Sounds like Dan Quayle is the real hero here. Who would have thought? The guy everyone ridiculed in the late 1980s ended up saving our democracy. |
He gets a complete pass for at least 10 years. He saved our nation. The history books can be more subtle. |
Dan Quayle did not stand down the mob. Dan Quayle did not take great personal risk to save our nation. Give pence credit where credit is due. He isn't smart, but once he realizes what is right, he is willing to die for it. |
We can be nuanced about this. Liz Cheney and Mike Pence and their ilk certainly acted with courage to save our democracy. That doesn't mean they're clean in other areas of their lives. Pence had a disastrous term as Indiana governor, and was dogged for years with his controversial decisions regarding treatment of homosexuals. In the end we're all human. We can admire and commend them for certain important actions that have defined our history, while keeping in mind that hardly any of their usual policies are in line with progressive values. Indeed, Pence is a Christian Nationalist and as such part of a dangerous movement that would curtail tolerance for faiths other than Protestantism, marginalize non-whites and "deviant sexual groups", and enforce a biblical interpretation of women's roles. Beware. |
I can’t believe how much credit I’m giving a Cheney…
But let’s not put Pence’s few days of courage (after he tried to follow trump’s orders) on the same level as Cheney’s 18 months of outspoken truth seeking. |
Dan Quayle could have called the FBI. I mean, so could Pence, but I get how that was harder. |
What would the FBI had done. It's not like any of this wasn't obvious and apparent at the time. There were newspaper articles about changing electors, Trump told the Proud Boys to stand by, he was calling the election a fraud (unless he won) since April; he was tweeting about the 6th to encourage people to come.
The FBI knew all of this was going on, or at least they should have, because we certainly talked about it on this message board. |
Pence or Quayle or Luttig or anyone else who Pence talked with could have told the FBI that John Eastman and others were planning to violate the Electoral Count Act. They knew that and no one else did at the time. |
I highly highly recommend that as a supplement to the hearings, everyone should listen to the podcast "Will Be Wild" It gives tremendous insight into what was going on inside the government in the months leading up to 1/6 and how agencies were completely hamstrung.
The FBI was warned of every single thing that happened and they didn't act on it. They knew, but they let it happen. It wouldn't have made a bit of difference if Pence had gone straight to them. |
For a democracy to survive, its leaders must have some kind of moral core and basic human decency. That’s really what it comes down to. There are no other “safeguards”. |
Heads-up to all the naive Americans out there. The FBI and the CIA have had major problems of incompetency and bias since their creation and not work for you, the American people. The FBI was complicit in Nixon's bugging of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate, to name just one example. And can I please remind you that then FBI director James Comey broke long-standing tradition by sending a letter to Congress just before the 2016 election that the Democratic candidate's emails were under investigation. It halved her lead in the polls and was a major contribution to the election of the Republican candidate. Our most powerful institutions and electoral processes (hello Senate) have built-in political bias and history shows they act against Democrats. |