It seems to me there is one hero in the Jan 6 story who was most unlikely and has barely been acknowledged. Dan Quayle was never a person I particularly admired. I didn’t agree with many of his political positions when he was politically active as a Senator and as Bush I’s VP. The late night comics loved him because of his tendency to mangle syntax in comical ways. When he retired from politics, nobody would have expected him to ever have a significant role in public life again.
But that is exactly what happened. It has been obvious to me since the very start that this was a heavily planned and organized plot that very nearly worked. A year later, those realities seem only now to be coming into focus for most of the media. The only thing that has been even slightly surprising to me is just how close this came to working. It literally came down to whether or not Pence would show up.
We now know that there were real assassination attempts targeted at Pence and others. We know that elements of the Trump coup team were going after Pence. We know they put enormous pressure on Pence before Jan 6. We know that on Jan 6, somebody cut off his security access, an act of treason that deserves to be prosecuted to the max. And we have seemingly reliable reports that part of the coup plot included kidnapping Pence once the plotters became convinced he would not play ball. Pence was to be replaced by Grassley, who is just senile enough and spineless enough to have done what the plotters demanded.
So that puts Pence in the position of visible hero for the nation. But we also know that Pence was ready to go along with Trump and it has been reported that the only thing that gave Pence the conviction to stand his ground and not let the seditionists embedded in the Secret Service shuttle him away from the Capitol — thereby making it impossible for Pence to preside — was the counsel he received from Quayle.
Now that we see the rest of the plot, the real shock is that it really all came down to this one thing. If Quayle had not persuaded Pence, our democracy would have fallen. Simple as that. It really was that close.
There have been a few articles that have mentioned this, such as: www.cnn.com/… But at the time of that reporting, few appreciated that this was quite literally the ONLY thing that saved our democracy.
The Quayle story really needs to be told. He needs to be part of the public hearings. Biden needs to unite with Quayle — certainly Quayle deserves the highest honor that can be given to any private citizen.
I never thought that would be Quayle’s true legacy, but there it is. He is the person that saved our democracy and he deserves to be honored as such and have history record that unambiguously.