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| Manchin |
The shakers and movers in the national Democrat Party, chiefly speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi of California and Democrat leader in the U.S. Senate Chuck Schumer of New York, knew months before a Congressional vote on President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” spending extravaganza that they did not have sufficient members in the Senate to pass the measure, which, not incidentally, would have worsened a growing national debt approaching $30 trillion and stoked the fires of a now raging inflation. Their surprise at the vote is not only surprising; it is a shameless imposture gussied up as a surprise.
The Biden-Pelosi-Schumer Build Back Better plan --
indecently swollen with new spending the cost of which will be passed on to
their children and grandchildren, this at
a time when much of the nation is still lying prostrate under the boots of COVID-related business shutdowns -- was effectively killed, for the time being, by two
moderate Democrats, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and U.S.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom are
desperately trying to wrest their party from the bloody jaws of their Party’s postmodern progressives.
Manchin especially has been on the enemies list of
postmodern progressive Democrats for some time. In a radio interview following
the vote, Manchin “lashed out at hardline tactics against him by those he said,
[who] ‘Just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive,’”
according to an Associated Press- New York Times report
that appeared in a Hartford paper a few days before Christmas.
“I knew where they were, and I knew what they could and could
not do,” Manchin said. “They just never realized it, because they figured,
surely to God, we can move one person. Surely we can badger and beat one person
up. Surely we can get enough protesters to make that person uncomfortable
enough [so that] they’ll just say ‘OK, I’ll vote for anything, just quit.’”
But AOC-Bernie-Sanders progressive Democrats had not taken
the full measure of the man. “Well, guess what – I’m from West Virginia. I’m
not from where they’re from” -- i.e. U.S. seaboard states such as California ,
which for the first time in its history has lost a U.S. Congressional seat
through outmigration, according to the LA News, and New York, now bidding
a bitter farewell to its super-progressive New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio
-- “and they can just beat the crap out of people and think they’ll be
submissive, period!”
The major tiff between Manchin and the new Democrat
Progressive Party conclusively demonstrates that the often cited “Big Tent”
Democrat Party of President John Kennedy and, here in Connecticut, of Governors
Abe Ribicoff and Ella Grasso, has now become a closed political shop, moderate
Democrats like Manchin and Sinema having been muscled out by Congressional leaders
such as Pelosi and Schumer, both bending their knees ideologically to Party
anarchists U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and
socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Moderate Manchin is uncomfortable with borderless spending,
and he wants to tie welfare to work requirements, as did Bill Clinton, the last
president to have balanced the federal budget.
Like California and New York, Connecticut also has been a
one party state for some time – minus an Andrew Cuomo-like governor, who was
hustled out of office after it had become clear that his COVID policy had directly
caused thousands of deaths in long term care facilities, that he had been a
little Napoleon while in office, that he, with some help from his brother Chris
Cuomo and an obliging TV network, CNN, had been a super media manipulator, and
that, in the post Me-Too period, he had man-handled women.
Here in Connecticut, we may thank our lucky stars that
Governor Ned Lamont, halfway competent, is a business man whose ambitions,
obscene by the standards of postmodern Democrat progressives and Bernie Sanders
socialists, are refreshingly boring. Lamont does not mistake himself for FDR
and seems to understand the vital connection between improvident spending and
high taxes – just like the much put upon Manchin.
However, the narrow “moderate” corner of the Democrat Party
occupied by both Lamont and Manchin is quickly disappearing, nationally and in
Connecticut. Increasingly, Democrat moderates in the seaboard states that
bracket the nation have been constricted by the progressive boa that appears
to be operating on a single principle: that power, which corrupts, does not
corrupt absolutely when it is absolute.
In his best moments, Lamont, far less infantile than
postmodern progressive Democrats who have crowded out responsible governance,
sometimes sounds like Henry David Thoreau’s “party of one.”
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