Thursday, February 16, 2023

TWGB: Glimpses of Daylight

 

I really have to hand it to Mike Pence--it is astonishing to me that he has managed to swallow every ounce of pride a human being could have in fealty to Donald Trump. If you sent one goddamn lynch mob after me, my indignant ass would not wait a single day before I'm telling anyone with a camera, a microphone, a pencil what the hell you did in excruciating detail. But that apparently is not the Mike Pence way. He's fighting a subpoena to testify about what happened 1/6 (and probably leading right up to it) on what he is going to claim are constitutional grounds about how he was doing his congressional duty as president of the Senate and what not.

Nobody believes this shit. Surely, as some folks think, this has to do with Mike Pence thinking he might take a run at the GOP primary and not wanting to entirely alienate the folks who would be already mad that he didn't hand the election to Trump. 

But you have to know that's stupid, right? They already hate him. He isn't making anything up  to them, not in a race where Trump still exists. Just like with Nikki Haley, he doesn't understand the axiom every single wrestling fan knows by heart: if you want to be the man, you've got to beat the man. (Whoo!)

If Pence wanted to demolish Trump, he has the inside track on everything. Do you think the fake electors thing was a plan if the collaborators didn't suppose they had Pence in the loop? Pence knew what was up--just like he had reason to know what was up when Trump extorted Zelenskyy. See--that's why I don't think Pence's failure to want to run and tell has everything to do with 2024. No normal person is giving Nancy Reagan eyes to Trump and waxing on about his broad shoulders in public where people could hear, gets bodily threatened by a mob Trump encourages, and then just decides not to shaft Trump in return--unless he doesn't really feel like owning his own complicity. 


Dan Quayle convinced this fool to not do something appallingly stupid, even though he asked multiple times because he really wanted to. Don't get it twisted: Pence is not anyone's hero except by accident and a failure of nerve, and he acts like it. 

So here 's a little glimpse of daylight: if you asked me, Pence doesn't really have daylight between himself and Trump, and if he's running, is it really to win? Or just to coax his former running mate to take him back, even though the man doesn't need him to be his religious right sherpa anymore since he's got them sewn up all by himself? 

Pence can lie back and enjoy the bed of nails he's made for himself. 

So, in other TrumpWorld news, the excerpts from the Fulton County grand jury establish one very important thing: there was no widespread fraud. We knew that, right?  TrumpWorld has to pretend that Trump won, but the facts are not there. And yet, Team Trump aggressively promoted the Big Lie, and wanted to twist arms to make Trump a winner when he simply...wasn't. There also is a recommendation that one or more witnesses lied in front of the jury and they very well knew it. But I don't think an indictment for perjury is all we're talking about here.

You see, Trump is excited that he isn't mentioned by name in the bits that came out today:


He's congratulating himself on not being mentioned in the bits that came out. Oh. To be the person who explains why that might not be good for him, actually. Because the indictments parts are...nah. You probably get why this might not be good news for him, and besides, some lawyer who expects payment from him should explain it to him. And see what happens next. 

It's not a lot, but frankly, that a jury of reasonable people saw the evidence and realized there was no widespread fraud would totally be a meaningful thing if meaningful things affected the kind of people who still believe in the widespread voter fraud.

You know what might though? Knowing the good folks at Fox News didn't actually think the widespread voter fraud was a real thing either, and that they just promoted it because their fanbase loved hearing about it. They argued amongst themselves that the evidence didn't exist and Sidney Powell was a nut, but they realized the little baby brains they had been grooming for political entertainment wanted to be told there was fraud, so they set the table. 

The glimpse into what Fox News people think of their on-air talent (Lou Dobbs is comparable to North Korea news) and their fans is a real kick--but will the Fox News fans actually get exposed to this and get out of the canoe to pick the tasty mangos? 

Beats the actual shit out of me. See, I'm from planet Wannaknow and criticizing mainstream media based on fact-checking and logic is because I want them to do better, but Fox News fans seem like they are from Planet Mushroom Farm and just want to get fed bullshit and be kept in the dark.  So maybe they won't ever know or care.

Fox News might still have their ass sued off though, so that part is still pretty funny. 

Anyway, I see glimpses of daylight but man--I still would rather see glimpses of indictments and maybe a perp-walk. 

3 comments:

Green Eagle said...

Trump's whole game now is to gum up the legal process so that he doesn't end up behind the defendant's desk before the 2024 election, and that is what Pence is up to- Any idiot knows that the grounds for his refusal to testify are utter nonsense, but they could use up months before a court says so, and really, who knows just how our corrupt Supreme Court justices might rule?

Vixen Strangely said...

I can understand how Pence thinks he can game the legal system to escape being in jeopardy before the primaries, but I don't know how he thinks he escapes what Trump will do to him. And I don't think the majority of people won't see his delaying testifying as anything but chickenshitness.

Used to be, people would self-vet and try to understand the ways they could lose before taking a gamble at running for office, or so I hear. In an age where jackasses are running for office with a whole fake resume while also living in an age when anyone can use a search engine to discover their resume is fake, I feel like consultants have convinced politicians that with the right PR, they can dig themselves in indefinitely so long as their consultants get paid.

So what if you're fighting a subpoena for your possible involvement in some light treason? Pshhht--it's nothing! Here, do a photo op in hospital. Say something strong about communist China. Blah blah blah. People will forget.

Richard said...

Pence is a fool. His people don't want him. They want a Culture Warrior who is going to kick some ass and make the libs cry. The days of Cowboy And Ladybug are over.
At least he had the decency to try to keep clean. It was probably a moral chrisis.

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