Usha Vance is the most likable person even tangentially related to the Republican presidential ticket, and so of course she’s being trotted out to do the most depressing and debasing work assigned to political wives since time immemorial: Cleaning up objectively horrible comments made by her husband, and perhaps humanizing him a little in the process – or at least trying to.

The Vances have reportedly long cast themselves as a Clintonian power couple. And as is often the case when to highly ambitious people marry, the husband’s aspirations move to the front burner while the equally-impressive—and, in this case, arguably more socially and intellectually adept—wife winds up in a series of traditionally feminine roles: cheering him on, telling others about his soft side, papering over his screw-ups. The whole performance is carefully calibrated to send the message that if she loves, accepts, and forgives her man—and of course she does!—then so too should the public.

In this case, though, the comments are repulsively misogynistic and awfully hard to hand-wave away. They include Usha’s husband, J.D. Vance, complaining that the US (and the Democratic establishment in particular) is run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."

These “childless sociopaths,” he said, have made the country “less mentally stable;” he has also argued that parents should get an........

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