Starting a little late but I'm going to follow along as Kamala Harris debates the obsequious, vacuous bag of old Sunday school clothes known as Mike Pence.

Let's go.

Naturally, my laptop just crashed, so bear with me as do a two-thumbed riff.

Anywho, first couple questions have rolled by.

As is his nature, Mike Pence is delivering smarmy crap as greasy as gooseshit through a tin horn.

The guy is more oily than a bag of mackerel.

Senator Harris is hammering away at Pence and the guy just smiles a creepy smile and lies through his teeth.

The irony is that his lies, no matter how smoothly delivered, have almost no import in this race.

*HE* has almost no import in this race.

Trump, thanks to his bottomless neediness and narcissism, has created a blackhole that has sucked all of the sound and light out of any Republican not named Donald Trump.

Pence could hit an 8-run home run tonight and by 8 am, it will be swept away by Mango Magoo’s tweets.

So far, the answers have been mostly noise. Impressionistic. Unmemorable beyond this 90 minutes.

Debates are scored by two yardsticks:

- who won among those who watched based on the aggregate impression

- who won the newscycle

So far, no soundbites, so we’re at zero on #2

And ultimately, Team Trump needs something they can’t achieve (per the above point re: Trump as the center of attention).

They need Pence to sell Trump despite being an irrelevant sidekick and despite Trump’s cataclysmic self-immolation.

It simply can’t be done.

Alternatively, he could at least theoretically help the ticket if he were able to deliver a real blow to the Biden-Harris platform.

But his obsequious delivery is as captivating and zesty as a glass of room temperature milk and a plate of saltines.

This all just feels like watching a eunuch Ed McMahon trying to sell Johnny Carson.

Just sit in your chair, Ed. No one tunes in for you.

Further, Trump’s perpetual hyperbole automatically makes Pence’s enfeebled attempts at bombast just seem... boring.

I honestly can’t see what I’ve seen so far even maintaining the attention of the slim sliver of voters still in play.

I will give Pence this:

He lies with as much comfort as an honest person tells the truth.

He is nothing more than an exoskeleton filled with the discarded husks of dead cicadas but he certainly looks almost lifelike as he delivers a steady patter of utter deceit.

Somewhat surprisingly, Harris has been having less success on the attack than I would have imagined.

Pence is a bullshit armadillo. He is merely letting attacks roll off him and instead merely moving on to the next two-minute propaganda vomit.

My hope is that in the second half, Harris follows suit in a way and simply ceases engaging with Pence’s bullshit and sticks to prosecuting her case against Trump.

Wish granted.

Kamala delivers the first major soundbite of the night.

“Joe Biden saved the auto industry... and you voted against it.”

You’ll see that one tomorrow.

Ouch.

We are now 50 minutes in and the window of opportunity is closing.

Some of the audience has drifted away. Some have already formed impressions.

Pence needed to seriously wound Biden and I’ve seen nothing that will be remembered as even a paper cut.

Harris could afford to play to a tie. Pence needed a knockout.

The playback tomorrow will wash this out to no worse than a tie for Harris.

And Trump is so massively self-centered, he will demand attention turn away from Pence and toward him regardless.

Oof. In a moment that will entirely blow up in his face, Pence gives a shout out to the parents of Kayla Mueller, an American woman held captive, abused and ultimately killed by ISIS...

...and then uses their daughter as a political prop to win points in a debate.

That was the most tasteless, usurious, vulgar thing I’ve seen in a debate in recent memory.

To bring grieving parents as your guests and then drag them through a gratuitous retelling of their daughter’s terrible suffering.

Disgusting.

Pence is a fucking sociopath.

He is a sick piece of shit. A garbage human.

A soulless bag of shit stuffed into a pair of church pants.

His soulless, servile dishonesty is the product of being devoid of conscience or character.

I loathe him with the fire of every possible sun.

Separately, Pence is being disrespectful to the moderator - who is utterly failing to keep him within time limits.

Pence’s disregard for the rules and the moderator’s efforts to enforce them will remind countless women watching of every man who has ever talked over them.

Pence’s utter disregard for her authority will be a story in and of itself.

He has done reasonably well at the verbal parrying (full of shit though he is) but he has now created an automatic parallel to Trump’s own rudeness last week.

Pence needed to model the very opposite of Trump’s behavior.

He needed to provide a counterpoint.

Instead, he has veered too close to mimicking Trump’s performance - performance so disastrous, it sent his polling plummeting.

Pence tries to pin Kamala down on whether Dems would pack the court.

Harris opens with a lacerating smile, a comfortable laugh, and when Pence tries to cut in, adds “I’m speaking...”.

Then drags Pence through the precedent of Lincoln declining to do what Trump is trying to do.

That was Pence’s most aggressive frontal assault.

And it was shunted aside with command and aplomb.

Pence saved his powder and then shot a blank.

Granted I am biased and feverish typing with my thumbs but it seems to me the net impression of this debate is that Pence is nothing more than a promoter for Trump.

He’s the bully’s sidekick.

Ultimately, no one votes for or against the bully based on the little turd beside him.

Pence goes full lecture.

Kamala rolls up his sermon and flogs him with it like a naughty altar boy.

“I will not be lectured [...] about enforcing the laws of this country.”

And then guts him like a fish over Trump’s racism and lawlessness.

The “biggest” answer of the night.

Harris won the post-debate with that answer alone.

Brutal. Sweeping. Easily excerpted.

And Pence was left with little more than a mealy mouthed equivalent of “Trump has a Jewish friend.”

Meandering. Hollow. A miss.

The post-debate matters more than the debate.

The replays succinctly frame the outcome. They reach an audience that doesn’t tune in.

And the most biting, damaging, scorching moments have been lopsidedly Harris’ - specifically that last moment.

I’m interested in seeing how this gets digested and replayed by the media.

Pence’s best punches were pretty small-ball and inside baseball.

Policy digs in an era where that matters not at all.

The wonks will applaud his debate skill but without a real moment to show why.

Ultimately, I am very much ready for a beer - which I have managed to go without thanks to my computer crashing.

It is very old. It no longer wishes to serve me.

Pence now rambling about Russia and Hillary and impeachment.

This has been a nothingburger for Trump for four years.

It has even less meat now.

The President is a drooling lunatic RIGHT NOW.

Ain’t nobody thinking about 2017.

Final question.

Pence opens with a cloying, saccharine and condescending “I commend you for taking an interest in public life.” to the moderator.

The man makes my skin crawl. He’s a windowless panel van away from being the guy your parents told you to take no candy from.

He is very much the archetype of the guy in the park who swears he lost his puppy and just needs your help finding it.

He’s skeevy in a way that former city kids like me have a radar for without being able to quite define.

He’s the creepy uncle whose eyes linger too long in a way that makes you absolutely not want to sit near him at Thanksgiving.

The guy is creepy as fuck.

And thankfully, on that note, we are now done.

I’m off to get a beer.

Sorry this wasn’t my best work.

I was on my phone and it has been a day and they can’t all be Shakespeare.

And, no joke, my computer just finished booting up and screamed that Windows boot-up noise.

Thanks for nothing, laptop.

And before I got out of the room, Joy Reid said close to what I said earlier.

Every woman who has ever been talked over, disrespected, and disregarded as an authority got an aggravating reminder of all of that from a rude, Trumpian Mike Pence.