The 2024 Presidential Election- The LONG General Election

[TGHusker]

 This was applicable in 2020  but I don't think it will stop the DOJ this time around. 

 

 

[TGHusker]

Mona Charen nails this.  I was wondering when someone of note would speak out on this topic (not to belittle my all wise HB fellow posters - but most of us aren't professional OP-ED writers although some come close) .  Mona didn't go back to the Access Hollywood tapes but she hints at it.  For me, that is when I lost my faith in Pence.  He had the opportunity to resist the urge for power and do the right thing even if it sunk the GOP chances in the 2016 election.  He was a good soldier for the GOP but being a good soldier for an unethical cause will in the end be self defeating.  Mona makes her case below as to why Pence, having sold his soul to Trump and Power, is not worthy of the GOP nomination for president and why his loyalty to the president will / has made him unelectable.  She gives him credit for standing tall on Jan 6th but that one act won't remove the Trump stain on his reputation. 

 

 It has greatly bothered me that Pence hasn't spoken out forcefully against Trump since Jan 6.  Trump put a target on his back and Pence does nothing. Is he that weak and pathetic that he still bows to the man that had him targeted?  Is he so afraid of losing the support of the cult, that he won't attack the cult leader?  The answer to those 2 questions is obvious.   It proves that he is only interested in power - he will emasculate himself in order to gain it.  

 

 

https://www.thebulwark.com/mike-pence-sold-his-soul-for-nothing-january-6/

 

Mike Pence Sold His Soul for Nothing

He was honorable on January 6th, but not before or after.

by MONA CHAREN 

 

JULY 28, 2022 5:30 AM

 

Quote

 

Poor Mike Pence. You remember Mike Pence—he’s the guy who defeated a roomful of lickspittles to claim the obsequiousness grand prize at a 2017 cabinet meeting, praising the dear leader once every 12.5 seconds. Well, it seems that Mike Pence thinks he has a shot at the presidency. He’s building a campaign team, has made numerous trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and is appearing at campaign events for candidates challenging Trump-supported nutters.

You can imagine how the conversation went with his political advisers: People are tired of Trump. They’re exhausted by all the drama. They want to move on. And you’re the perfect person to fill the void. You served him faithfully, but when it came to violating the Constitution, you stood your ground. Voters will recognize your courage. And you are the true conservative!

Marc Short, Pence’s vice-presidential chief of staff, offered that, “If he were to run, he may not be the biggest celebrity. But if we’re going to go back to a principled conservative who represents the things we stand for, then there’s no one better than Mike.”

“If we’re going to go back.” Not likely. But Pence seems to think there’s a yearning for that. He’s blown the dust off yellowing copies of his Before Time speeches and sprinkled his text with the sort of Christian-y talk that got him a House seat and the Indiana governor’s chair: “Pray for our opponents,” he told a (small) audience at a South Carolina church, “that their hearts would soften and their minds would open to the unimaginable beauty that is life.”

Isn’t that nice? But there are a few flies in the ointment.

 

First problem. Now? Now is the moment that Pence rolls out the prayer? As Pence is well-situated to know, big chunks of the GOP base have become hungry for a very different tone. Christian charity is out. Vulgar insults, shameless lies, and secessionist hatred are in. It sure is ugly, but Pence is in no position to complain. It’s a revolution that Mike Pence did so much to encourage, and it’s bizarre that he seems to think he can carry on as if nothing has changed.

Pence prostituted his reputation for Christian piety to the most vile figure in the history of American presidential politics, a man who modeled the opposite of every virtue taught in Sunday school. Pence lent his credibility as a religious man to a villain, and gave permission to millions of self-styled Christians to vote for him. Pence’s pious conscience was remarkably quiescent when Trump encouraged his followers to rough up hecklers; when he bore false witness against Muslim Americans (falsely claiming that he saw them celebrating after 9/11); when he attempted to extort the president of Ukraine to lie about Joe Biden; when he separated asylum-seeking parents from their children; when he refused to condemn the tiki-torch Nazi wannabes in Charlottesville; when he elevated a series of kooks and conspiracists to high office; and when he insisted that the election had been stolen.

Pence was fine with all of it.

Second problem: Worse than simply remaining silent, he played the toady with seemingly endless reserves of self-mortification, uttering cringeworthy encomia to Trump’s “broad-shouldered leadership” (a phrase he repeated at least 17 times), and audacious lies about matters big and small.

