLT: [I was sitting] with a senior North Korean official who said very frankly that the United States — the world — has to understand that we are now a nuclear power, and has to treat us accordingly.  What do you think when you hear that kind of resolute statement?

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: Well, we continue to hear that kind of rhetoric, and that’s all the more reason why President Trump and our allies are absolutely determined to continue to bring pressure to that regime.  The world has agreed that we must have a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, and we’re going to continue to put all the pressure to bear, economically and diplomatically, while preserving all of our military options, to see that that happens.

— NBC Evening News, February 9, 2017

Pence intoned all this in his measured, monotonic, vaguely condescending terms, implying that every syllable of this ideological insanity should have been intuitively obvious to everyone.  There was a frozen density to Pence’s demeanor as he talked, a concrete-like determination to be less reasonable than the North Korean spokesman.

So, any bets on whether North Korea backs down first?  They’ve been teaching their people for decades that the West only wants their destruction.  They treat America in particular as an existential threat, hellbent on their complete ruination.

Yeah, I’m sure they’ll just hand over all their nukes simply because we asked poorly.

Pence works hard to sound reassuring and traditional, even as he spouts the weirdest madness.  How far, I wonder, might this heavily homophobic President-in-waiting go if we, say, gave him the reins of power?  This is not an academic question.