What the F**k, Joe Manchin?!!!

WV Senator Joe Manchin, contemplating how he’s going to screw the Democrats.

I don’t get it.

Seriously, I really don’t.

Senator Joe Manchin just announced for Biden’s Infrastructure bill to pass, it has to be ‘bipartisan’. Yes, you saw that, ‘bipartisan’. Joe seems to think the GOP is ready and willing to pass anything that might help average Americans, and thus maybe reflect well on President Joe Biden. No, Joe, that won’t happen, ever, not if the Republicans can help it. And Hey! With the help of their buddy Manchin, they can help it!

Joe Manchin is helping to kill the very popular agenda of a Democratic president, a member of Manchin’s very own party. This is a bill that would greatly benefit his own constituents, the very people who elected him to help them!!!

I…It’s just that... It’s like…

I got nothing.

It’s just fucking insane.

I’ve been buying this ‘man of the Senate’ crap, at least for a while. I gave him some line... Let it play it out... Thinking, ‘Well, maybe he’s sincere about this’ but now… gotta cut that line. He’s not interested in actually helping people, even those back in his home state. He seems to care more about burnishing his own brand than helping his voters. He’s playing to his base, without actually delivering for that base. He’s David Copperfield, preforming the illusion of legislating while actually just waving his hands and throwing up smoke.  

In other words, he’s a Republican.

He was already in cement up to his knees with the ‘no tampering with the filibuster’ pledge, now he’s up to his neck, dead set on killing the infrastructure bill, hell, the whole Biden agenda, unless ten Republicans sign on.

I don’t understand what his game is here, unless he’s playing a re-election game with the people of West Virginia, polishing his ‘bipartisan, man-in-the-middle’ image at the expense of, well, our democracy. Kyrsten Sinema’s game is more transparent and pretty damn disgusting, but comes down the same thing, but with more “maverick” trimmings ala the rep John McCain was supposed to have during his senate tenure. Could it really be that openly callous? Or is he actually that clueless as to who and what the current bunch of radical Republicans are? They’re not conservatives and haven’t been since Reagan; they’re insurgents, radicals pretending to be ‘conservative’ but unable to define what they are for, only what they are against. And what they are against is allowing Democrats air to breathe… literally.

Senator, we need to talk.

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Dear Joe, old buddy, ‘ol building-and-loan-pal,

Well, Joe, where are they? Where are the Magical Republicans, ready and eager to sign on to help save the crumbling physical and mental infrastructure of America? Where are the ten brave GOP souls who want to bust out of Mr. Mitch’s Reform School for Trumpaholics (secret cure, more Trump), step into the sun and proclaim they want to help Americans?

Yes… that is the sound of crickets, and not the cool Buddy Holly kind.

Joe, if you want this bill to be bipartisan, why don’t you and Kyrsten get out there and convince those ten to step forward and vote with you? Frankly, because you can’t. I do believe if the filibuster weren’t in play (though it always is, isn’t it?) you just might get those votes. But, since this is the party of Trump, and especially the Senate of Mitch McConnell, (Minority Leader be damned) you won’t get them. You know it.

You know it, Joe.

Time to pack it up. You lost this one. Time for the agenda that 80 million people voted for to go forward. Time for you and Senator Sinema to accept the fact you’re being/been played. Time to help the people of West Virginia get their roads, bridges fixed, get the childcare they need, and help with their aging parents. Time to give them the relief promised. Time to be a different kind of hero, Joe, one that gets things done for the people who elected him.

Time to deliver for the people.  

Magical Republicans be damned.

He Won’t Let Us Walk Away

Wouldn’t you like to see that last of this face?

Here we are.

Six months from the defeat of Donald Trump, and we can’t walk away from him. Why is that? After we got rid of the last awful, destructive administration (yep, it was George W.). We talked about him, but we moved on as quickly as we could. Bush helped by staying out of sight and not popping up to swing at every pitch thrown at the backstop.

Trump has no such problem. He issues opinion and edicts, scorn and ‘blistering’ takes on everything thrown his way, and always ties it to either; how great he was and how everyone sucks, or how the election was ‘stolen’ from him and everyone sucks.

Rinse, repeat.

But that’s just Trump himself. We may have Joe Biden in the White House, but we are still living in the sulfur ruins of TrumpWorld ™, which threatens at all times to ignite into wildfire proportions. This is why we can’t rid the national psychic of the man and his followers. He may not have social media anymore, but he still has the entirety of the GOP to push and scream his message. Like an parasite, Trump has hollowed out the host GOP and now controls the party, making them more than happy to keep advocating his lies, keep swinging spiked baseball bats at the legs of democracy, keep riding that wave of Trump grievance into power.

We can’t stop talking about Trump not because he won’t go away (and he just won’t) but because we have to. He’s the toddler that heads right for the china collection the minute you look away, the dog who will pee all over the living room if you don’t pay an ever-increasing amount of attention. Only this time, the living room is our democracy.  

Look at Texas.

Texas has been descending into the fever swamps for years, but now they’re expediting it using Trump’s elections lies as an excuse. This past weekend, under a midnight deadline, the Texas house GOP was trying to ram though a particularly egregious voting ‘integrity’ bill. This was a bill that went into closed-door negotiations one size, and came out nearly double, with all manner of conspiratorial garbage shoved in. Like making it easier for a friendly judge to thrown out an election based on a ‘preponderance’ of the evidence of fraud, instead of actual evidence of fraud. Or limiting early voting to 1pm-9pm on Sundays. Or illegal to transport more than two non-family members to the polls. I wonder who that might be directed at?

Lots of crap like that. And they had the votes.

The Texas house Democrats (the minority, of course) though, after trying everything they could, just slowly, one-by-one, left the chamber. When the time came to vote on the bill, the Democrats were gone, denying the Republicans a quorum. The deadline passed, the bill died. For now. It’ll be back. But it’s still a victory.

The Democrats did two things here: they stopped a voter suppression bill and made headlines, and they took that ugly, racist and grotesque bill and dragged it into the sunlight for all to see. ‘This is what the Trumpublicans are doing! This is what we have to stop!’ and the Texas Democrats literally said “This is how we are fighting in Texas, why aren’t you fighting in Washington?”

They listened to Trump, just as the GOP is listening to Trump, but they acted to stop him. In DC, we have at least two Democrats who refuse to listen, who refuse to act and will likely continue to do so until it is too late. Joe Manchin, I think, has a stubborn if deluded sincerity to his insistence on a bipartisanship that hasn’t existed in decades, killed mostly by the grab for power by one party. The other, Kyrsten Sinema… Well, I have no idea what the hell Sinema thinks she’s doing. Arizona, her state, is a purple state where the GOP is screaming that it’s really dark, blood red if you only count the votes the right way. Maybe she thinks she’s keeping to the middle? Maybe she thinks she’s being a ‘maverick’ by acting like well, a jerk. She does admire John McCain she says, but playing cute games while the building is on fire is not the way to be a ‘maverick’, it’s the way to be a dead donkey.

And out of a job next election. If we still have elections by then.

No, we can’t look away from Trump and get on with our lives as much as we all yearn to do so, because he and his followers are still there, flicking matches into the pool of gas that is the country at the moment, trying to stay in power, or just to see what will happen if it all goes up at once.