There was no bottom to Pence’s fawning. To please Trump, he called Joe Arpaio, a convicted criminal (pardoned by Trump) and thuggish abuser of power, a “tireless champion of the rule of law” and said he was “honored” by Arpaio’s presence at his speech. He claimed, preposterously, that Trump had performed magnificently in the face of the COVID pandemic: “President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset. He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties.”

When Pence traveled to Ireland on an official visit, he didn’t stay in Dublin, but traipsed 140 miles west to stay at the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, necessitating a 40 minute flight and hour-long drive each way. Must have been inconvenient, but then, if Trump had asked Pence to crawl both ways, he would doubtless have obliged.

Pence helped transform the GOP from a conservative party into a cult, and as he is discovering to his sorrow, cults don’t behave the way normal political parties do. That’s why Pence’s gamble that he will get credit from the base for his loyal service to the leader is foolhardy. He is at the mercy of the leader. If the leader disowns him, no history of loyalty to Trump himself, far less service to conservative goals, will save him. Ask Jeff Sessions. Ask Mo Brooks. Pence is attempting to finesse this by referring frequently to the Trump/Pence administration and declining to criticize Trump—even for January 6. When speaking of it (which he tries to avoid), he calls it a “dark day,” adding that he supposes he and Trump will “never see eye to eye” about it. Got that? Trump sicced an armed and violent mob on Pence by tweeting that Pence had failed him, and Pence responds that, gosh darn it, sometimes friends disagree.

Third problem: It’s impossible to say how large a contingent of Republican primary voters are in the “Pence is a Traitor” camp, but consider that a recent New York Times/Sienna poll found that only 6 percent of Republicans would vote for Pence in a 2024 primary. At their dueling campaign appearances in Arizona, Trump assembled a rally attended by thousands while Pence spoke to a crowd estimated at 300.

There may indeed be an audience in the GOP for someone other than Trump. A softening in his support is now just barely discernible in polling and lack of donor enthusiasm. But the Trump base will not forgive Pence. Better to turn to someone like DeSantis who hasn’t been guilty of abiding by the Constitution.

And if the GOP were, by some miracle, to seek an honest, non-authoritarian, traditionally conservative candidate, there are other choices including Liz Cheney, Larry Hogan, and Adam Kinzinger, who have reminded Republicans of what conservatism can look like.

Pence did a great thing for the country on January 6. His tragedy is that he has managed to earn the contempt of the MAGA world and the anti-MAGA world. Again, he deserves full credit for not obeying Trump’s command to refuse to count the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. That took courage and a certain amount of integrity and saved the country from a constitutional crisis and possibly worse. Considering the stakes, he should have followed it up with total honesty about how we reached that frightening moment in American democracy. If he had attempted to invoke the 25th Amendment, or encouraged senators to convict Trump at the second impeachment, or testified in public to the House January 6th Committee, it might have gone some way to compensate for the infamy of the past four years.

Pence chose another path—trying to have it both ways. It will end, perhaps appropriately, with a whimper.

 

 

 

If you don't know who Mona Charen is, here is her info from wiki.  Her  quote below from the 2018 CPAC meeting is revealing. 

 

 

Quote

 

Charen wrote for National Review magazine, where she was an editorial assistant starting in 1979. Later she joined the staff of First Lady Nancy Reagan as a speechwriter.^[10] She then worked on President Ronald Reagan's staff, in the White House Office of Public Liaison and in the Office of Communications.

Charen served as Jack Kemp's speechwriter in his unsuccessful 1988 presidential bid. She launched her syndicated column in 1987.^[11] It is syndicated by Creators Syndicate and has been featured in more than 200 papers, including the Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Washington Times.^[12]

Charen was a regular weekly commentator on CNN's The Capital Gang, which appeared on Saturdays. Following an on-air heated exchange with fellow panelist Al Hunt,^[13] the two of them did not appear on the same panel for several weeks. Charen switched to Capital Gang Sunday when that program was launched, appearing until the program was canceled.

Her columns have also appeared online at National Review Online, TownHall.com, and the e-zine Jewish World Review.

In 2010, Charen won the Eric Breindel Journalism Award.^[14] Currently, she appears regularly on John Batchelor's radio show.

