According to the world media, US vice president Mike Pence has been on a “charm offensive” in Australia. In reality, Pence is a right-wing weirdo, who could be dubbed charming only by contrast with Donald Trump, and because of the sycophancy of the media.

This shtick of not being as bad as someone worse has served Pence well in the past. During his seven-year career in talk radio, he described himself as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf”. And as that implies, he’s got all the usual right-wing talking points, and then some.

In the 1990s, as president of right wing think tank the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, he began publishing his thoughts online – “Global warming is a myth …There, I said it” and “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill”.

There’s also the weird stuff about calling his wife “Mother”, and not being prepared to eat dinner alone with any other woman once he got married. Apparently, he thinks this shows his respect for his wife. To me, it sounds like a creepy sleazebag trying to limit his opportunities to lose control.

Clearly, the guy is no fan of women’s rights. Pence stated repeatedly during his career as a radio host and member of congress that legal access to abortion should be relegated to the “ashbin of history”. He is proud of Indiana’s record, under his governorship, of prosecuting women for “foeticide”.

In fact, as a congressman, Pence moved an anti-abortion bill every year. You know the sort of thing – more restrictions and punishments for women and their doctors, requiring aborted foetuses to be cremated or buried. Depraved lunacy.

Since Pence was so interested in knowing every single detail of Indiana women’s reproductive health in case they were aborting foetuses by pretending to have periods, the “Periods for Pence” campaign took off, with women calling the governor’s office to let him know when they were expecting their periods and asked for his advice.

Another part of Pence’s “charm” is his racism. In February, he celebrated Black History Month by not mentioning any Black people. Instead, he tweeted his praise for president Abraham Lincoln. That’d be a bit like marking Holocaust Awareness Day without mentioning Jews. That’s right, like Trump did this year.

As for Islamophobia, charming Mike was an early adopter. During the 1990 election campaign, Pence ran a television advertisement in which an actor, dressed in a robe and headdress and speaking in a thick Middle Eastern accent, thanked his opponent for being in thrall to foreign oil. After the 2015 Paris attacks, Pence issued an executive order attempting to ban Syrian refugees from Indiana.

LGBTI people have also felt the brunt of Pence’s charm. He argued in Congress that an AIDS bill should only be renewed if resources were “directed towards those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behaviour”.

Pence’s favourite movie is The Wizard of Oz. No wonder, as he combines all the characters’ failings: The scarecrow had no brains, the tin man had no heart, the lion was a coward, and the wizard was a liar. Unlike them, there’ll be no redemption for Mike Pence.