Bernie is getting mean, and Manchin is starting to fight

 After weeks of playing nicey-nice and hailing their "unity," the mask is starting to slip for Senate Democrats at the extremes of the spectrum.

According to the Washington Examiner:

Sens. Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders had a tense exchange during a closed-door meeting about President Joe Biden's social spending plan on Wednesday, marking the latest flare-up between the pair of ideological opposites who are both members of the Senate Democratic Caucus.

Manchin, a West Virginia centrist, and Sanders, a socialist from Vermont, have taken pains in recent days to put on a show of unity after weeks of barbs, as congressional Democrats try to agree to a framework for the bill by Friday, Axios reported.

Suffice it to say, both Manchin and Sanders have their careers on the line regarding this bill, and one of them gets the political death knell if the other one gets his way.

Bernie's getting mean because he's the one who wrote the $3.5-trillion "reconciliation," brimming with blueprints to socialize the country permanently, something he's been angling for his entire political life.  This is his final legacy, summing up what he's always wanted: free college, free daycare, free money for child tax credits, Green New Deal, full-blown socialism with the government's hands in every pot, much of it dating to his days on the Vermont hippie commune when he was also writing his rape fantasies.

He's 80 years old and unlikely to have another shot at it, and though stranger things have happened, he's unlikely to run for president again.  It must cheese him mightily to see the senile old fool, Joe Biden, in the White House right now, twisting in the wind, talking inchoately, wandering off, getting lost, saying whatever his masters tell him, and spilling his apple sauce, while Bernie's in full possession of his faculties and knows what he wants to do in the limited time he has left, which is to socialize the country.  If he can't be president, he can still turn America into the socialist hellhole he's always dreamed of, and that must be what's turning him into a junkyard dog against Manchin.

Like Colombia's FARC guerrillas, Sanders is a revolutionary more likely to die of old age than be annihilated by his opponents, and he knows the clock is ticking.

Meanwhile, Joe Manchin can read the political temperature.  A monster red wave is building, based on polls, which just keep getting worse and worse for Democrats.  Voters are likely to flip both houses of Congress red in reaction to the sea of incompetence brought to them by Joe Biden and all his incompetent idiots — from defeat in Afghanistan to an open border to his mad vax mandates — ordering mass vaccinations on the public while letting 16,000 COVID-infected illegals walk about the country.  There are also soaring energy prices brought on by his energy production shutoff fiats which are about to get worse, the supply chain fiasco leaving empty shelves in stores for basic items, and inflation that is set to take the U.S. back at least to the Carter era of stagflation, if not move on to Argentina- and Venezuelan-style levels brought on by money-printing to pay for social programs.  Those are far from Biden's only popularity-eating incompetences, but for sure they are harming Democrats in the polls.  It's possible that Manchin wants more government pork for his state in the bill, as all Democrats do, and maybe more goodies for his wife or something.  But it's significant that Manchin is calling for work requirements in order to accept welfare and has called for a "strategic pause" in government spending, both of which would keep inflation at bay to some extent. 

Who's the most likely to get thrown out in coming elections?  Yep, the players at the edges, particularly the moderate edges in red states, where voters can ask themselves: shall I vote for an ersatz conservative in Joe Manchin or go for the real thing?  We know what the voters' patterns are when it comes to that.  So Manchin's holding the line against Bernie is him thinking about his political survival.  It's likely he's hearing from voters.

Now the mask is off, and Bernie and Manchin are mixing it up.  No more fakey-fake talk of unity, despite that comical raft of euphemistic explanations from various Democrat sources in the Examiner piece.  They're in a fight, and only one of them is going to get his way.  Democrats have employed all kinds of slimy pressure tactics against Manchin, such as hunting him down in his houseboat home in order to protest against his stance on the porkulus.  What's more, Bernie himself has taken to writing op-eds, one of which turned up in a West Virginia publication, intended to make voters angry with Manchin.  That didn't go over too well with Manchin — I wrote about his response here.  Pressure of this sort all tends to make him dig in.  We know that Democrats are pulling out all the stops to get Manchin to fall into line on the Sanders bill.

Now that word is out that he's mixing it up with Bernie, it's likely it will be that much harder for Manchin to suddenly join the Bernie lunacy like a good little soldier and hope the voters won't notice.

Call it the battle of the jackasses.  "Titans" is a little too grand for them.

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