In June 2014, she became a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.^[15]

In February 2018 she was invited to participate in a CPAC panel discussion. Her comments, which elicited boos and jeers from the audience, included the following:

I am disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women, who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women—and because he happens to have an 'R' after his name we look the other way ... This is a party that endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate in the state of Alabama even though he was a credibly accused child molester. You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that ... Speaking of bad guys, there was quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day. Her name is Marion Le Pen. Now, why was she here? Why was she here? She's a young, no-longer-in-office politician from France. I think the only reason she was here is because she's named Le Pen. And the Le Pen name is a disgrace. Her grandfather is a racist and a Nazi. She claims that she stands for him. And the fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace.^[16

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

36 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Mona Charen nails this.  I was wondering when someone of note would speak out on this topic (not to belittle my all wise HB fellow posters - but most of us aren't professional OP-ED writers although some come close) .  Mona didn't go back to the Access Hollywood tapes but she hints at it.  For me, that is when I lost my faith in Pence.  He had the opportunity to resist the urge for power and do the right thing even if it sunk the GOP chances in the 2016 election.  He was a good soldier for the GOP but being a good soldier for an unethical cause will in the end be self defeating.  Mona makes her case below as to why Pence, having sold his soul to Trump and Power, is not worthy of the GOP nomination for president and why his loyalty to the president will / has made him unelectable.  She gives him credit for standing tall on Jan 6th but that one act won't remove the Trump stain on his reputation. 

 

 It has greatly bothered me that Pence hasn't spoken out forcefully against Trump since Jan 6.  Trump put a target on his back and Pence does nothing. Is he that weak and pathetic that he still bows to the man that had him targeted?  Is he so afraid of losing the support of the cult, that he won't attack the cult leader?  The answer to those 2 questions is obvious.   It proves that he is only interested in power - he will emasculate himself in order to gain it.  

 

 

https://www.thebulwark.com/mike-pence-sold-his-soul-for-nothing-january-6/

 

Mike Pence Sold His Soul for Nothing

He was honorable on January 6th, but not before or after.

by MONA CHAREN 

 

JULY 28, 2022 5:30 AM

 

 

 

If you don't know who Mona Charen is, here is her info from wiki.  Her  quote below from the 2018 CPAC meeting is revealing. 

 

 

 

 

He, along with many on the right, have proven they have zero values they fall back on in times like this.  They are only there to gain power for themselves and the party.  Pence spent 5 years licking Trump's boots only to have one glory moment.....well....that's not enough.  If he hadn't been the way he was for 5 years, his actions on J6 would have not been needed.  And, his silence since then is concerning.

 

He has spent his life saying idiotic things about working with women trying to act righteous.  But, he had the chance to actually make a stand for women against a pathetic human being that treats women like objects....and he failed.

[TGHusker]

3 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

 

He, along with many on the right, have proven they have zero values they fall back on in times like this.  They are only there to gain power for themselves and the party.  Pence spent 5 years licking Trump's boots only to have one glory moment.....well....that's not enough.  If he hadn't been the way he was for 5 years, his actions on J6 would have not been needed.  And, his silence since then is concerning.

 

He has spent his life saying idiotic things about working with women trying to act righteous.  But, he had the chance to actually make a stand for women against a pathetic human being that treats women like objects....and he failed.

Yep, couldn't agree more.  I think the editorial speaks strongly to that last part.  There are far better people out there but few - (looking at you Liz- please run in 2024) who won't sell their soul for political expediency.  I'd rather vote for some one who has proven character that I disagree with than someone I agree with whose character hasn't stood the test of fire.   

[funhusker]

On 7/28/2022 at 10:35 AM, BigRedBuster said:

 

He, along with many on the right, have proven they have zero values they fall back on in times like this.  They are only there to gain power for themselves and the party.  Pence spent 5 years licking Trump's boots only to have one glory moment.....well....that's not enough.  If he hadn't been the way he was for 5 years, his actions on J6 would have not been needed.  And, his silence since then is concerning.

 

He has spent his life saying idiotic things about working with women trying to act righteous.  But, he had the chance to actually make a stand for women against a pathetic human being that treats women like objects....and he failed.

What was his glory moment?

 

There was nothing he could or couldn't do.  It was a procedural responsibility.  Glory to him for not adding more fuel to a raging fire?  

 

Pence is just as much as POS as most others involved in that administration.

