Tag: Joe Manchin

MAGA: Trump Can’t Fix This

twitter/thehill

The mindless stupidity of his supporters is what I find most depressing. Mindless stupidity that takes McCarthy’s statements at face value. How would you prove any of his claims? Why would today be any different no matter who the President was?

I can tell you the answer; it wouldn’t be better, it would be worse. Why? Because Trump didn’t even have a plan to roll out vaccinations. Trump has no knowledge of economics. No knowledge of science. He has nothing beyond bluster and charisma to draw on.

What might have made things better is if more people had voted Democratic down ballot in 2020 and put a solid Democratic majority in the Senate. That would have at least made a difference.

As it is now, in 2022, we are still bargaining with traitors in the form of Joe Manchin and the entire Republican caucus; a traitor because he holds the country hostage for his own personal benefits. He’s not a Democrat, he’s a Trumpist sympathizer. He’s a benefactor of 40 years of Reaganism. He’s wealthy from the dirtiest of power sources and wants to continue to profit from them. His backers in West Virginia are marginal Trumpists themselves and still solidly lovers of Reagan. They still think their god is going to save them. They still think their god wants them to have lots of money so they can get into heaven and they are planning to herald his second coming, soon. They are the stupid people, just like the people who still support Trump.

The Unlamented Death of Reaganism

Oh, sure. Joe Manchin’s changed his tune now because he can see the writing on the wall. Anyone who’s paying attention can. This murderous world-wide heatwave is impossible to ignore unless you are a complete idiot. Now he wants to get onboard. Now he wants to be a Democrat like his President is. It may be too late though. It should be too late for him to change sides and be accepted as one of us, one of the people who aren’t blinded by greed and politics.

Trump can’t fix this. Republicans are incapable of fixing this. They have denied science for so long that they can’t even tell the difference between rain and being pissed on by their own political leaders. The economy is improving from Trump’s unprecedented failure at stopping a pandemic and two-time impeached catastrophic failure as a President. The Democrats are demonstrating the criminal nature of Trumpismo and the current Republican party with facts, live testimony under oath and recorded video footage and the leader of the party in the House is telling us “who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

Republicans have made the the 2022 Midterms all about Trump and his wounded pride at being solidly trounced in the 2020 Presidential election. He has forced the Republicans to make this election about him, and so you have McCarthy talking about how Trump could make the country better as if Trump isn’t the reason the country is suffering right now, and we all know it. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, we know this is what Trump created as President. This thing we are living through right now.

Look in the mirror. Stare into your own eyes and admit this truth to yourself. Then go out and fix the problem that your votes created in 2016 and 2020.

The only solution to the crisis we are in now is to vote more Democrats into office, nationally. More Democrats and solid independents into office locally. Republicans will be compromised for a generation now; that is what the blind jingoism of FOX and it’s zombie Reaganisim over the last two score of years have gotten us. A functionally one-party political system incapable of governing without super majorities.

The California model can’t spread fast enough, in my estimation. We have to fix the primary systems across this country so that only smart, popular people with sane ideas can ever rise to the top of the political system. Only then can we be safe from the stupid people who threaten to burn us all to death with their off-gassing.

Because only Donald Trump loves America enough to give you a pony.

facebook/Stonekettle

Not a Democrat

Joe Manchin is not a Democrat. He was elected to the Senate on the Democratic ticket, but he’s not a Democrat or in favor of democracy.

I’ve always said this, Bret, if I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for and I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t,” Manchin, a key centrist, told host Bret Baier on “Fox News Sunday.

nbcnews.com

He talks to FOX news to make this announcement, where it will get to the people he wants to signal to. Republicans. If he was a Democrat he would have talked to media outlets that don’t explicitly serve Trumpists. He wants the Trumpists to know that he’s one of them, a little winking aside to those people he wants to keep on his side.

FOX trumpets that it is the most-watched network on cable television. Who has cable television anymore? Rachel Maddow is leaving MSNBC, not because she has changed her mind about the veracity of the message she delivers, but because she thinks she can reach more people somewhere else. Cable television is dead. Old media. Cable network measurements are like noting the dimensions of dinosaur bones. Important for history, but not really relevant to the here and now.

Joe Manchin is just another one of those dinosaurs. Outdated. Ready for the museum. Only relevant because of the fiction that is party control of the United States Senate. The ossified controls that were placed on that legislative body back in the day when communication across the country took weeks or months have grown constricting and self-defeating in an age where we can know in minutes what the population thinks about any given subject. We just need our paid representatives to do the thing we want, or explain to us why they aren’t doing it. Majority and Minority party leadership in the Senate is as meaningless as the Filibuster, which was a mistake back when Aaron Burr committed it by eliminating the ability to move the prior question. Only now do we understand just how destructive these rules are.

Joe Manchin is against securing the vote for everyone. He doesn’t want the federal government to set down minimal guidelines that guarantee the vote for everyone. The vote is the only way we can effectively communicate with our paid representatives in government other than by bribing them with campaign contributions. He panders to the wealthy who control our government, rather than stand up for the people who should control our government through the vote.

Joe Manchin is against everything the Democrats currently stand for aside from keeping the government functioning. He voted for the extension to the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling shouldn’t even be a thing because it only serves the fiction that the spending of the federal government can be controlled by threatening to guillotine the entire economy through a default on bonds. This is not an effective way to govern, and yet that is what we have been reduced to since the days when Newt Gingrich threw a wrench in the legislative works and did everything he could to keep Bill Clinton from being an effective President.

Joe Manchin wants to keep the government functioning to do…? What? Nothing the Democrats want to do. Consequently Joe Manchin is not a Democrat and thusly the Democrats do not control the Senate, have not controlled the Senate at any point since the 2020 election. Case closed. In 2022 we should send a clear message and put enough Democrats into legislative office that we can get the legislation that we want passed and presented to the President for his signature. That is the only way forward in the short term.