Daily Broadside | Pence is the Quintessential Nice Guy, But He’s Not Presidential Material

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 31:19
After I strayed,
    I repented;
after I came to understand,
    I beat my breast.

Tuesday’s Reading: Jeremiah 34-39

Tuesday and there’s more than enough craziness in this country to power my blog for another ten years. Not that I necessarily want to keep cataloging and critiquing our government and the people who run it. I’d much rather that the partisan institutional power brokers are rooted out and we return to some semblance of nonpartisan governance. But that’s not happening anytime soon, and my fear is that we’re right on the cusp of crossing into a socialist society from which we won’t be able to extricate ourselves.

I don’t know Mike Pence at all except what I’ve learned of him in the news and from one of my friends who knows him. As far as I can tell, he’s a solid conservative Christian man of principle (Roman Catholic).

You may remember the outrage over his “I don’t dine alone with a woman not my wife” rule. Virtue Pick (VP) Kamala Harris had a case of the vapors over his approach, disingenuously suggesting that women’s rights suffered from men who ostracized them and limited their opportunities. Of course, when has Kamala been right about anything recently?

The point is that Pence seems like a genuinely nice guy, the kind of even-tempered soul you’d like to visit with over dinner (with both your wives).

Recently, there’s been speculation that Pence may toss his hat in the ring for 2024. For instance, he spoke at St Anselm College in New Hampshire, where would-be presidential candidates sometimes visit. But during his speech, he said something that illustrates why he’s not the right guy for the job.

Are you kidding me? We’re in an existential fight for our existence right now as a constitutional republic and you’re scolding us for criticizing and calling out the manifestly unconstitutional war that the FBI and the DOJ have levied on Donald Trump and, by extension, all of his supporters (and many who loathe the man but loathe the FBI’s off the reservation activities even more)?

Kurt Schlichter and others are warning conservatives off voting for him.

Your problem is that you live on forever in a world that no longer exists, if it ever did. You live in a world where there are norms. You live in a world of rules and guardrails, where the institutions are at least nominally neutral and where we all share some basic premises that provide common ground. But we don’t. They hate America. They hate believing Christians and Jews. They hate the idea of free speech, freedom of religion, the right to due process, and not killing babies three seconds before they poke their heads out. They think kids should be mutilated to conform to gender delusions. They want us normals disarmed, disenfranchised, and, more often than you softies will admit, deceased.

You [and Tim Scott] want to run in 2024, but you think it’s still 2005, and you both talk like a pre-failure Weekly Standard article about “empowerment” and “opportunity.” Buzzwords like that are worse than meaningless in an environment where our basic liberties are under constant assault by these communist bastards. There’s a war on and you people want to sing Kumbaya. That’s why you cannot be allowed anywhere near the levers of power in 2024. 

You just can’t accept what time it is. The FBI, Crusty Joe’s personal Stasi, invades President Trump’s home – they rifle through his wife’s panty drawer – and Tim Scott tells CBS News that we need to wait for all the facts. All the facts? Like the FBI hasn’t spent the last six years trying to frame our president and everyone around him? “Sure, they made up a lot of things in the past to imprison Trump and his staff, but this time it might be totally true – let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!” 

Mike Pence then tells us we need to go easy on the Bureau flunkies who did the deed because, after all, the institution is full of good apples. Yeah, good apples. Where are these good apples? Who’s the guy who quit because he refused to be part of the Democrats’ political hit squad? What’s his name? Jim Jordan says 14 whistleblowers have come forward. Awesome – 14 out of 35,000. That’s a good apple tart, not even a good apple pie, much less a good apple barrel. 

You always want to give the benefit of the doubt to the institutions because to not do so pushes you outside of your comfort zone. You desperately want the system to work. But so do we hardcores. The difference is that our response to the manifest proof that the system is totally broken to the point where only drastic reforms under a ruthless leader like a Trump 2.0 or Ron DeSantis 1.0 can save our country is to accept the harsh reality. We have made peace with the fact that there is nothing left to conserve, that we must loot and pillage and fight to rebuild upon the ruins. 

But you softies, you cannot get your heads around the truth of the situation because to do so would require you to go hard, and going hard is not in your wheelhouse. It’s not your brand. So you simply ignore reality and pretend that it is 20 years ago and that if you are only a good person, good things will happen.

Over at forbes.com, Pence is quoted as saying, “We need to let the facts play out, but more than anything else, the American people need to be reassured in the integrity of our justice system, and the very appearance of a recurrence of politics playing a role in decisions at the Justice Department demands transparency as never before.”

Well, yes. Unfortunately, he’s talking about law and order while we’re watching the emergence of a police state. You really think they’re going to listen to your calls for transparency? The only reassurance some of us will ever accept is if the current Stasi-cum-FBI is demolished, which will take, in part, being defunded.

As much as Mike Pence is likeable as a person, I have to agree with Kurt Schlichter and the others. He can’t be president because he’s part of the problem.

Pence seems like a genuinely nice guy, but I won’t support him for president because as nice as he is, he’s part of the Establishment, and right now we need someone who is not.

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