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Terry Mc Kenna's avatar

Let's not praise Mike Pence anymore. He did not endorse Trump, but he calls the current administration a disaster. Really? On what basis?

Nor does he call out those who relented and kissed Trump's (ring, ass? )

I am also tired of smarmy used care salesmen types like Mike Pence claiming to represent our values. What values? Compared to Biden (who clearly supports faith, family and a respect for our constitution).

Even claiming to support small government ... really? That ship sailed a long time ago. We have a big national government with post offices, highways, national parks, Medicare, and a large national defense. Pretending to support small government in the face of reality is like pretending that farms look like they did in the Wizard of Oz.

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Deutschmeister's avatar

Amidst a number of well-made points this morning are a few head-scratching misrepresentations and omissions. For example:

1) "Trump salutes the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol. Trump supports criminals. The rest of us support the republic."

Actually, no, and therein lies the essence of the problem. There are far too many millions of "the rest of us" who do not support the republic. They support someone (maybe anyone) who is against the republic in any form that does not align with the own view of how it should be. They embrace thuggish rhetoric and deeds that over 200 years of American presidents did not utilize. They embrace demonization and marginalization of those who oppose them under the premise that it is us or them in the end, nowhere in the middle. They embrace a lack of civility and coarseness, and a crassness of speech, attire, and other fundamental aspects of self-representation that betray a contempt for what anyone else thinks about it. And they embrace the idea that some lives and life forms are better and more important than others based on appearance, heritage, and citizenship. The republic that they want is not the republic that our forefathers intended, or fought and died for. DJT is their means to an end, and while it is important not to excuse him for his own words and deeds, it is critically important to remember and accept that he would not be where he is today, saying and doing what he does with increasing recklessness, if he did not have tens of millions of anti-republic Republicans backing his every action and utterance. Ultimately his success is due to their enabling of it. They have to own it.

2) "Pence had gone as deep into MAGA as a traditional conservative could, then had the courage to do the right thing on January 6th—and has chosen to burn his bridges rather than go crawling back to Trump for forgiveness, as so many others have. It’s a respectable choice he’s made." Again, no. Pence can take as much of a principled stand as he wishes, and as openly as he'd like. But if he explicitly says in almost the same breath that he would never vote for Joe Biden instead, under any circumstance, it is largely empty rhetoric, because it intends no form of meaningful opposition to DJT and his agenda. It is merely talk, with no action to back it up. As long as he remains in the GOP-or-bust camp, Pence is not part of the solution. He remains part of the problem.

3) I miss a principled discussion here of DJT's comments of the non-people he referenced, clearly meaning them to be lesser life forms who are not worthy of fundamental decency and respect for human life. Which we've all seen within that movement as something that ends with birth, then you're on your own, kiddo, all the more so if you were born elsewhere. It falls to the rest of us to connect the dots on the substance of his reference to those who "aren't really people" and what fate awaits them in a second DJT term, and if successful, what may befall others who unspokenly are next in line -- perhaps including some of us here.

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