Manchin and Sinema

Green Eagle, with his inevitable inability to keep his mouth shut, has some things to say about the issues with Sinema and Manchin.

First of all, let me make it clear that I loathe both of them and would be happy to hear that they had been run down on a gravel road in Texas by a teenager rolling coal in a pickup.  Anyway, on with my comment.

Let's just get one thing straight before I continue.  It is absolutely standard practice for all reporting, both on the left and right, to refer to this country's political differences as between liberals and conservatives.  That is completely false.  Real Conservatives from the past, like Benjamin Disraeli or Winston Churchill would hate these people who are cozying up to fascists and even out and out Nazis.  In fact, the struggle in this country is between vaguely honest politicians and a pack of corrupt criminals who will do any despicable thing to keep rich sociopaths financing their careers.

So, that is pretty much what we have with Manchin and Sinema.  Particularly with Manchin, who is a coal mine owner himself, and hardly needed much encouragement to join with the likes of the Koch brothers and the Mercers to strip our country dry.  With Sinema, this seems to be mixed with an out of control ego and a sadistic desire to make people suffer, making her a sort of female mini-Trump, but the rest applies to her too.

Well, let's face one fact:  Yeah, rich criminals have managed to purchase these two Democrats, and undoubtedly a couple more who are willing to let Manchin and Sinema take the bows in public, but are right there with them.  But do not forget, these same people have bought all fifty Republican Senators, and in fact have bought the entire party, rigging it so nobody who would stand up to them has a ghost of a chance to win a Senate seat.  The rich guys who own the Republican party will corrupt absolutely anyone they can, so it is no wonder that they have gotten to a couple of Democratic Senators.  But Manchin and Sinema are not the problem; the fifty Republicans are the problem.

Consider the following:

"Boosted by their dominance of smaller states between the coasts, Republicans have controlled the Senate for 22 of the 40 years since 1980. But according to calculations shared with me by Lee Drutman of the centrist New America think tank, if you assign half of each state’s population to each senator, the GOP has represented a majority of the American public for only one two-year period during that span: 1997 to 1998. Today, according to Drutman’s figures, the 47 Democratic senators represent almost 169 million people, while the 53 Republican senators represent about 158 million. Measured by votes, the disparity is even more glaring: The current Democratic senators won about 14 million more votes (69 million) than the Republican incumbents (55 million), according to calculations by Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution."

In fact, in 2016, a quarter of Senate seats represent 59.5 percent of the population (and it's only getting worse.)  That is to say that 40% of the population holds 75% of the senate seats.  And this 40% is heavily weighted toward non-college educated white people- i.e. Republicans.

So what is the answer to this offered by our "liberal" mainstream press?  Consider this idiotic analysis, by Jeff Greenfield, from the Washington Post:

"...in reality, the Senate isn’t quite the unsolvable problem that Democratic critics think it is. The chamber’s current Republican tilt is political, not structural — and it could be overcome without any changes to the Constitution. The Democrats just have to start winning elections.

 "...the Democrats are fortunate: They cannot build a time machine to bring them back to 1789...They cannot erase Article V from the Constitution...They have no choice, then, but to find the messages and the organizing tools that can break through that new red wall that stands between their national majority and the power to govern."

Sure- all the Democrats have to do to stop Republican perversion of the Senate is to win a vast supermajority of votes in the United States- they already get 14 million more votes than Senate Republicans, only to be tied into the current inability to accomplish anything.  That's the answer- just find a way to snap millions of Republican voters out of the malignant daze in which they live.  And care for a little more mainstream press stupidity?  Here's Joan McCarter:

"McConnell is in a position to create economic chaos because Manchin and Sinema put him there"

No, Joan, Manchin and Sinema didn't put him there.  The same corrupt rich people that put Manchin and Sinema there put McConnell in his office too.  

The problem is not Manchin and Sinema.  It is the stranglehold that utterly criminal billionaires have on our government.  They've bought (at least) 52 Senators- 50 Republicans and 2 Democrats- and they can replace those in a second if they prove unfaithful to the sacred principle that rich people deserve everything in this country.  The only answer to this is to destroy the ability of the hyper-rich to engage in this kind of corruption.  If it cannot be done by sane campaign laws, it will eventually done by mass violence, as has always happened in the past to out of control aristocracies.  If France in 1789 is your idea of sensible government, Republicans, just keep up what you are doing and, eventually, after who knows how much suffering, you will get to relive it.