[DevoHusker]

19 minutes ago, funhusker said:

What was his glory moment?

 

There was nothing he could or couldn't do.  It was a procedural responsibility.  Glory to him for not adding more fuel to a raging fire?  

 

Pence is just as much as POS as most others involved in that administration.

Agree here. Pence can't get a pass for doing the one...one, thing he was sworn to do

[JJ Husker]

Pence is maybe the one and only R I’d like to see on the ticket. Not because he is any better or the lesser of evils but because I think he would be the easiest path for a D to the presidency. He would fracture the R vote because so many MAGA crazies would view him as the enemy. Trump would disparage him all the way because Trump is not interested in the R party controlling anything. Trump is only concerned with himself. Pence for President would be glorious.

 

And I don’t particularly like any of the Ds, it’s just that they aren’t anywhere near as dangerous.

[BigRedBuster]

On 7/29/2022 at 9:48 PM, funhusker said:

What was his glory moment?

 

There was nothing he could or couldn't do.  It was a procedural responsibility.  Glory to him for not adding more fuel to a raging fire?  

 

Pence is just as much as POS as most others involved in that administration.

Completely agree. But, some are trying to claim he’s a hero because of J6. 

[BigRedBuster]

 

[TGHusker]

A new name to keep in mind for 2024. Miami mayor Suarez who is anti trump and anti Desantis. Just what the doctor ordered.  But other than that I don’t know much about him 
 

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/11/miami-mayor-suarez-president

[knapplc]

The most searing indictment of Orange Man Bad I think I've ever read.

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

 

[TGHusker]

3 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

 

Good.  Trump will be or should about to be sent to jail by then and she would run against Trump want to be - Desantis. 

[TGHusker]

I'm disappointed in what I read as a weak response by Hogan on the MAL warrant.  

 

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-win-for-donald-trump-gov-hogan-says-americans-deserve-facts-in-mar-a-lago-search/ar-AA10ENbV?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=b280fbc6fede401580cf78796b7d9b8c

 

 

Quote

 

Hogan said, in part:

If in fact they do not have a serious case, on serious federal law violations and potential felonies, then certainly people would make the argument that it was all political: 'Why didn't you do this for Hilary Clinton when she had confidential documents?' I would say, this week it was actually a win for Donald Trump. It seemed to motivate his base and people rushing to his defense.

ABC News also reported that during Sunday's interview, Hogan, a loud intraparty critic of Trump, also warned against other Republicans exacerbating tensions over the ongoing investigation after some lawmakers like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene issued calls to "defund the FBI, dismantle the DOJ, and gut the agencies of political biases and persecutions."

I think that's what we have to find out more information about: What really are the documents and what are the implications from a national security standpoint?" Hogan said Sunday. "One side, you can say, 'well, the Justice Department, the FBI and the federal judge believed that they should do it, then it must be pretty serious.' On the other hand, with the absence of more transparency, people are going to continue to jump to conclusions.

 

 

 

[TGHusker]

Run Liz Run - if only to expose the corruptness of the current GOP party.  Perhaps you can find a way to win.  

 

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/17/liz-cheney-2024-wyoming-gop-primary

Liz Cheney plans to go national

 

Quote

 

Allies of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) tell Axios that after last night's primary loss, they expect her to start a super PAC — which would attract lots of wealthy, anti-Trump Republican donors.

Why it matters: Forming a national group would signal a run in the '24 GOP primaries, giving a real voice to anti-Trump Republicans.

Driving the news: It sure looked like a presidential-campaign stage when Cheney — vice chair of the House Jan. 6 committee — conceded Wednesday night in Jackson, Wyo. She immediately teased a '24 presidential run.

• "[O]ur work is far from over," she began.
• "The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all," she added.
• "Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our Union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history."
• "Two years ago," the third-term congresswoman said, "I won this primary with 73 percent of the vote. I could easily have done the same again. The path was clear, but it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. ... That was a path I could not and would not take."

• Cheney on Wednesday morning said on NBC's "Today" show that running in 2024 is "something I'm thinking about," and it's a decision she will make "in the coming months."

• "We have a tremendous amount of work to do, I think it could take several election cycles," she added.
• "Donald Trump has betrayed Republican voters. He's lied to them, those who support him have lied to them and they're using people's patriotism against them, they're preying on people's patriotism," she said.

 

•