I had wondered if I was a bit rough on Joe Manchin last week, but Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch has surely won the award for injurious manhandling of the anti-environment West Virginia senator and scourge of Joe Biden’s approval ratings. His comparison of Manchin to the villain of many a James Bond movie is spot-on:
In 2021, the monster who is actually threatening Planet Earth with untimely demise is a Bond villain barely worthy of the title. His potential for a mountaintop lair in his home state of West Virginia has been flattened and stripped by a century of Big Coal, so his evil abode is instead a houseboat floating lazily in the Potomac River. His goon squad consists of oil company lobbyists and “Morning Joe” sycophants, and his only scar comes from repairing a sink aboard the “Almost Heaven.”
And yet make no mistake: West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has positioned himself to destroy the globe in a way that Auric Goldfinger, Ernst Starvo Blofeld, or Lyutsifer Safin could have only dreamed of.
As good as this conceit is in and of itself, Bunch deploys it to hammer how destructive and nonsensical Manchin’s opposition to badly-needed environmental legislation truly is, writing that, “The droughts, floods, rising sea levels, mass migrations and human misery that would result from this failure — triggered by a self-aggrandizing U.S. senator’s ego and massive greed — will surely surpass any mad scientist’s doomsday device.” He also makes a point that’s been staring a lot of us in the face: the corruption of Joe Manchin, with his ties to big coal and his personal investments in the industry, may be as old as the industry’s involvement in American politics, but the consequences of it are newly horrific, at least for anyone who’s interested in preserving a livable planet.
This gets to a point that I wish I had made more strongly, but that Dave Roberts hits on with a recent Manchin take-down. Roberts writes:
Manchin’s objections to the programs in the BBB are not based on any empirical evidence or coherent theory of government. What he has is a set of reactionary instincts, gut reactions common to old conservative white men [. . .] He's just a vain, arrogant, rich old white guy who surrounds himself with other vain, arrogant, rich old white guys. They all overestimate their own intellect & abilities. And apparently they're still the pinhole through which all policy must pass. This country is so fucked.
If there is any silver lining in Manchin’s suicidal stubborness, it is that we collectively have a narrow opportunity to see this combination of entitlement, corruption, and incompetence in the plainest view possible, and to keep pushing the Democratic Party to grow beyond reliance on this sad old guard to fill out their senatorial ranks.