Mr. Vice President, you are one big phony

           Mike Pence has offered to take a polygraph. Quick. Rush a device to his side.

            No – there's no chance whatsoever he's the senior official who wrote the anonymous New York Times commentary that branded his boss petty, amoral, and consistently acting in ways "detrimental to the health of this republic."

            Why do we know the author in The Times isn't Pence? That's simple. One whose spine is as jellified as his would never do something so brassy.

            However, let's play along with his pretense. This is all Pence is -- a pillar of pretense, of plastic piety. Ask him: Are you Anonymous? Then ask a whole lot more.

            Mr. Vice President, you've said you knew nothing about Mike Flynn's offer to the Russian ambassador to lift sanctions over attacks on the U.S. election system. You know, it's that collusion thing. Please reaffirm your response for the benefit of the electrodes on your forearm.

            Mr. Vice President, you said after the embarrassment in Helsinki that President Trump's interaction with Vladimir Putin was an example of "American strength in action." Did you get sufficient REM sleep the night before?

            Mr. Vice President, the other day you said the Space Force would "strengthen our security . . . ensure our prosperity . . . and carry American ideals into the boundless expanse of space." Was that you talking? Or was it cold medicine?

            Mr. Vice President, have you changed your mind at all since, as a congressman, you said, in reference to then President Clinton: "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."

            Now that your boss has been implicated not only in shacking up with porn figures but making illegal pay-offs to them, have your moral standards gotten their customary 10,000-mile checkup?

            Mr. Vice President, you said the other day in regards to the discord over the Kavanaugh hearings that we need to return to a "more respectful time" in our politics.

            As one tweeter said in response:"Irony just died."

            Mr. Vice President, like all of the president's mouthpieces, in just about every statement you seem flatly and precisely devoted to insulting the intelligence of every thinking man and woman.

            You did that when, in defending Trump's border policy of separating children from their parents, you called the U.S. "the most welcoming country on Earth."

            You did it after his remark about not accepting refugees from "shithole countries." You said Trump's policy is not dictated by "race or creed." OK, it's just dictated by a basic lack of class or any inkling of dignity.

            None of your statements are to be taken at face value, Mr. Vice President, no matter how much your face assumes the tenor of a Da Vinci painting.

            Such was the case in May 2017, barely into the infantile days of the Trump administration, when you formed your own political action committee – the Great America Committee.

            It was the first time that a sitting vice president had done so.

            Sitting vice presidents have all the support they need from the national political party. Your move has the markings of someone with his eyes on someone else's office suite.

            Don't you, as Trump's greatest apologist, see this president fulfilling his four-year term?

            Mr. Vice President, Americans indeed would be served if we could strap you into a truth suit. They would see quickly that in casting their lot with serial prevaricators, we got two for the price of one.

            Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.