News With Views
by Kelleigh Nelson
Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company. —Booker T. Washington
Moreover, I have heard that those who are fond of praising men to their faces are also fond of damning them behind their backs. —Anonymous
Everyone wanted to see (him) fall so they could devour his remains. As is usually the case, the army of sycophants had turned into a horde of hungry hyenas. —Carlos Ruiz Zafón – author
Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable, than loyalty. —Cicero
On January 6th, 2021, Mike Pence knifed Donald Trump in the back and the Republic in the heart. We expected it. He refused to hear from states who wanted a ten to twelve-day delay in the counting of electoral votes, despite receiving multiple letters asking him to do so. At the end of the electoral count, he elbow bumped with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. His loyalty was not to Donald Trump or to the Republic.
Presidential Aspirations
The former VP has now formed a fundraising group hinting a run for President in 2024 against former President Trump, who I highly doubt will run again. Pence claims he’ll be active in 2022 elections. The treasonous activities of the 2020 elections have proven the alleged vote fraud will never again allow true conservatives to be elected; of course, those who would toe the line are acceptable.
Pence has joined controlled-opposition Heritage Foundation as a distinguished fellow. He has also started a podcast and will be writing a monthly op-ed and speaking at conferences and colleges in his new capacity as the Ronald Reagan Presidential Scholar at the conservative Young America’s Foundation. The foundation wasfounded at the home of neo-con William F. Buckley and is heavily funded by Koch brother organizations and famous icons of the neo-con rightwing including former Amway executives Richard and Helen DeVos and Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute.
In May 2017, Pence filed FEC paperwork to form Great America Committee, a political action committee (PAC) that would be headed by his former campaign staffers Koch brothers’ Nick Ayers and Marty Obst. Pence is the only vice president to have started his own PAC only six months after taking office. See Open Secrets for who received funds.
Pence Demeanor
Pence was a six-term member of the House who had focused on climbing the ladder of party leadership but he never chaired a major committee or authored even one single successful piece of legislation. His manner, always guarded and always pushing to get ahead, caused members of his own party to keep him at arm’s length. Pence was considered likeable enough, but he wasn’t personally popular; his closest friends in the House were Jeff Flake and Paul Ryan.
Flake went on to become Arizona Senator in 2013 and retired after one term. As Senator, he embraced the amnesty cause and became a charter member of the disastrous 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty group who helped arm the Benghazi rebels.
Paul Ryan joined the board of Fox News in early 2019.
Pence is a man who covers his true personality with a veneer of niceness…you never see the real Mike Pence, a man who along with his wife plans a cunning strategy for every event.
His “kindly pose” is so practiced that he looks like a man whose face will never crack an honest to goodness smile. He’s spent a lifetime learning to avoid offense and in doing so has become an empty suit. No one has ever profiled him in depth…Pence has always been recognized for his demeanor and not his accomplishments of which there truly are none.
Despite presenting himself as a deeply moral man, the reality belies this front. His record shows a ruthlessness and comfort with aggression that contradicts his religious pose.
Pence claimed Charles Colson as his mentor. Colson was a convicted Watergate conspirator who allegedly wrote an enemies list for President Nixon and proposed firebombing a Washington think tank in order to obtain documents it held.
Colson supposedly had a religious conversion, but is that what drew Pence, or was it Colson’s aggressive tendencies? Pence has immense ambition and his wife Karen is fully behind him.
Many people do not give credence to Pence’s religiosity, believing it is just another way to justify his ambition. He failed as a conservative member of Congress for twelve years, he failed miserably as Governor of Indiana for one term,and he also failed as a loyal vice president.
Early Years
After graduation, Pence applied to Indiana University’s law school, but failed the admissions test. Two years later, after intense study, he passed the test. He hated his law classes however and said it was a “bad experience.” While in Indianapolis, he met Karen Batten Whitaker at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. They were married in June of 1985.
Karen Pence is two years older than her husband, and was previously married to a med student. Herex-husband, Dr. Steve Whitaker, became a drug company executive responsible in part for the development of the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis.
Mike graduated from law school in 1986 and he was ready to follow his political ambitions and Karen was there to help.She was Mike’s advisor and they campaigned together for his congressional seat by riding their bicycles through the district and wearing Pence for Congress t-shirts. Pence tied himself to popular politicians of the state, Senator Richard Lugar and Dan Quayle, but Democrat Congressman Phillip Sharp defeated Pence in 1988 and 1990.During those years, Karen taught school and Mike became an Indiana radio celebrity who was referred to as the decaf Rush Limbaugh.
Congressman Sharp retired and was succeeded in 1994 by Republican David M. McIntosh who served three terms in Congress and ended up in trouble with the House ethics committee. McIntosh and Pence were close friends and when McIntosh decided to run for Governor in 2000, he urged Pence to campaign for the vacant congressional seat, which he won. McIntosh lost the race for governor, but in 2014, he became the head of Club for Growth who spent $2 million to defeat Donald Trump. (McIntosh was also a co-founder of the Federalist Society.)
Pence had many advisors throughout his political years and they followed him into the Vice Presidency, but always present in every Pence office was the “red phone.” That red phone was only used for calls from Karen Pence and when asked what it was for by a fellow congressman, he said, “Mrs. Pence is the only one who has the number, not anyone on staff. She occasionally shares it with the kids, but when this phone rings, I answer it.” It’s a known fact that if anyone wanted to get to Mike Pence, they had to go through Karen first; she was the gatekeeper and Mike’s top advisor.
Indiana Governor
When Mike Pence ran for Indiana Governor in 2012 and won, Karen was installed in an office across the hall from her husband. Again, the red phone was on Mike’s desk, and although his top advisor was just across the atrium, she only used the phone to talk to him. And she, not Mike, was the new sheriff in town as she set down rules for the Governor’s visitors. Their work hours were kept short and they left early to be home by 5:30 for dinner.
Indiana’s disappointment with the governor was evident. The Indiana mothers who ignited the national rebellion against Common Core were wondering why Governor Pence betrayed their trust. He took credit for repealing Common Core in Indiana when in fact he merely replaced it with a rebranded version of the same standards — actually, standards that might be even worse. Link
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was watered down by Pence when Eli Lilly and others threatened to leave Indiana if Pence didn’t add an amendment to the bill to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Nearly a dozen LGBTQ and civil-rights groups sent an open letter to Pence asking him to fix RFRA. When Pence caved, conservative support evaporated.
When President Trump threatened to overturn President Obama’s EO protecting LGBTQ federal contractors from discrimination, Mike Pence joined with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in urging the president to support the rights of the LGBTQ community.
