Literary Corner: Nicely, Nicely

As you know, former vice president and reputed presidential candidate Michael Pence boldly confided to the attendees of the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday (no cameras), that the Former Guy's launch of his irregulars' attack on the Capitol was constitutionally ill-founded, and also insensitive to Pence's personal needs: 

“President Trump was wrong; I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told the gathering of reporters and politicians on Saturday. “And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

I'm sure he's right and January 6 will live in infamy as Pence Family Endangerment Day. 

Meanwhile,  the Former was quick to respond, basically, that Pence had endangered himself:

Schrödinger's Poker

 

Tubalcain Alhanbra, via Shine.

The Senate impeachment trial was suddenly thrown into some kind of turmoil by the surfacing of some sort of new detail on the 6 January siege, from Rep. Jaime Lynn Herrera Beutler (R-WA and one of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach in the House), on the story Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told her of his call that afternoon to Trump to beg him to call off his thugs and stop the assault.

It wasn't going to change the outcome of the trial, though it probably should have, but it could have prolonged it beyond bearing: the House managers wanted to call her and, I thought, McCarthy as witnesses, and Trump's lawyer Michael Van der Veen threatened to come back with a call for 100 depositions, just for starters—effectively, to turn the impeachment into Benghazi hearings. 

In the end they made a deal: Herrera Beutler's story will be added to the record, but suppressed from the closing statements, and won't be part of the case on which the senators vote. 

I'd like to spend some time on it all the same. The story also does offer some important clarification for our understanding of what happened, alongside the reporting of Tommy Tuberville's conversation with Trump of around the same time, in which Trump had been urging him to do something to delay the certification of the election results after Pence's announcement that they would be certified in spite of Trump's complaints. In the call Tuberville is said to have told Trump he had to go because the Capitol police were evacuating the Senate chamber as the Senate's president, Mike Pence, was being whisked out of the room.

For the Record: Unite the Country

 

Anybody else think this is kind of significant? The vice president effectively saying, "Behave yourself, Donald, or I'll have you fired."

Gotta say I'm a little impressed. Of course when Trump made clear he didn't care if Pence was murdered or not it prolly got Pence thinking. https://t.co/iJtpNGpijb

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 10, 2021

Not really sure it's sunk in for anybody else that Pence could be in a legitimately tetchy mood about this:

The Reality

 

Illustration by Todd St. John from The New Yorker (Jane Mayer's prescient piece of October 2017 on the prospect of a President Pence).

Page:

Vice President Pence, more than 210,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since February. The US death toll as a percentage of our population is higher than that of almost every other wealthy nation on Earth. For instance, our death rate is two and a half times that of Canada, next door. You head the administration's Coronavirus Task Force. Why is the U.S. death toll, as a percentage of our population, higher than that of almost every other wealthy country? 

Pence:

I want the American people to know that from the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of Americans first. Before there were more than five cases in the United States, all people who had returned from China, President Donald Trump did what no other American president had ever done. And that was he suspended all travel from China, the second largest economy in the world. Now, Senator Joe Biden, Biden opposed that decision. He said it was xenophobic and hysterical, but I can tell you, having led the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that that decision alone by President Trump bought us invaluable time to stand up the greatest national mobilization since World War II.

Not only did Pence completely ignore the question, but as everybody ought to know by now, Biden was right to call the Trump travel restriction on travelers from China only (admitting US citizens and permanent residents and not imposing any quarantine on them) "hysterical" and "xenophobic", given the way it focused on a single Yellow Peril population (after 5 cases had been confirmed in the US and more in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, France, Italy...), too late and too restricted to be effective at stopping the coronavirus, which was already spreading in New York; spreading, in fact, through travelers from Europe, but hidden for weeks because of the Trump administration's failure to develop adequate testing, rejecting the advice of the WHO (consistent with Trump's xenophobic hatred of international organizations in general). 

Out Like Flynn Revisited

OK now it's really getting crazy, as the Justice Department seems to think it's found a way to pardon Mike Flynn without giving Trump the trouble of doing it himself. I'm recapitulating some of the things I was thinking about at the time of Flynn's second guilty plea, in December 2018, in the light of what we've learned since then from the Mueller investigation, as a response to the Flynn news.

New York Post editorial page:

Flynn’s supposed crime was lying to FBI agents in a January 2017 interview at the White House. Yet the concealed evidence included 1) a top FBI official’s notes suggesting the entire purpose of the interview was to catch Flynn in a lie, or get him to admit to a technical violation of the Logan Act — all in order to force him from office. And 2) an internal Justice Department memo, from the day before that interview, calling on the FBI to close the Flynn investigation because agents had dug up absolutely no wrongdoing.

In fact, they already had the transcript of Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador that was the supposed reason for the interview — and knew he’d said nothing improper, just things an incoming national-security adviser should discuss.

Actually no. The calls Flynn exchanged with Ambassador Kislyak from where he was supposed to be on vacation in the Dominican Republic between 29 and 31 December 2016 were a response to what the Presidential Transition Team regarded as an emergency, after President Obama imposed new sanctions on the Russian state in return for Russia's well-established interference in the 2016 presidential election and Foreign Minister Lavrov announced that Russia would be retaliating with measures of its own. After getting briefed by the PTT, Flynn called Kislyak (whom he'd met for the first time with Jared Kushner on 30 November, at Trump Tower, for a conversation in which Kushner had talked about Trump's desire to "start afresh" with Russia and Flynn lamented the lack of a secure line for them to communicate—secure, that is, from observation by the US government) and urged him to stop President Putin from said retaliation because if he showed some restraint that would make it easier for the incoming Trump administration to end all the sanctions, including those related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Ukrainian territory, and its murder of the whistleblowing attorney Sergey Magnitsky; two days later Putin agreed.

