Former Vice President Mike Pence probably figures that if he is not the early front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he is certainly in the hunt and probably makes the top five list of contenders.

That’s not going to last very long if he continues doing what he did Friday. Now that GOP voters have seen Trump and DeSantis, they are no longer impressed by so-called “Republicans” who willingly serve as stooges for the Democratic Party’s Blue Media. Mr. Pence deserves every bit of the glowing coverage he is receiving from the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, NBC News, and other similarly-inclined shovelers of the Democratic Party’s narratives.

You may not have heard about this. It hasn’t received a lot of coverage on our side of The Big Ditch. CNN liked it, and so did Rolling Stone. But other than the NY Post, it doesn’t look like anybody on our side wanted much to do with it.

Here’s what our would-be 2024 presidential nominee did for us on Friday: he went in front of a group of Republican donors who were assembled at the RNC retreat in New Orleans, and told them that, “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin.”

Unless you just wandered out of the forest — and didn’t read Jeff Charles’ Progressive Media Still Pretending Conservatives Love Putin — you’re probably aware that Republicans Support Putin is the latest bloody shirt being waved by the Democrats and their degenerate propaganda media in their continuing campaign to divide the country and sow hatred among their base for anyone who dissents from Progressive politics.

So, what was Mike Pence doing even talking about “Putin apologists” in the GOP? Parroting something he read in the WaPo, most likely. To be fair, Mike Pence never mentioned Donald Trump in his speech. And the press had been barred from the room. But also to be fair, who among us is surprised that Pence’s comments turned into Blue Media headlines like: Mike Pence Slams Trump Over Putin Praise at GOP Event? Isn’t this what they always do?

Pence has been around long enough that he should not be walking into these kinds of traps. This is the kind of stuff we got from pre-Trump GOP-ers, who were always walking around on eggshells because they actually believed that the Democrats’ media was the media.

Well, it’s not. It used to be, but that was 20 years ago. Only about 32 percent of the public — basically the Democratic Party’s base — trusts the so-called legacy media to cover events fairly, or to even tell the truth. Virtually no one who votes GOP — these are the people Pence will need if he intends to be the party’s nominee — believes a word those people say. Who on this side of The Big Ditch believes that more than a handful of self-identified “Republicans” who also happen to be nutjobs, qualify as “Putin apologists”? Sure, The Other Guys are all saying that, but that’s why they are The Other Guys. They don’t speak for us. They don’t even know us. They think we’re all high school dropouts named Cletus who live in trailer parks.

There does exist this stupid narrative in the Blue Media that pointing out that Vladimir Putin is unlikely to sport a two-digit IQ amounts to “praising” Putin. That’s just naked propaganda BS designed to persuade stupid people; it’s nothing we should counter or even react to. Yes, the Democrats have huge numbers of highly ignorant stupid people in their base that they motivate with this kind of trash. But most of them don’t even vote.

From where I sit, the worst castoff from Ron DeSantis’ press shop would be an improvement over whoever advised Mike Pence to toss this one right over the plate for the WaPo and its friends to hit out of the park. That was just dumb. We Republican voters have now seen better. We don’t have to accept this kind of lazy deference to a mythical “mainstream media.” There is no mainstream media. There is “our” media and “their” media, and GOP candidates who seek coverage in “their” media by parroting their talking points had best expect to get their votes over there as well — because they won’t get ours.