Joe Manchin is absolutely reveling in the marathon cat-and-mouse game he's playing with that increasingly tattered ball of fluff known as the Build Back Better Act.
Grizzled old unfixed feline though he may be, Manchin can't resist reverting to some kittenish antics in his dotage, mewling coquettishly just the other day that "I'm open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward. But I'm equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.”
He's already eviscerated the poor little rodent with his fangs and claws. But even though it is mostly dead, if not already completely dead, the game must go on. He stuffs his prey into his maw, shakes it about in a frenzy before letting go and watching it fly across the room, to land with a pathetic thud before it skids limply across the floor in a simulacrum of panicked live-action flight. Cool cat Joe then lowers himself into the pounce position, butt wiggling and tail twitching, pretending that the dead or near-dead creature is the worst mortal enemy in the whole history of responsible and respectable fat cat-dom.
With a growl, he springs into action and mauls the corpse anew before cradling in his arms and licking it into submission.
When the political game being played in Washington is the Mickey Mouse version of Kill Bill, and like Joe Manchin, you're not only winning but you're the only player, why would you ever call a merciful end to things? After all, you've got your myriad "owners" like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer to reward your antics with a big bowl of cream for so entertainingly torturing and killing the mouse with such insane aplomb. It certainly saved them and the rest of the Democrats the trouble of having to do it en masse by buying a mousetrap and setting the cruel, inhumane thing in full public view themselves.
Joe Manchin is the sound of one neoliberal hand clapping... or, if you will, the spine of one nation snapping.
But I am here to tell you the Democrats do feel your pain. If you're bummed out because there will be no paid family leave, no dentures or eyeglasses for old people, no climate catastrophe reversal, please remember that it could always be worse. The brand of trap recommended by most Dems is Hav-a-Heart.
Look at this way - the liberal class is so virtuous that they even treat the maligned Manchin humanely. Not a tail-puller or arm-twister in the bunch! As the website "Senior Cat Wellness" lays it out,
As cats are born hunters, they often kill live prey such as mice or birds. Before killing a small animal, a cat will seemingly play with it first. While this looks cruel, the cat is acting in self-preservation rather than malice.
Cats play with prey to subdue it before delivering a killing blow, which can be dangerous when hunting rodents. Mice and rats will fight to stay alive, usually by biting. This could be painful for a cat or spread disease. Playing with prey by batting or tossing it leaves small animals exhausted or injured. The cat can then safely kill and conclude a hunt.
So you see, proles, Manchin is simply operating on a natural instinctual level. We are deemed to be more dangerous to him than he is to us. (If only.) It's all about the self-preservation of a political party and not about nasty things like voters who are fighting to stay alive on low wages, no health care and a burning, drowning planet.
The good things in the bill may have gone the way of poor little Mousie, and prey of all species will suffer and die because of Manchin and his backup, Kyrsten Sinema. But the bright side is that these good, rejected safety net and survival things are now finally part of the National Conversation!
"Paid family leave's demise this time could fuel it later," gushes a recent headline in the New York Times. Who knew? It is just like the dead mouse that the cat brings back to life by the power of its own violent imagination!
If you find that reassurance from the cat pan Liner of Record too hard to swallow, then it is your own damned fault, and the elites will be only too happy to browbeat you, gaslight you, and guilt-trip you into compliance and shame. Times scribe Jonathan Weisman outlines it thusly:
Some business groups and G.O.P. proponents of a paid leave program believe that if it had been broken out and negotiated with Republicans, the way a $1 trillion infrastructure package was at Mr. Biden’s urging, it could have survived, and some think it still could resurrected as a bipartisan initiative.
They said the problem lay with the Democrats’ decision to put paid family leave in the expansive social policy and climate bill — a multitrillion-dollar package financed by large tax increases on businesses and the wealthy — which they knew that Republicans and mainstream business groups would never support.
It was all in the framing, stupid! Somebody could have at least belled the cat, for crying out loud. Or plugged up the mouseholes at least, to avoid all the pain and blood and gore hurting their sensitive, innocent, beneficent, elitist eyes.
Meanwhile, if all you designated prey out there do find yourselves struggling in the clutches of a whole clowder of capitalistic fat cats, all you need to do is relax. Or as "progressive" Guardian columnist Robert Reich adjures us, we should get to work on our resilience skills. Plus, wouldn't you rather be miserable under Biden than under Trump? If there is one thing that Reich has learned in his 50 year political career, it is that human prey are way too impatient. It is unrealistic to take the promises of a better survival by politicians too seriously. If you can't wait decades or centuries to get the housing, medical care, food or climate catastrophe reversal you urgently need right now this very minute, then you're just wallowing in fatalism. "The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed," he glibly and cheerily concludes.
Yes, my friends, we are now definitely in the terminal gaslighting phase. They haven't failed us. We have failed them.
