Tuesday open thread: The incredible cowardice of Mike Pence

Yesterday, Marc Short—former Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff—had this to say:

Pence's ex-chief of staff Marc Short has just confirmed to @ABCNewsLive @LinseyDavis that on January 6, 2021, "If the mob had gotten closer to the Vice President...there would have been a massacre in the Capitol that day."

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) July 26, 2022

His former boss, however, has taken a different tack to the events of January 6th:

Some people want this election to be about the past, but elections are always about the future. Democrats would love nothing more than for Republicans to take our eye off the ball and focus on days gone by.

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) July 22, 2022

Let's recap, shall we? Pence spent four years slavishly devoted to Donald Trump. Whatever that orange buffoon did, he mimicked. The joke was that Trump didn't need pets, because he had Pence and Lindsey Graham. And for his troubles? His erstwhile chief fomented an insurrection which  would have seen Pence swinging from a gibbet.

Men like Pence stupefy me. Their utter cowardice belies their tough talk. They are frightened little people who speak loudly and carry small sticks. They project images of virile manliness, when in fact women like Cassidy Hutchinson have far more ovarian fortitude. All of these so-called men—Pence, Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone—would recoil in fear from any physical confrontation stripped of their security details.

But Pence takes the cake. Trump threw him to the wolves. January 6th is not the past, but very much the present. Its perpetrators and participants are still a mortal threat to this Republic. But Pence, for political reasons, wants to brush this under the carpet. He thinks he has a path to the White House if he just elides the events of the insurrection.

Sadly for him, that's not how it works. The Trumpian base considers him a traitor. He has no base of his own in the GOP. And no one outside of the party takes him as a serious candidate. The gutlessness he's displayed since the events of that day and night are as defining as Josh Hawley's boot scootin' boogie. 

The Republican Party is a cult based on fear. Fear of the other, and fear of each other. If they were of another time and place, they would be poisoning each other. But at heart they're all cowards, afraid of losing power to someone more extreme, and losing power to a changing country. And Mike Pence is its poster boy of  pusillanimity. A man who won't stand up to the man who tried to have him assassinated is not one to stand up to Putin or Xi. He won't even stand up to an errant fly, after all.