Playing Preying Munching Manchin

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!"

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."