America's Number 2: Not worth a warm bucket of piss!*

Remember this guy? Neither do I. I suppose I have the excuse of being nine when he left office.

In honor of tonight's impending debate-y awesomeness.... The Vice President of the United States is an important office. Just kidding! They don't really do much but hang around and wait for the President to die or for the Senate to have a tie. The only executive powers the VP has are anything the President doesn't feel like doing. Or, if they're Dick Cheney, whatever they hell they decide falls under their purview. But there are no restrictions to the number of terms a VP can serve, so we could have Darth Cheney for life if he just kept getting nominated!** If we didn't care about the earth imploding itself just to get out of four more years of horror and desolation. But anyway, some Vice Presidential-y facts! In bullet form!

• The VP has no Constitutional oath, they just take the same one as Senators and Representatives.
• The VP makes the same salary as the Chief Justice and the Speaker of the House ($221,000 this year)
• Back in the day, the electoral college was even more fucked up and the voting process allowed for the slots of President and Vice President to be filled by political rivals. They fixed that with one of those amendment thingies (12th).*** The 25th Amendment also clears up some issues of Presidential succession. If you care to know more, you can just Google that shit.
• The Vice President and his or her family lives on a naval base and/or various undisclosed locations.
• If you go to the Wikipedia page on the VPOTUS, you can find many a quote from embittered politicians about what a worthless job it is.
• Only five former or sitting VPs have been elected to the Presidency, so maybe they should just stop trying. Though this is the first election since 1956 where neither a sitting President or Vice President has been on the ballot. Thank god.

Vice Presidents! They don't do much! Except for carrying key states in the general election and/or risk embarrassing the President and/or possibly becoming President when John McCain inevitably drops dead! God bless us, everyone. But mostly America. *The assessment of the office by John Nance Garner, our nation's 28th VP. This quote is deemed false when the Vice President is a power-hungry supervillain. **Apparently Sarah Palin thinks Dick Cheney's greatest mistake was that whole "duck [sic] hunting accident." HuffPo has video if, unlike me, you can stand to watch it. ***For fictional examples of the office's political realities see: The West Wing's John Hoynes and the premise of the movie Dave.