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."

The Mangling Munching Manchin Machine

(Say three times fast)

Just like clockwork, the Democrats are out in coordinated force, blaming sexism and xenophobia as the core occult reasons for the opposition to party operative Neera Tanden's confirmation to the Biden cabinet.

Granted, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is full of noxious hot air when he points to the "incivility" of Tanden's thousands of vitriolic deleted tweets, aimed both at Republicans and progressive Democrats in the Bernie Sanders wing, as his reason for not voting for her to lead the Office of Management and Budget.  In tandem with that nonsense, he apparently believes that it is the very height of civility to deny his own constituents, living in one of the poorest areas of the country, a rise in the minimum wage to 15 lousy bucks.

So while Republicans (and Manchin) are crying their crocodile tears and claiming they are victims of Tanden's Mean Girl Syndrome (because they only want unity!), the Democrats are perfectly willing to forgo legitimate criticism of her corruption in order to defend her. When you have identity politics to fall back on, the sky is the absolute limit when it comes to glossing over such inconvenient facts as Tanden's call to attack Libya to get at its oil, her past efforts to destroy Social Security and Medicare, her red-baiting of any and all critics of neoliberalism and Hillary Clinton, her leadership of a Democratic slush fund disguised as a think tank (Center For American Progress, or CAP) , her acceptance of corporate bribes from billionaires and corporations to run said slush-tank, her physical assault of a former employee, and her destruction of a blog run out of CAP offices once employees began to unionize.

This is the woman that Joe Biden cynically proposes to control the purse strings of our country and to manage our lives in the process. It is a scary scenario, to put it mildly.

So it is all the more disheartening when even progressive stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leap on the Identity Politics bandwagon in order to defend the bullying Tanden against that traitorous bullying misogynistic villain Joe Manchin. AOC actually helps to ridiculously lump Tanden in with two other more liberal endangered Biden nominees, Hispanic Xavier Becerra and Native American Deb Haaland, as a way to further paper over Tanden's despicable career.

We are supposed to believe that just because Indian-American Neera Tanden once survived on food stamps and lived in public housing, she will suddenly divert from career script and champion poor people. In an absolute subversion of the mantra of Martin Luther King Jr., we are asked to judge Tanden based solely upon the color of her skin and the configuration of her XX chromosomes, rather than upon the content of her truly rotten character.

The glossy veneer barely disguising all kinds of corruption and the record inequality which is carefully engineered and maintained by the political class and its partners in consolidated media is a very flimsy substitute for legislation in the public interest, run by true public servants rather than by the career-climbing servants of the oligarchy.

Witness, just as the latest example of this performance art, Monday night's candlelight vigil spectacular starring Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to mark the 500,000 American deaths from Covid-19. Media reviewers have glowingly called their tasteful tableau such a powerful and refreshing step up from Donald Trump's own criminal callousness.

Because there's nothing like a shiny solemn candlelight vigil to substitute for a single payer health care system, regular Covid relief checks, and student debt forgiveness, right? 

Because things that help ordinary people are treated by the permanent ruling class as veritable plagues against free market capitalism. The body politic, to our leaders, is itself nothing but a Mean Girl calling them nasty names and hurting their feelings, when all they want is Unity and Civility. Harrumph!

Mangling Joe Manchin, meanwhile, dutifully plays his own designated role as the bad cop/useful idiot who prevents the noble and empathetic Joe Biden from completing his incremental agenda. Not formally defecting to the Republican side of the duopoly is simply a clever bargaining chip on Manchin's part, of course. He can dangle the threat of defection over their heads for the duration of his tenure, in the process giving his co-conspirators all the cover they need to implement their occult austerian agenda as they hide beneath their candle-lit masks of beneficence.

Just as the Tea Party Republicans once thwarted Barack Obama's hideous "Grand Bargain" with former House Speaker John Boehner to cut Medicare and Social Security, so too are right-wingers thwarting Neera Tanden's big career move to chief crook and budget-slasher. Sometimes you just have to pick your crooks and decide which bad guys you want to root for, to give you the slightest serendipitous bit of respite from the munching maw of neoliberalism.

Mangling Manchin may end up accomplishing some good in spite of his horrid old self. Then again, he could make a deal with Biden, who might agree to trash his minimum wage promise in exchange for Manchin changing his mind on Tanden.

As the New York Times frames the saga in its own extended mangled metaphor of an article, the White House is still "giving her confirmation a shot" while Tanden herself is "committed to rolling up her sleeves." Ouch.

It is so essential to remain vigilant as we're relentlessly regaled by these never-ending vigils, produced so carefully for our relief and stupefaction.