• I almost feel sorry for Mike Pence. Only almost, because he knew to whom he was, if not selling, at least renting his soul. Even if he didn’t, even if he was so naive and misguided to believe that he could ameliorate Trump’s toxicity, “Mother” knew and she didn’t keep her disdain a secret. Whether anyone else counseled him or not (aspirational minions are seldom the best source of wisdom), his wife tried to warn him, but ambition closed his eyes and ears to the obvious.
• Mike Pence is too much of a relgious zealot and idealogue on a quest for an American theocracy to ever get my vote. We could not be friends under any imaginable circumstances. The most the man who made one of the worst political and personal miscalculations in the history of American politics could hope for from me is the courtesy I would show almost any fellow human.
• There is, however, zero evidence that Mike Pence is anything but a good, decent man, unlike his former boss, for whom there is zero evidence that he is anything but a bad man. Vice-president Pence knew that but chose blind ambition over his beliefs to loyally serve “Despicable He.”
• His reward? Had there been a literal bus does anyone doubt the former president would have thrown him under it after being relegated to second place behind the Constitution? Mr. Pence is so vilified by his (ought to be former) party that he has already been forced to make room in that storage locker where he kept his principles for his doomed presidential campaign. Luckily, he had created some space by finding and displaying at least a modicum of integrity on January 6.
• And that’s why I (almost) feel sorry for him, in the same way I found sympathy for the Alec Guiness character who, at the end of Bridge Over the River Kwai, realized, to his horror, whom he had served.