The Vice President has inadvertently gotten himself into the middle of an episode of Mean Girls with no clue how it all started. Just recently, Karen noted how failed New York gubernatorial candidate and Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon decided to declare open season on Mike Pence. This was a rather odd spat to begin with, given how it unfolded, but we’re still talking about free speech, so there you are.

After getting her objections to the Vice President off her chest, you might assume that we’d all be moving on to the next daily outrage. If so, you’d be wrong. Not content to engage in a Twitter spat that the Veep completely ignored anyway, Nixon has been published in the Washington Post, offering a toxic pen letter in which she explains that regular, decent people shouldn’t associate with Pence because he’s just not a decent person.

Speaking at a forum in Omaha on Thursday, Joe Biden called Vice President Pence “a decent guy.”

When a chorus of progressives and LGBTQ activists, including myself, pointed out that a man who has built his career on homophobia and misogyny cannot possibly be considered “decent,” some dismissed it as just outrage Twitter. While Biden later walked back his comments and acknowledged that “there is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ rights,” I think it’s important to explain why calling Pence “a decent guy” is an affront to the real meaning of the word.

While I like and admire much about Biden personally and politically, especially his championing of the Violence Against Women Act, when he talks about Pence being “a decent guy,” he is putting politeness over policy. In effect, he is saying that Pence’s record doesn’t matter. So let’s talk about that record.

She goes on from there. And on. And on. At length. Feel free to click through and read it all for yourself if you wish, but make sure you’ve set aside some time and probably a couple of aspirin.

Here are a couple of things that jumped out at me as this entire kerfuffle was unfolding. First of all, Nixon is opening up both barrels in a conversation that didn’t even involve her. Nobody – including both Joe Biden and Mike Pence – said a bad word about her. Or about gay people for that matter. In fact, her name was never even mentioned. And yet she somehow feels integrally involved in the discussion. Pence and Biden have known each other for a very long time. They can freely acknowledge that they disagree on many policy points, but they are both serving their country and following their own beliefs. How horrible, eh?

Also, note that Nixon doesn’t confine herself to criticism of Mike Pence over his many supposed sins and shortcomings. She has to keep harping on Joe Biden, the guy who went out of his way to (sort of) apologize to her after doing absolutely nothing wrong. It’s not enough for Cynthia Nixon to hate Mike Pence. She’s going to be keeping tabs on anyone else who fails to sufficiently hate him as well.

While considering this, let’s not lose sight of the horrible thing Joe Biden supposedly did to start all of this off. He said that the Vice President was “a decent guy.” That was it. The entire statement. And that prompted her to write a lengthy, scathing response in the Washington Post labeling Pence as “insidious.” (And that was some of the milder language.) I find it difficult to picture what a horrible, miserable life someone has to lead in order to carry around that much hate in their hearts every single day. Sadly, that seems to be the nature of far too many of these so-called progressive activists.

Please feel free to spend your days roaming the streets and looking for things to be angry about. I’d rather find the more pleasant aspects of life to focus on at least part of the time.