What the hell does Joe Manchin think he’s doing? He raves against messing with the filibuster, he babbles against using the reconciliation process and he whines about wanting a bi-partisan process to achieve all legislation. It may sound great to him but it’s all bullshit! He needs to have at least enough intelligence to realize that the Republicans are the ones who are not being bi-partisan as they imperiously stamp their little feet and declare that they will never vote for any of the bills proposed by any Democrat, even as they are the ones who provide no feedback or suggest any solutions to the logjam they are obviously trying to continue in the Senatorial stoppage of all legislation. The Democrats have gone far out of their way to encourage the GOP to negotiate with them on everything they have proposed. The first people Joe Biden hosted in the White House after he won the election were Republicans. He has stated again and again that he wants the GOP aboard any package that passes. But when Biden proposed the $1.9 trillion Covid bill, the GOP came back with a bill that totaled $600 billion. That is not negotiating. That’s just the GOP’s way of saying, “fuck you.”
If I have a building to sell and I put it on the market at $9 million and someone sends me an offer of $2.5 million, which is the equivalent of what the GOP offered Biden, I don’t even return their call. That’s not an offer to negotiate, that’s an insult. There was nothing to be gained from dignifying it with a reply, just as there is nothing to be gained by answering any of the GOP rhetoric on the infrastructure bill.
In the last decade, since the second half of Obama’s first term only one piece of serious legislation has come out of our process. It was Trump’s tax bill that cut taxes on the rich and practically eliminated them on corporations. That monstrosity caused an almost 2 trillion deficit, something that the GOP never mentions when they talk about the cost of Biden’s bills that at least, will put the country back together and pull it out of the mess left by the Fat Liar. Now it seems, we have to save the nation from Joe Manchin and his inane babbling. For years we thought he had stayed in office by lying to his simple-minded constituents about how he was going to revive the coal business in West Virginia.
Watching his latest moves it appears that he actually believed that nonsense. Why else would he think that helping the uber-destructive Republicans would have any salubrious effect on the economy or the nation in general?
The fact is that most legislation needs 60 votes and the nation will never get those sixty votes as long as it needs ten of them from the GOP side. It isn’t like a negotiation can take place where the Dems give a little and the GOP gives a little and sane minds can come to a functional agreement that gives the nation much needed legislation to deal with the problems we face. The Republicans don’t want to negotiate because the only thing they want is to stay in office and they’ve already figured out that they can do that by doing nothing. You can’t negotiate for something if you haven’t made any plans about what to do with it once you have gotten it and the GOP hasn’t had a plan since Trump had real hair.
If the GOP wants to make a bill bi-partisan maybe they should act in a bi-partisan manner and make reasonable suggestions that can be negotiated instead of taking the Moscow Mitch stance of, “there’s no way this will ever happen.” It’s too bad Joe Manchin isn’t bright enough to recognize what’s going on. What Manchin must be made to realize is that without a bill as large as the infrastructure bill, the coal workers he has been lying to for years will finally abandon him for someone who can actually deliver job training, good schools and a shot at a real life.
The only thing the GOP wants is to keep the Democrats from achieving anything, because they are dumb enough and venal enough to think that failure will insure their own jobs. The fact that it will hurt millions of Americans means nothing to them; just like ripping children from their mother’s arms or poisoning the planet or standing by while a feckless president allowed a virus to kill half a million of our people meant nothing to them.
People ask me all the time, “How can they act that way? Don’t they care about anyone?”
No, they don’t care about anyone, except themselves. The facts are very simple. The American voter has put 50 low-life swine in the Senate who care nothing about anything except keeping their jobs while protecting the men who give them money. Legally or illegally, they don’t care.
And Joe Manchin is just like them. He knows that Biden’s infrastructure bill is essential to the welfare of the American people but he just doesn’t give a shit. Just like he doesn’t give a shit about the people of West Virginia who need those good paying blue-collar jobs Biden’s infrastructure bill will create a lot more then they need the bullshit about bringing coal mines back. That will never happen and as long as he keeps babbling about it Joe Manchin can ever be considered an honest man.
