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Thank you for expressing everything that went through my brain about these christians as I was watching them boasting about their hypocrisy.

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Amen! I just subscribed... Haven't seen anyone else emphasize the absurdity of this behavior. So, Jesus saved us once again? Why? God is on our side? "Our side"?!?!

I was appalled by the Old Testament references. Prayer is the answer? How pathetic that even the "good guys" somehow thought it would be comforting to us to hear that they all prayed to the same god.

As much as this hearing gave me some hope that our democracy could be saved, this public display of "faith" is very disturbing. Does Aguilar really think this was helpful? Damn it, democracy does not require faith in Old Testament BS to function. When are we going to grow up?

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I grew up in a family of Methodist and Presbyterian ministers. I am old now and I recognize nothing about the religious teachings I grew up with. so much so that now I declare no religious affil;iation. These people have finished off corrupting that, as if religion was never this violent but in truth was just as and still is. So religion has been hijacked. Young people find it a thing to flee and avoid now. So do I. But again today, an active shooter, deep South B'ham, Alabama, episcopal church in Mountainbroo and Hoover, the two most well-heeled parts of B'ham. The difference being that every law enforcement agency, local, state and national appeared for this one, FBI and every community sheriff's department for thirty miles around. Monsters are in charge of religion these days. There's kind of no peaceful place left to go except deeply inward. Republicans and their ilk have trashed everything that was a comfort at one time.

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Pence is one of the most deluded ninnnies in this whole under-educated cavalcade of vassals to the ultra rich known as the Republican Party.

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Bottom line: Pence did the right thing, and the democracy still lives, though on life support. Should he testify? Absolutely. Should he have gone public long before Jan. 6? Absolutely. Have his key staff testified and helped build the case against Trump and Eastman? Absolutely.

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Jun 17, 2022·edited Jun 17, 2022

I like your final suggestion that Pence put his bible down and go testify, under an oath to his god, to tell the whole truth! But it won’t make any difference. The RW WhackJobs still aren’t watching anything to do with the 1/6 hearings. Facts cause their whole world to unravel.

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My sentiments exactly, Lucian. Jesus had nothing to do with this.

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I bristled when these people spoke about how their faith drove them to do the “right thing”. I agree with Michael Beschloss who just said on MSNBC “Do. not canonize Mike Pence. He did the right thing, at the last moment.” He also said and I am paraphrasing, that Pence had 4 years not to be loyal as a lapdog to Chump, but he chose to do nothing until he realized democracy was at stake. Pence is a POS also. I too, do not hold Mike Pence as a decent person.

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“Thoughts and prayers” won’t stop the Trump Cult.

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The "same God" stuff was a bit much. As for Jesus, if that's what it took for these people to follow the law, I'm glad He got into it. Thank you, Jesus!!

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"The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church."

--- Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll

"Robert Green Ingersoll (/ˈɪŋɡərˌsɔːl, -ˌsɒl, -səl/; August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899) was an American lawyer, writer, and orator during the Golden Age of Free Thought, who campaigned in defense of agnosticism. He was nicknamed "The Great Agnostic". ****

"With the beginning of the American Civil War, he raised the 11th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Cavalry of the Union Army and assumed command. The regiment fought in the Battle of Shiloh. Ingersoll was later captured in a skirmish with the Confederates near Lexington, Tennessee on December 18, 1862, then paroled - i.e. released on his oath that he would not fight again against the Confederate States of America until formally exchanged for a captured Confederate soldier or officer of like rank (who was often under parole himself, making the practice a matter of honor and formality, which could be extended to individuals or even entire regiments en masse). "

One of Ingersoll's daughters became a renowned campaigner for women's rights, and his funeral eulogy was delivered by his friend , Walt Whitman.

{EDIT! It was the reverse: when Whitman died in 1892, it was Ingersoll who delivered his euology.}

Ingersoll's Wiki bio is well worth a look, and his collected works are available through the project gutenberg website.

"The liberty of man," of humanity, "is not safe in the hands of any church," and I suppose if Ingersoll were alive today and propounding his views, ---which were greatly influenced by the experience of having a father who was both an abolitionist and a Christian minister; thus the entire family was persecuted before the Civil War by, who else, other Christian ministers and their congregations ,who quoted "Holy Writ," their sacred text, the "Word of God," to justify chattel slavery of blacks and other human beings --- he would be excoriated by the usual Trump cultists and their allies in the mass media outlets of the right wing. The "centrist" mass media would do their best to ignore him.

We are cursed to live in interesting times!

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OMG, my day is complete! Praise Lucian 👏

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Totally agree! What happened to separation of church and state????

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Great piece.

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Jun 17, 2022·edited Jun 17, 2022

Olivia Troye likes and admires Mike Pence, on what basis I cannot begin to fathom. To me, Pence is the personification of willful blindness and hypocrisy. But that's just me. Of all the people to whom Mike Pence could have hitched his wagon, Donald Trump would seem to be the most improbable. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out what's under the skin of people who lead public lives, at least enough to get past the flackery and bullshit. I'm convinced that beneath the Forrest Gump-like schmuck persona that Mike Pence models himself, there's a real part of him that likes the evil that Trump epitomizes. How can Mike Pence not see that. Trump's lying, grifting, and fleecing is everything Trump lives for. He has no regard for the office itself, and no regrets for the harm he's done our country. For the past six or seven years, Mike Pence has been Donald Trump's loyal sidekick. A cartoonish Gabby Hayes to Roy Rogers. Someone willing to humiliate himself as the guy who let a house fly perch on his hair during his vice presidential debate. The guy who agreed to be the public face of his boss' administration on responding to the coronavirus pandemic, while the boss himself, Trump, did whatever he could to sabotage that effort, at a cost of a million dead Americans. And Mike Pence just sucked it up.

