Transportation Department Secretary Pete Buttigieg continued his pointed attacks on GOP Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance, the U.S. Senator from Ohio. Appearing with comedian/pundit Jon Stewart, Buttigieg — widely believed to be a frontrunner in the Kamala Harris VP sweepstakes — pressed his assertion that Vance was “odd.”
[The Vance-is-odd message aligns with the viral assignation by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that Trump and Vance are “weird guys” — a label that trended on X this week.]
Democrats have scooped up and amplified statements Vance made back when he was first turning his ship around and aiming it toward MAGA, changing from a notable Donald Trump detractor (“might be America’s Hitler”) to a Trump advocate — and the former President’s choice for running mate.
The most prominent of those statements, which embrace an anti-DEI, anti-Woke platform, shows Vance lamenting a country run by “childless cat ladies,” a category in which he managed to include Buttigieg — and notably Kamala Harris. (Buttigieg now has children, but he did not at the time Vance made his statement to Tucker Carlson on Fox News.)
JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and have “no direct stake” in America. pic.twitter.com/3DJY3pQTGe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2024
Buttigieg also took issue with Vance’s assertion that people with children should have their vote count more, as if the freedom to decide not to have children isn’t a freedom Republicans are interested in protecting. Such a system would also curtail the voting power of people who are physically unable to have children, decreasing the potency of their votes.
Vance justified re-weighting the vote to favor those with children by claiming that citizens without children have less at stake in America’s future. Buttigieg quoted Vance as saying that the childless “have no physical commitment to the future of this country.” He then rebutted the claim by citing his own wartime service.
.@PeteButtigieg: JD Vance has turned out to be so odd. He systematically insulted so many people. He says not being a parent makes you less. He said people who don’t have children ‘have no physical commitment to the future of this country.’ When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I… pic.twitter.com/YBrlRqsRMf
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) July 30, 2024
“When I was deployed to Afghanistan,” Buttigieg told Stewart, “I didn’t have kids back then, but I will tell you — especially when there was a rocket attack going on — my commitment to this country felt pretty physical.”
Buttigieg served six years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves, and did a six-month deployment to Afghanistan. Vance is also a veteran, a U.S. Marine who was deployed to Iraq for six months in 2005 working as a military journalist.