There was a discussion on This Week in which Chris Christie repeatedly called Joe Biden a liar for his stance on the proposed infrastructure bill. This was the second week in a row Chris did this on that show. Considering that for the last four years, Christie has had his nose up the ass of the biggest liar in political history, he should have a better idea of what constitutes a lie. This just shows he’s not as smart as I always thought he was. Chris raved on and on about the meaning of infrastructure and how the new bill covered much that has nothing to do with infrastructure. Then Jennifer Granholm our new Secretary of Energy came on the show and explained very clearly so all the slow kids could understand, that infrastructure meant more then roads and rails but everything that had to do with the building of a national economy which included the health care necessary for workers to take care of their dependents while they work.
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As if we weren’t buried in enough controversy with all the fighting about bi-partisanship, guns, murderous cops, the infrastructure bill and whatever else; we now have a big noise about COVID Vaccine passports. Why is this a thing? Why would anyone object to having to show a document to identify him or herself as being disease free? Unless that is, they weren’t and didn’t care if they were a danger to those around them.
The big bitch seems to be around the “invasion of privacy” concept, which in this day and age is really comical considering that every store you ever shopped in knows when you had your last proctoscoopy.
The basic concept of a COVID Vaccine ID card being a violation of your rights is a pretty weak wall from which to fight any battle. Sure we all have the right to do as we please as long as it’s legal and doesn’t violate anyone else’s rights. That’s where this train runs off the track. The ID card tells those in charge of medical security at any venue you may enter that you have taken the appropriate precautions to maintain the safety of your fellow occupants. It’s the same concept as wearing a mask. It’s not a political statement, except for the nuts. It’s a safety precaution.
I have my shots and I wear a mask not because I think Donald Trump is an asshole and a treasonous crook but because I wish to keep myself and my fellow human beings as safe as possible from a disease. Yes, Trump is a disease too, but an entirely different kind. Your driver’s license proves you know how to drive a car, your COVID Vaccine ID shows that you have received the shots. There is no significant difference.
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John Boehner was on Meet the Press this Sunday trying to sell a book and proving that he is as big an asshole as he ever was. Chuck Todd tried desperately to pitch him a series of softballs but Boehner is just too dumb to recognize a favor and overswung, hitting all of them into the turf.
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Probably the biggest news of the week was the announcement that on or before September 11, 2021 the United States would be withdrawing all military from Afghanistan. This has set off a huge brouhaha from all sides of the political spectrum whether it be the traditional hawks on the Right screaming about wasted American casualties and the dangers of terrorist staging platforms or the progressive Left whining about Taliban takeovers and the secession of all humanitarian accomplishments in that beleaguered country.
The reality is that they are both right and also very wrong. The misinformation we were fed as an excuse for the invasion of Afghanistan, like much that has come out of Republican governments over the last couple of decades, was a lie. Sure, there may have been some staging done for 911 in Afghanistan and yes, maybe the Taliban or al Qaeda was behind that aspect of the attack but we now know with certainty that the attack was planned and executed by Saudis not Afghans. It seems our need at the time for Saudi oil far outweighed any considerations by the Bush administration of who was actually responsible for 911. Despite this revelatory information seeping into our government’s knowledge base, we have wasted 20 years, over 2,500 American lives and trillions of dollars on the fiction that is the Afghan war.
What’s more important is that despite 20 years of occupation we have not appreciatively dragged the Afghan nation out of the 7th Century. Despite zealous efforts by various missionary inspired American do-gooders, very little has been done to change the Afghan character and bring it into even the 19th century. Yes, we’ve created a few small schools and several almost functional medical facilities but the heart and the spirit of the Afghan people still resides in a religiously and culturally defined place that resembles closely a time just after the invention of the wheel.
It has taken United States, one of the most educationally advanced countries in the world over two hundred years to arrive at a place where its women and its minorities are even approaching a place in society where they are almost equal to white men. Do we really expect this medieval community to make that same transition in a mere 20 years?
I think not.
The United States has always made a couple of serious blunders with respect to foreign relations. We always seem to assume that whomever we are dealing with has the same goals as we do and are willing to abandon their traditions and mode of social interaction and use ours. This is almost never true, certainly not in the case of Afghanistan. It’s absolutely time for us to get out and give that beleaguered nation a shot at becoming something more than a screwed up, constantly at war, Western satellite.
The question becomes, will the medieval aspects of the Afghan civilization be able to take over completely and wash away all the advances that have been made in the last twenty years. If so, especially in the area of women’s rights, this will be a tragedy.