J.D. Vance is very, very Republican grift.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walls yesterday blasted J.D. Vance for being a grifter because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati.

Governor Walls, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with 24 kids in my graduating class where 12 are cousins. In Vance's

autobiography, he'll bill the elegy trash talks as poor relatives, essentially

accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and

addiction. He doubled down on these memes in his RNC speech pointing out his

own mother's drug use. In fact they're victims of Republican policies that make the rich richer and keep poor people poor.

His mother's addiction is a symptom, not a cause.

Vance, of course, nobly, yes, rose above at all with the help of our socialist GI Bill, which Republicans

opposed, paying his way through Yale, and with help from right-wing billionaires who took Vance

out of their wings and helped him set up a

hedge fund that made him fabulously rich. Often the media refers to his life as a true Horatio Alger story.

When I was a kid, my dad was the national president of the book collecting group,

The Horatio Alger Society.

Vance is a story right out of Alger's books.

Alger wrote stories about poor young men being lifted up into business success by wealthy older men,

although he's now out of favor because he was busted as a gay predator. Even the Horatio

Alger story itself it turns out was a grift. Just like Vance's career does life

story are a grift. Just like most all of Donald Trump's failed businesses, just like

Nixon's racist law and order grift, and Reagan's tax cut for the rich supply

side grift, and Bush and Cheney's oil grabbing Iraq weapons of mass destruction grift.

Republican policies in fact have been one long grift for more than half a century.

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