The PTT was, as we now know, intensely involved with these calls, consulting with Flynn by email and phone before and after each one, through his deputy K.T. McFarland, who was at the Mar-a-Lago club with the president-elect's party:

I'll just leave this here

Neville Chamberlain pic.twitter.com/xnYDcXQicB

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Mike Pence pic.twitter.com/OhZDhZdmUU

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Well Said, Mr. POTUS

John William Waterhouse (1845-1917), The remorse of Nero after the murder of his mother, pen and ink, via Artnet.

Do I detect—this is going to sound weird—a note of remorse in our poet-president's response to the newspaper office slaughter in Annapolis on Thursday? Because what does he mean, otherwise, with "shocked the conscience of our nation"? What "shocks the conscience" other than the awareness of guilt?

I'd Like to Address

By Donald J. Trump

I’d like to address the horrific shooting
that took place yesterday at Capital Gazette
newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland.
This attack shocked the conscience of our nation
and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists,
like all Americans, should be free from the fear
of being violently attacked while doing their job.

Horrible, horrible event, horrible thing happened.
In your suffering, we pledge our eternal support.
The suffering is so great... My government will not
rest until we have done everything in our power
to reduce violent crime and to protect innocent life.

I always feel the formula "I'd like to address" is apologetic in its own right, in the sense of if you'd like to, why don't you just do it? But yes, I'm thinking about the intemperate violence of the president's language toward journalists, the way he keeps them caged at his rallies and mocks them for the delectation of the fans, and the failure of society at large to recognize the signs, especially in the murderer's Twitter feed, as reported in the Baltimore Sun:

Are you there, God? It's me, Ross.

Via St. Thomas More Catholic Church and Parish School, Houston, a St. Thomas that actually looks a little like Ross Douthat.

Or maybe the Blessed Virgin, but definitely requesting a miracle ("Why Not Mike Pence?"):

DOUTHAT: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, amen. And soften the hearts of the Republican caucus in the House, and let them impeach the Trump, for that is seriously a good idea to make Pence president before the midterms, if you can swing it. If they'd managed to convict Bill Clinton in 1998, see, and Gore had been president going into the 2000 election, he would have won, and...

B.V.M.: He did win. St. Thomas More intervened to stop the recount. I told him to leave it alone, but that man never listens to anybody.

DOUTHAT: Oh, yeah, well... Pence probably needs a bigger miracle than Bush did, because he has to get nominated in the first place.

So that's the general idea: there's old Pence, the exact sort of guy all those white evangelical men of virtue think of themselves as being, bland as a boiled potato and as fanatical under the blandness as his talk radio background could make him, positioned to become president without even having to go to the trouble of getting elected, if only the Republicans could make up their minds to do it.

The interesting part is that Douthat, the smartest of our rightwing columnists, as I've always said, though not the least dishonest, seems to have become the first to broach the possibility that the orange asshat could be guilty of something; putting it with the most extreme delicacy—

Take care of the Pence and the hounds will take care of themselves

Governor Mike Pence in deep conversation with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, in a photo I haven't been able to date, via Daily Kos.

Kyle Smith writes at National Review Online:

Should Mike Pence become president, the Left will surely lead us in a national chorus of “Whew! Back to normal.” Correct? After all, our friends in the Democratic party have been saying for many months that President Trump is not normal, that he is uniquely unfit for office, that his brand of mendaciousness, volatility, poor character, and immaturity have no precedent in the Oval Office, that he is a Nazi sympathizer and even a fascist, that he is an extremist who exists outside the bounds of ordinary political disagreement.

Mike Pence, on the other hand, is so normal that one of the things that the late-night comics mock him for is being too normal.

Well, if it's normal for a man in his late 50s to be afraid of being alone in a room with a woman he isn't married to, or to be in a room where alcohol is being served unless Mrs. Pence, who he calls "Mother", is there with him to preserve him from committing who knows what kind of desperate depravities, then sure, late-night comics mock him for that. Surely we can agree that he's as abnormal as Trump, only in a different and generally quieter way.

Today in contempt for the working class

Update: Welcome to Tengrain's Basket of Adorables.

Apparently they were out of Malbec that one time. Salem Times-Register, 2015, via Crooks & Liars.

Pretty sure my VP-themed cocktails for tomorrow's debate are going to be a glass of red wine (Kaine) and a shot and a beer (Pence).

— Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) October 3, 2016

Ah yes, "Boilermaker" Pence they call him, scourge of all the locals from Muncie to Indianapolis because he's such a hardass working-class sort of chap such as Suderman met once when the Uber was delayed and he was compelled to take the subway. Suderman knows all about such warm-hearted though stern-exteriored salt-of-the-earth fellows. (In fact Pence is more abstemious, or more afraid of alcohol, than Trump, refusing even to be in a room where alcohol is served unless his wife is present to restrain him, for flesh is weak, even Pence's.)