Let us therefore show our resilience and all stop cynically chanting "Let's Go Brandon," and instead rejoice that the Pope has not excommunicated Joe Biden.
Let our new pro-austerity mantra be "Man Up, and Take It On the Chin." Or conversely: "Chin Up and Take It Like a Man!"
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| President Joe Manchin |
For as the party of the oligarchic Demos is wont to yowl: "Don't ever let the purr-fect be the enemy of the good."
11 comments:
You know West Virginia takes a hefty load of trash talk for being a state full of redneck underground farmers, and children of a lesser God. Now I would say all that trash talk is just elitist talking down to their slaves, however if the citizens of the great state of West by God Virginia elected and keep electing Joe the Mouse, maybe there is some evidence to the trash talk. Mr. Munchkin is certainly not an old time Democrat. It’s just a thought have a nice day. Aloha Nancy
Joe Biden's trillion-$ bills remind me of glorious musical compositions on paper that never get performed, or architectural renderings of skyscrapers that never get built.
Likewise, those trillion-$, Rooseveltian blue-sky Biden bills that keep getting buried after CatMan Manchin guts them. By the time CatMan single-handedly finishes hollowing out Biden's agenda, midterm elections will be upon us. Another DNC disaster. Well, at least two more years of Biden's term will remain, you say, surely enough time to pass some piddling bill for the infrastructure, social programs, taxation, healthcare.
No way. The Dems just lost a governorship in Virginia. Signs of the times, they say. Because more people are beginning to see the Biden as useless as Hoover. As everybody knows, the GOP is a sure bet to take back both House and Senate in 2022, no matter Biden's shockingly progressive bills in the archival filing cabinet. After midterm elections, or maybe in 2024, when Trump or his political equivalent get the keys to the White House, Manchin will declare himself a Republican. You heard it first here.
What the Dems might do collectively now, just for the hell of it, is drum Manchin out of the party. It would make no difference in future roll call 'ayes' or 'nays' deciding the fate of any Biden bills, and the Dems would rid themselves of an elephant-sized mole.
Would anything be better if McConnell organized a Republican-led Senate, controlling all the committee chairs and when a bill could come on for a vote?
As bad as Manchin is (yeah, this is frustrating), would that be better? That is what it would mean to drum him out of the party. That is what would happen if his voters turned on him in ways we just witnessed.
We need to do better than take our ball and go home.
It is difficult to work with him. It would be much harder to work against him, and even harder to work against McConnell's Senate.
After next year, we may be looking at McConnell's Senate anyway, and maybe a Republican House too, so Democrats had better get what they can while they can. Make hay despite the clouds in the sky, because rain is coming.
Here we go again: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
Yes, the bills that ultimately emerge from the Manchin-Biden-Schumer-Pelosi (MBSP) cabal will yield a few crumbs for the needy (and more cakes and tax breaks for the top 20%). Yes indeed, that would be better than anything McConnell might come up with.
The problem is that the MBSP compromises, virtue signaling and window dressing are not building any support in red and blue land for any prolongation of the MBSP way. An increasing majority of the electorate thinks it has good reason to reject the failed doctrine of lesser evilism. It doesn't work for most commoners and they know it. And they increasingly seek vengeance against its practitioners.
The electorate's building disgust with the appeasing, no fight, rich leaning, lesser-of-two-evils MBSP system, in blue states as well as red, will explain the Democrats' coming losses on all fronts in 2022 and 2024.
The italicized nugget below might explain everything to loyal Democrats still chanting "My lesser-evil party, right or wrong, but my lesser-evil party." Research shows that tolerance, acceptance and patience levels among suffering, distressed and betrayed voters is likely to be far less than among comfortable voters. Round and round the Dems go.
"[T]he story of every Dem election win is they promise lefty stuff, fail to deliver, then they lose subsequent elections and then tell themselves that doing all the lefty stuff they didn't do was the cause. They lose power, eventually go back to running on lefty stuff, win, and then again fail to deliver."
--Atrios
I think there was a moment when Obama ran for president and promised universal health care and to rein in the big banks when thinking liberals took a chance and hoped and believed. However, Obama being the big betrayer of his constituency has soured most of us. The fact that Biden got the Democratic nomination over Bernie and Elizabeth Warren told me that the only real platform the DNC was going to endorse was Biden was not lunatic Trump.
I don't see any hope. There is no party for the 95% to vote for and the Democrats are just putting on a show, election cycle after election cycle. Biden puts forth bills that the majority of Americans would like to see enacted and then Manchin and Sinema put a wrench in the works. I have no doubt if these two odious people were to disappear tomorrow, there would be two more Democratic senators, who have been towing the party line up till now, who would suddenly come out of the woodwork and do the same thing and S and M. Given their corporate, oligarchical overlords, I have no doubt that the majority of Democratic representatives don't want anything to change.
