Every once in a while, Mike Pence – when not speaking about Christian Nationalism or anything to do with AIDS or harm reduction, every once in a while, Mike Pence can make a salient point and, as a matter of fact, more often than not – these days, it is done by hammering his former boss. All’s fair, though. It was Trump as “boss” to then Apprentice Pence, who literally left poor Mike for dead on Capitol Hill on January 6th, not long ago. (As an aside, I named Mike Pence my “Person of the Year” for 2021 for going through with everything and refusing to leave the Capitol for fear that Secret Service allied with Trump would “hide him in Alaska” for the remainder of the term, so he couldn’t cast those votes in Congress to certify the Biden election. So it’s not like I’ve never credited him when due, as here… )
Pence is not happy with Trump – again, fairly enough. But this time, Mike’s ire is over Trump’s ever-expanding capacity for corruption, to wit – personally accepting the gift of a 747 as “Air Force One” because the current robin’s egg blue bird is just a dump, right? Something. Anyway, Mike lashed out in an interview with Kristen Welker (Below). First, Pence reminded everyone who Trump was dealing with – not nice folks:
“I think first we got to remember who Qatar is. We’ve got a military base there. I have members of our immediate family that have deployed to the region, but Qatar has a long history of playing both sides. They support Hamas. They supported al Qaeda. Qatar has actually financed pro-Hamas protests on American campuses across the United States.
Yeah, Mike! Be careful, though. The entire GOP is in bed with Saudi Arabia, and they are the ones who were involved enough in 9-11 as to have the entire chapter still classified as applied to the House of Saud. So the Qatar complaint can be seen as somewhat hypocritical. Regardless, hypocrisy or not, Pence makes a good point. Qatar had an opulent 747 to give because it’s rich and corrupt AF. Now we are, too.
“And so the very idea that we would accept an Air Force One from Qatar, I think is inconsistent with our security, with our intelligence needs. And my hope is the president reconsiders it. I think if Qatar wants to make a gift to the United States, they ought to. They ought to take that $400 million and plow it into infrastructure on their military base.
Ha, great move. Pence pawns Trump. He just challenged Trump to say, “Yeah. It would be bad to just accept a flying mansion. Instead – so as to not appear ungrateful – we will accept $400 million in improvements to our military base.” Of course, the magic is that Trump wouldn’t “enjoy” the military improvements and thus it’s not really a “gift,” right? That’s the beauty of Pence’s joust. It really leaves Trump no room to roam.
“There are profound issues, the potential for intelligence gathering, the need to ensure the President of the United States is safe and secure as he travels around the world, and of course, also there, there are very real constitutional issues.
“The Constitution prohibits public officials from accepting a present, in the words of the Constitution, a present from a foreign state. Now, they may have some basis through chain of title, through avoiding that. But, I think it’s just a bad idea. And my hope is the president will think better of it.”
My hope is that Trump sees this and freaks the fck out because he’s pinned into a corner a bit – on national television, the same show on which Trump went not long ago to declare it unimportant to enforce the Constitution (Maybe it’s important to be entirely factually correct on that one, I don’t know). Pence actually has a great idea. Challenge Trump to say that military improvements are less important than his own pleasure. Now – if Trump wanted to be more Trump than usual, he would demand the plane and the $400 million in improvements to a new “Trump Annex” in the Qatar base. We will see.
Meanwhile, every once in a while, when not talking extreme religiosity and being priggish before all of us, Pence can come up with a decent idea, i.e., staying long enough to ensure the Biden presidency:
****
God Bless: I can be reached at [email protected] and also on X at @JasonMiciak, and please follow me now on Bluesky.
Zoomers, we are always in need of donations. It’s been an especially rough month, and my own health has not been great these past few weeks, which just adds to the frustration. Anything you can spare will be immensely appreciated. And thank you to all who have donated generously already. Ursula
What’s really funny on the whole issue is that Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been at loggerheads over their own issues. The Saudis have been pressing on long-held (but very murky) claims that the whole of Qatar is actually part of “historical” Arabia which the Saudis claim (the Kingdom also includes Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait and even Bahrain as part of their “historical” Arabia but the leaders of those countries have largely kept on much friendlier terms with the Saudis) and, it wasn’t all that long ago that the Saudis threatened to literally cut off Qatar (by digging a channel along the countries’ border) unless Qatar agreed to turn over a very small strip of that border to the Kingdom.
As for the whole al-Qaeda and HAMAS matter, both Saudi Arabia and Qatar bear equal shares of responsibility–well, maybe the Saudis bear a bit more as they’ve been more financially supportive of both groups. The Saudis spent millions of dollars propping up madrassas (Islamic schools–kind of like Christian seminaries but starting at like 5 or 6 years of age and almost wholly focused on studying the Qur’an and applying its principles to everything) that spread the most extreme fundamentalist versions of Islam (starting with the Saudis’ preferred Wahhabism and going from there) and, of course, al-Qaeda began as an offshoot of the 1980s Afghan “freedom fighters” trying to “liberate” Afghanistan from its Marxist, pro-Soviet regime (the ones who stayed in Afghanistan after the pro-Soviet regime collapsed evolved into the Taliban fighting the more democratic elements of the Afghan government) and the group’s leader was, of course, a Saudi national (and a member of the Saudi royal family–a somewhat distant member but still with a claim to the throne). And, the 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals (15 of them; 2 more were from the UAE, and 1 each from Egypt and Lebanon).
As for HAMAS, again, the Saudis were right there supporting the group, primarily to fight Israel rather than the political infighting with FATAH (the Palestinian Authority’s main political organization) but the Saudis never cut the funds because of the political infighting. After the Saudis signed the “deal” that Jared “worked out,” the spigot wasn’t cut completely.
Joseph, placing quotation marks around “freedom fighters” and “liberate” inplies doubt about the veracity of those terms, when in fact the Afghan mujahadin were most certainly fighting to liberate their country from the Russian invaders, ie for freedom from Russian occuption. Afghanistan has a centuries-long history of fighting against any and all invaders, and with great effect. Sadly, the appalling Taliban has won, for now.
being shipped to Alaska by Trump’s secret service detail is what pence was afraid of.
It was actually his chief of staff who accused them of plotting something similarly. I do think that they were trying to get him away from the capitol so he couldn’t cast his vote – and he refused. He had a job to do. Give him some credit.
jason