This spouter of Bible verses lives in a moral sewer. He's a pietistic fraud. He wants to be president at the head of a Trump-dominated Republican Party that was ready to lynch him on his boss, the President's say-so. Pence wants to run for president two years from now, with the party faithful despising Pence for his 'disloyalty'. But their enmity doesn't appear to bother Pence a whit. Who does he think is going to vote for him.

Pence peddles a self-referential Christian theology and political programming that would have been in vogue during the 1840s, all about saving souls, and christianizing Indians. All of those hosannas praising the Lord, and wrapping themselves in the cloth over simply doing their public duty, after seeking and failing to find any other plausible alternative. Pence went so far as to contact former Vice President Dan Quayle, who told Pence that he had no choice but to follow the mandate of the Constitution. Meantime, Trump is insisting that Pence take an action that would most certainly blow up the Constitution. Well, so much for the sacredness of both the Oath of Office, and the Constitution that they're all sworn to uphold.

Conservative retired federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, who testified yesterday, was importuned by Pence's official counsel to counsel Pence about his official duties in the Congress counting the certified presidential and vice presidential votes submitted by the individual states. Judge Luttig was beside himself with anxiety that the Vice President had no substantial inner core of strength and integrity to resist Trump's importunings, badgering, demands, and threats.

Pence's penchant for appeasing and extreme propitiating Trump and his thuggish allies borders on the obscene. This man who requires a Bible verse to come to a common sense judgment has the inner core of a terrified child. He has no sense of self or personal agency. He seems to be saying that he's the servant of whomever has the power to control Pence's future. Pence yearns to be the president, but he cannot make a decision without checking the Good Book to see if Jesus, or some other characters in the Bible would approve. This past week Pence was overheard to say that he can't wait to get to Heaven so he could congratulate the Drafters of the Constitution for their excellent work. Is this guy for real? Eighteen months ago he was 40 feet and minutes away away from being captured by a MAGAHAT mob and sent to his eternal reward at the swinging end of a rope. I hesitate to guess what sentiments those departed patriots' souls would have conveyed to a newly-arrived Pence had the Insurrection succeeded.

Despite Pence's new-found celebrity heroism, he declined the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Insurrection's invitation to testify in person. Members of Trump's inner circle are now testifying as to how vociferously they were telling Trump that he was wrong in what he was doing; but Mike Pence, who was supposed to be the guy who was positioned to blow up the Constitution, is too shy to man up and tell the American people in his own voice what enabled him to defy Trump's wrath and to perform his historic duty by essentially doing no more than each of his predecessors did when it was their turn to attest to the peaceful transfer of power to their successors. Too cute by half.

It's not that Pence has a lot to do these days. He appeared before the Federalist Society to lamely defend his refusal to violate the Constitution. We know what happened from other witnesses, but the committee wants the vice president to tell them what the episode meant to him. Pence might have to admit in his testimony that he's the hollow man he appears to be to me and I suspect many others.

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wow, Lucian. all through that bible-thumping (which ALWAYS makes me want to gag...no, correction: it actually Makes me gag, it's THAT visceral), all I could think about was how completely cynical all of that shit is...at least over 99% of the time. and I was feeling unaccountably strange and antsy. then, when the hearing was done and the MSNBC folks came on and their first comments had to do with Pence's absence, I wanted to slap myself a few times for not figuring out (until I heard it from the tv) that it was precisely THAT absence which was bugging me. why indeed? I assumed they'd asked and that what they got was a big no. if this is the case, I figure that they figured it was better to have Pence second-hand than to spend a lot of time trying to persuade him. of course, I could be entirely wrong about this, but it's going to be my story until I know better. if I'm right (and actually, even if I'm not), all of this outrageous praise being heaped on Pence (and his lawyers and everyone else who's changed their stories for the Committee) is a typically contemporary American shtick...the convenient "forgetting" that these leopards have the same spots now that they had two years back. one example among many is the phone call Pence made to Dan Quayle (I have the misfortune of sharing his birthday and he doesn't deserve it). today, it was to share their mutual disdain for TFF. but months ago, when we first heard about it, it was a different story. way back then, Pence made the call to see if there was any way he could oblige TFF without going down in history as a traitor. where were his profoundly religious lawyers during the four years of daily law-breaking they witnessed? while I have to admire Liz Cheney's decision to trash her chances of being reelected to her seat THIS election, let's remember she was WITH TFF until just about the bitter end. I'm not even gonna MENTION Barr because everything about him stinks. I guess I just did. I could go on, but everybody gets the idea. no sense of collective memory here, and it gets worse every day. all it took was TFF to make the unindicted war criminal Bush seem like a sweet guy. in the UK--say or think what you will about the place--you can't MENTION the name "Blair" without people looking at you like YOU'RE the war criminal. and Blair was merely the equivalent of Bush's pussyboy. from my point of view, this is a good thing...I'm thinking of that old tag (Santayana? Marx??) about having to relive the history you don't remember. if this weren't a peculiarly modern American thing, the Republicans wouldn't have thought of simply "redefining" the events of 1/6 because they'd have known it would never work....

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