Jay–Ottawa -- "The electorate's building disgust with the appeasing, no fight, rich leaning, lesser-of-two-evils MBSP system, in blue states as well as red, will explain the Democrats' coming losses on all fronts in 2022 and 2024."
I agree. But greater evil voting is not a solution.
The only outcome offering a solution is for one or both parties to blow apart.
This happened for example in 1856, producing the 1860 election of Lincoln from the resulting new Republican Party. It was voter disgust with endless compromises going nowhere, on slavery but also on other issues (not the same as "progressive" ideas but an earlier ancestor).
In that case, both the Whigs and the Democratic-Republican Parties blew apart, and their factions re-combined along issue lines. We got radical reforms vs hardened refusal to reform anything.
And of course we also got a civil war. That was about slavery, but about a lot more too. The post Civil War world was a very different place, not just ante bellum but without slavery.
We must be heading, fast or slow, into such a party destruction. It is quite likely that the Green Party (issue oriented) or something very like it will be a core group around which some of the factions will regroup. The other pole around which opposing factions will re-group?
I don't think we are there yet, but we are getting a lot closer. The two existing parties have no future, really will never offer anything.
Both parties are sideshows of the deep state. Heavyweights of the deep state are super elites drawn from big money, the military, its suppliers, and three-letter security agencies. I don't see how those principalities and powers might be brought down through domestic resistance. At least not in the time that might or might not be left for remedial action. The undoing of the current gang of powerful crazies will have to come from abroad, perhaps through the dollar's fall from grace or a series of glaring military defeats. Those two crack-ups might provide an opportunity for a new outlook to develop within the surviving cast of deep state. New parties would eventually reflect the changes in deep state ranks.
The evolution of new political parties takes time and is, as already stated, irrelevant. An unhinged, self-appointed, and out-of-reach elite in the back room have long been calling the shots. As a result, the nuclear doomsday clock is 100 seconds away from wiping the global slate clean. Heavy blows from climate change are already upon us. Civilization cannot wait for standing political parties to evolve to bring us a new day. Turnarounds in energy production, disarmament and economic disparity should have begun fifty years ago; instead they keep setting new records in the up, up and beyond direction. Meanwhile, in the background, the environmental doomsday clock just might be ticking well past midnight.
Other than that, enjoy the Dems' and Reps' variations on kabuki theatre.
Jay–Ottawa -- "enjoy the Dems' and Reps' variations on kabuki theatre"
I entirely agree with your comment. That is what we have, and it is unclear when it might ever change.
However, over the longer term, there is a way out, and as I see it only one way out. The parties must implode.
I have no idea how long that will take. I have no idea how long is the long term. But we have got to get there one day. It must come to that, it can only come to that.
@ Mark
Thanks again for your thoughtful responses. I believe you are correct in saying the parties must implode. Of those who still bother to vote, or even follow politics, I suspect they see how increasingly corrupted and useless are the two main parties. The elites could turn to other forms of control without the parties, but parties, as repugnant as they are, are still prettier than naked tyranny.
In politics –– as well as mainline religions of the West –– we're overdue for another Reformation. The Soviet Union went through a reformation of sorts in the handful of years around 1990. Today's China is unrecognizable from that of Mao's day. The US, on the other hand, is still waiting for its Luther to put together something more respectable than what we have now. But first the elites, holding the two parties up like a blind between themselves and the masses must be brought down by revolution (unlikely), the collapse of the dollar (on the way), or more serious military defeats (increasingly likely).
Lots of people see the handwriting on the wall. But their calls for attention are drowned out by the groans of the dispossessed, the partying among the superrich and their accomplices, and the bullhorn of propaganda for the commoners.
As never before, civilization is up against several pressing deadlines. A US implosion followed by reformation might never happen in time. In that case, the overdue reformation will be left to the unforgiving and show-closing forces of global warming.
Jay-Ottawa -- "the elites, holding the two parties up like a blind between themselves and the masses must be brought down by revolution (unlikely), the collapse of the dollar (on the way), or more serious military defeats (increasingly likely)"
Those things would do it. However, I still hold out hope for voter rebellion as happened in 1856 when parties that were non-responsive recombined around issue groups.
We do have issue groups. We even have whole third parties that are devoted to issues in ways the two parties refuse except for campaign lies. The Greens for example have more issues that strictly the environment.
When FDR swept in, that was an electoral revolution caused by the Great Depression, but in 1856 it was just voter disgust. I can happen. It does not happen often, but then in reality it is not needed all that often, even if it is desperately needed now.
But if that does not work, then you are correct, it will come another way. I suspect war, because the US keeps starting them and then keeps losing them, a pattern that would do it if the war was big enough, say the one now being mongered with China.
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