A Sinematic Flop

With Democrats Like These, Who Needs Republicans

October 3, 2021

We at Paying Attention have been painfully focused on the depredations of Joe Manchin regarding the Democrats’ attempts to enact the agenda Joe Biden ran on and handily won the presidency. Thanks to gerrymandering, endless dirty tricks and rampant voter-suppression techniques and laws, Ratpublicans, despite receiving significantly fewer votes throughout many so-called Red States, still managed to maintain an overly powerful minority in the House and Senate.

“I’ve never been a liberal.”
Joe Manchin, September 30, 2021

“No fucking shit.”
Ed Venture, slightly later, September 30, 2021

We have been remiss by not giving discredit where discredit is due. Freshman senator Kyrsten Sinema (“D”-AZ) has been every bit as full-of-shit as Manchin. The drug and medical industrial complex has prescribed $750K for Sinema, who once so medicated voted against helping reduce drug costs for Americans. While working diligently to keep Democrats from helping Americans recover from Turmp’s Make America Crippled agenda, she will not do interviews and has not given even a hint of what she wants to cut from the Build Back Better bill. Sinema recently met with a gaggle of corporate sugar-daddies/lobbyists who fawned over her (i.e., bought her) with gobs of green, “suggesting” she vote against the Democrats’ mandate to pass critical, bold legislation to save this country from Mitch Fucking McConnell and his Sedition Caucus.

Ratpublicans are anti-environment, anti-voting rights, anti-poor people, and just to show how much they are the party of Turmp, McConnell has decided that the government need not bother paying the debts accrued under Turmp, despite warnings from all quarters that doing so would mean economic disaster for the country and for countless American households. What the fuck does Moscow Mitch care? McConnell insisted that Democrats deal with the Debt Ceiling on their own, and then filibustered efforts to do so. Every single Ratpublican senator stood with McConnell and voted to shut down the government and destroy the American economy by stiffing creditors. Every. Single. One.

Every poll taken in the last 10 months shows that the American public supports Biden’s social safety net bill, both as a whole, and almost all of its constituent parts. Things like guaranteed pre-K, child-care, adding community college to K-12 public education, Medicare for all, a permanent child tax credit, cheaper drug prices for seniors, more equitable taxation of the super-rich, seriously addressing the climate crisis, etc. have massive support. Even in states like Joe Manchin’s West Virginia.

Sinema, hanging on every word and one arm of Ratpublican Rob Portman.

Another state where these policies are popular, Arizona, also has a faux-Democratic senator – Kyrsten Sinema. Sinema, though better educated, is coming across as no less ignorant, arrogant and anti-democratic (not to mention anti-Democratic) than intellectually insufficient hacks like Marjorie Traitor Greene and Lauren “When-do-we-get-to-pry-her-fucking-guns-from-her-cold-dead-hands” Boebert. This is not a gender thing – there are certainly more than enough Men-tal midgets and Men-tal defectives in Congress: Matt Gaetz, Louis Gohmert, Madison Cawthorn, Deven Nunes, Gym Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, the historically ignorant Ron Johnson, and of course Florida governor Ron Duh-Santis come gurgling to mind like an attack of e-coli for the brain. And keep an eye out for up-and-dumber Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). Wow, that’s quite a list. Are there that many more men because there are just more of them in government or because men are just worse? We may never know.

Manchin and Sinema represent a very small minority in their party and in reality, they represent their large corporate donors above all else. Let them deny it all they want. I thought that in a democracy the majority was supposed to be allowed to enact their agenda. Ninety-six percent of Dems in the Congress want to enact the agenda that they and Joe Biden ran and won on. We have a few holdouts who can obstruct whatever they want, for whatever reason they want, most notably Manchin and Sinema. They have expressed more fealty to the filibuster than to their party, their constituents (who by large margins support most of the Build Back Better package), or the Constitution. While it is their prerogative to disagree with policy, shouldn’t they respect the overwhelming majority of their party? This is not a rhetorical question. And the answer is YES.

The funny thing is, killing this recovery package, the first one that finally, and significantly favors the working class (and the environment) in almost 100 years, will likely serve to kill the political futures of the two most high-profile bill killers. Unsurprisingly, Sinema is blaming progressive Democrats and not every single Ratpublican for holding up Joe Biden’s signature legislation. Is she more full of shit than Manchin? You make the call.

Then there are the admitted Ratpublicans, would rather see Democrats fail than see Americans succeed. They just can’t get enough of Manchin's and Sinema’s corporate whoring.

I. Mangrey, obviously.