President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Spent much time in the parts of Kentucky and Tennessee where the roads are intermittently paved and people have been in the system for generations? I'm not trying to be flip or rude, but it's a different world from the nice, safe places like Nashville or Murfreesboro or Bowling Green where it feels like there's plenty of everything and certain luxuries are presumed to be givens in your average household.

The people in those areas have been commodified for specific types of work for generations. When sectors of those industries collapsed, they were marooned in food/health care/educational deserts. When Obama visited West Virginia and then said, "All they care about is their God and their guns," all I could think was how they missed an opportunity to listen and really connect with those people. Instead, they talked at them, passed judgment because they were an homogenous "them" and moved on to nice folks like themselves.

We talk too damned much and don't listen nearly enough.




Yeah, I'm wordy on here. People who only know me by words on a screen tend to think I don't like them in real life because I don't talk much at first blush. I'm just listening.

 

Do we blame them for being too stupid to know they are their own worst enemy, both politically and in life? Or after 40 years of voting against their own interests do we relish that their lives are worse with libertard tear?

 

Gonna be real fun when West Virginia is down to 200k population someday and gets the same two senators as Cali or Texas.

 

"Lobbyist money was like a drug. But what was even more like a drug was the drugs my constituents will buy with tax credits."--Sen. Joe Manchin

 

Change is going to take time. It's rare that we see older people fully accept the reality we see. Sometimes it's a matter of cracking open a door or window by finding some small commonality. If we just write off whole swaths of people, nothing is ever going to change. I've written about going back to places in Kentucky where St. Andrew's Crosses have been replaced by Trump flags. They bought the lie that he was one of them. It's tragic because we've reached a point where some of those divides have become, for lack of a better word, weaponized.

 

What if the dope fiends of West By God promise to buy their opioids from the pharmaceutical company Manchin’s daughter runs?

 

That's better...

 

Don't get me started on people equating a company's "revenue" with its "profit" and complaining they "only" paid $X in taxes on revenue of $X+Y+Z.

 

Imagine if Trump had come along 30-40 years sooner and the tobacco farmers of the Black Patch got fetishized the way coal miners are today. He’d have ordered cigarette vending machines in every high school.

 

Manchin is not taking getting blasted by the White House well at all. He's whining that some unnamed staffer "knows what they did" to cause him to come out against BBB. Because he's not real bright, he added that he always knew he'd oppose it but let the other Democrats negotiate with him. In other words, he acted in bad faith from Jump Street. He further whined that he might have to leave the party. The problem with being a turncoat in a 100-member Senate is that then neither side trusts you. And voters usually hate it. He's voted with the Democrats too often in 11 years to win a Republican primary against some Trumper.

 

Leave the party, you fuckin jive turkey. Threaten on.