Mike Pence Has Won His Long and Brutal War Against Joy Behar

Mike Pence—who is the Vice President of the United States but the full president of getting into petty and awkwardly moralizing showdowns with people who could not care less—has done it again! This time, the second-most-powerful man in America has bravely and almost single-handedly extracted an apology from one of six cohosts of a daytime television talk show over a month-old controversy.

A few weeks ago, The View, was discussing something Omarosa Manigault said about the Vice President during her brief tenure as a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. On the show, Manigault warned fellow contestants Ross Mathews and Mark McGrath about Pence, saying:

“He’s extreme. I am Christian, I love Jesus, but he thinks Jesus tells him to say things there. I’m like, ‘Jesus didn’t say that.’ Scary.”

In response, Behar said to applause:

It’s one thing to talk to Jesus. It’s another thing when Jesus talks to you. That’s called mental illness, if I’m not correct. Hearing voices.

Technically, Behar paraphrased an extremely commonly used quote (which has been attributed to Thomas Szasz) that has made its way to countless t-shirts. But that didn’t stop the the right from taking an immense amount of offense to the quip. Behar wound up apologizing to Pence privately, but I guess that wasn’t enough, because Pence appeared on Hannity last night to address the issue and make a plea for Behar to apologize to “tens of millions of Americans.”

And so on today’s episode of The View, exactly one month after Behar’s joke, she said, “So I think Vice President Pence is right. I was raised to respect everyone’s religious faith, and I fell short of that. I sincerely apologize for what I said.”

This whole God talking to politicians thing got old when “God told” George W. Bush to invade Iraq. If anything Pence should probably apologize to tens of millions of Christians for making them seem like humorless buzzkills who all actually hear the literal voice of Jesus. Nonetheless, congrats are in order for Mike Pence for finally getting a win and making Joy Behar apologize for something plenty of people already forgot about.