Pense pending… – The Court Painter

Mike Pence offered some insights into what he plans to tell Special Counsel Jack Smith about former President Donald Trump’s conduct before the January 6th Capitol riot. The former vice president gave an interview to CBS’ Robert Costa that aired on Sunday April 23/23 for Face The Nation. The conversation dealt in part with January 6th, so Costa turned to the fact that Pence will have to testify before a federal grand jury about his conversations with Trump in the build-up to the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Pence decided earlier this month not to appeal the court order compelling his testimony,

In the past, the former vice president has displayed notable reluctance to testify against Trump, even with all of the president’s setbacks for his claims to executive privilege.

Excerpted from The New Republic article Alex Shephard / June 22, 2022

Mike Pense is Useless

The former vice president’s refusal to address his former boss’s attempted coup somehow manages to straddle the line between cowardice and opportunism.

“He’s a coward and an opportunist, and he sees only one way forward: kissing Donald Trump’s ass while, every now and then, lightly calling out the fact that Trump tried to get him to steal the election (if not killed). This only adds to the increasingly tragic career of Mike Pence. He has the opportunity to salvage his reputation—at least somewhat—and perhaps take Trump down. Because he naïvely believes he still might be president, he chooses not to. He will emerge from this gaining neither the things he wants nor the things he needs.”

Excerpted from Ideas Atlantic article by David Frum The Man Who Pretended Not to Notice A fly landed on Mike Pence’s head. And he did nothing. October 8, 2020

The Man Who Pretended Not to Notice

“We saw a weird moment when a fly landed on Pence’s snow-white hair—and the vice president did not react at all. No doubt, it’s a conundrum, what to do in such a situation. If Pence had shooed the fly and the fly had refused to shoo, that would have been bad. So he did nothing. And that doing nothing somehow in one powerful visual moment concentrated everything. It symbolized the whole Pence vice presidency, the determined, willful refusal to acknowledge the most blaring and glaring negative realities. Through all of the scandals and the crimes and the disasters of the past four years, Mike Pence was the man who pretended not to notice. And now there was a fly on his head, and he pretended not to notice that too.”