Before 2024, Pence Should Address the Lynching

 

Former VP Pence is traveling the country to lay the groundwork for a possible 2024 bid for the White House, several people close to him say. https://t.co/5Q4LaTkQtg

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) December 11, 2021

Call me biased, because Mike Pence's relationship to queer rights, abortion rights, and the truth have never sat well with me, but before Mike Pence runs for 2024, and the only way in hell he's actually going to do it, realistically, is he has to try to demonstrate that he feels any way at all about the time when the Trump Administration ran a pressure campaign on him to overturn a legitimate election, he refused to do it, and the SOB's tried to lynch him. Because I promise you, the people who admire Pence grudgingly for doing one correct thing (which is complicated by his apparently being aware of the plot, because how the hell is the VP "not in the loop"?) will never get over his pious puppy-dog eyes at Trump for so long followed by one good thing, and then a mystifying lack of candor or ardor about the bad thing. 

The bad thing with the noose. The thing where he didn't trust the Secret Service even to take him out of there because they wouldn't bring him back. The actual insurrection attempt. The thing where Trump actually seemed to direct them to take him out because he wasn't doing Trump's bidding. 

It's a pretty big thing, the lynching thing. Also, the people who think he should have given the election to Trump need to have it explained to them (maybe by way of a detailed PowerPoint deck?) that the whole voter fraud narrative was always a lie and a fraud, a pretext for overturning a legitimate election, and that no, what he did was actually the only right thing to do.

He's a camel and the path to 2024 is a needle's eye. He has Trump Administration baggage on his back, and his failure to do Trump a solid, followed by running for office (especially if Trump runs) will be seen as ambition and a failure to acknowledge what Trump has done for him--the ingrate! Gives Trump every advantage except the the one that puts Trump actually away. 

Would that be sufficient? I don't know--it depends on how dirtied up Trump gets, but I'd think being responsible for a mob going after his vice-president with murder on their minds looks like it could be spun in a pretty fucktastically bad way. And even if that didn't ultimately advance Pence through the primaries to the big showdown, it would be great for his karma, which I know Pence as a Christian doesn't believe in, but history also sometimes positively records.  Also, in the event Pence is also pretty dirtied up by Trump association, it could even be his salvation. In a completely secular way. 

But he will be asked, so he will have to address the time when the president he served could have seen him dead. And maybe why after all this he still reps the GOP system and thinks his disloyalty will be forgiven enough for him to prosper. 

2016 Republicans didn't have the guts to kick Trump in the slats and take his lunch money by calling him out for what he actually was--a thug and a cretin. The only way a post-Trump party exists is with an actual anti-Trump movement, or I guess hope that Trump dies or goes to jail in a convenient timeline. But dying and jail can take a lot of time, so I suggest he be conventionally politically destroyed. And for that, Pence is uniquely situated.  

I don't want Pence to do well. I don't even think he will. But if he thinks anyone can beat Trump without sandbagging Trump, steamrolling him, staking his heart, drawing and quartering him, and burying the pieces at a crossroads (figuratively!! I guess!), he isn't fathoming the zeitgeist. 

I mean I guess he could stay shtum and wage a campaign to convince the Flynn/Qanon psyops folks he's the one because Trump's head is full of lumpless tapioca and have the digital warriors surreptitiously game the discussion boards that he's the real deal, but he fucked that possibility up by not letting the military law thing go on.  Also why not Flynn? Since he's already got the influence engines up and running. 

So anyway, instead of saying blithe benign bullshit like "we will never see eye to eye", Pence better find the stones to actually make beef about what happened. Or his weakness will be duly noted and exploited. 

But it could really fuck with his dark money support, so I totally understand why he wouldn't dare. Omerta rules are difficult to live by. But if he stooled to further the enterprise, he might be able to continue eating at the table.

I'm not saying I know that I know how it should work. Only it's similar to systems I already understand.  And if he never addresses the lynching thing, he's a pussy.  It's a sexist slur, but the meaning is clear--he can't be a man, a real man, and not answer to how Trump tried to fuck him up. If he can't frame that in ways that amount to how he would be better than Trump: enumerated and tangible, he's going to fail. 

He doesn't win the primary unless Trump is put to bed. That's the only goal he needs to know. Maybe also him stooling on Trump would delight me to no end. But my thing about how Pence can't captivate a legitimate share of GOP without finally shivving Trump stands.