The challenge was not particularly great for either candidate in the Veep debate. President Trump had set an impossibly low bar last week, and Mike Pence managed to slither over it, displaying a serial killer’s ease with lying, while oozing so much oleaginous, syrupy, unctuousness that I had to squeegee my TV screen. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s bar was even lower. All she had to do is not kill 200,000 Americans during the debate, and she’d win. Aside from Mike Pence’s pink eye and Kamala’s stink eye, the night’s star, right out of central fly casting, was the fly that landed on Pence’s head, and then just stayed there for more than 2 minutes. The fly’s landing spot made sense as Pence’s head has been up Trump’s ass for four years, and it had perfect timing; by the time the fly landed, we were both vomiting every few seconds.

+ WaPo: In VP debate, Trump is again the issue as Pence tries to change the focus.

+ The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser on Mike Pence’s Trumpian Makeover (which was the real story of the night because so many others have undergone a similar metamorphosis). “The more I listened to Pence the more I realized that the Vice-President of 2020 is no longer the deeply conventional, if fervently right-wing, evangelical of four years ago … He has been changed, and radically so, by his association with the President, and Wednesday night showed something both new and disturbing: Pence has come to resemble a lower-decibel Trump, lying with a fluency and brazenness that might have shocked his former moralistic self.”

+ Meanwhile, the president referred to the next VP as unlikeable, a communist, and a monster. So when I hear that there’s an outside chance the next debate will be called off, I say that sounds pretty fly to me.