Yesterday I happened to be standing in line at the supermarket checkout behind two women who were talking to each other about how ‘everything has become so expensive.’ And what bothered them most of all was that even with a slight drop in the price of gasoline, they were still paying ‘way too much’ in order to get where they needed to go in their cars.
Where did they need to go? First and foremost, they needed to drive 50 miles round-trip up to New Hampshire because that’s where they always went to buy cigarettes. The New Hampshire state motto is ‘Live Free or Die’ and these two women would obviously prefer dying from cancer than dying from having to pay higher taxes on their cigarettes.
Know why everyone, or just about everyone who gladly voted for Joe in 2020 hates him now? Because the Fake News media is using him as a whipping boy in the same way they used Trump over the past six years. But if Trump can’t even get coverage from Fox these days, you know goddamn well that he’s no longer good click-bait for the liberal side.
And to show you how utterly stupid and politically bankrupt the so-called Progressive wing of the Democratic Party has become, the latest poll actually has Hillary Clinton ahead of Joe as a Presidential candidate in 2024.
Hillary Clinton. Remember her? She’s the one who couldn’t be bothered to campaign over the last couple of months in 2016. She’s the one who lost Michigan by less votes than Jill Stein received because she said that appearing in Michigan after Labor Day would just provoke more voters to come out and vote GOP.
Exactly what the Progressive Democrats will now do since yesterday’s announcement that Joe Manchin has signed onto a major spending bill that will put nearly $400 billion into Green Deal programs, as well as subsidizing low-income access to the Affordable Care Act and not increasing taxes on any family earning less than $400,000 but increasing the corporate tax, remains to be seen.
But it only took Bernie Sanders about five minutes to denounce the plan, his statement no doubt being a signal to his Progressive followers that they all need to stand up and complain that the deal is just going to make things worse for the ‘average’ American and won’t solve the inflation problem at all.
It’s really a comment on the lack of even the slightest degree of self-awareness by these so-called Progressives that they happen to completely mis-understand what the term ‘progressive’ actually means. The Progressive Movement started as a reaction against Big Government and the failure of government to address the needs of the Common Man.
Now the fact that Glenn Beck and some other alt-right shitheads co-opted the word and use it to attack liberals who support the role and presence of government to mitigate certain inequities in everyday life, doesn’t mean that current-day Progressives should go along with how those class-based reactionaries consciously mis-read and mis-state current political affairs.
For that matter, Progressives should also restrain themselves from buying into the idea that Bernie Sanders represents some kind of Socialist alternative to the modern, capitalist state. Bernie ran a very clever 2016 primary campaign by swiping and using the Occupy Wall Street email list, but if you think he’s any kind of Socialist, think again.
Socialism doesn’t mean that we’ll have single-payer health care. Socialism doesn’t mean that kids can go to college for free. Socialism means that we get rid of private ownership of the ‘means of production,’ and I have never heard Bernie say that we should close the Chamber of Commerce down.
Joe did the one thing in 2020 that we needed to do. He got rid of Trump. And I don’t care how many things he had to promise in order to pull out the anti-Orange Shithead vote. I also don’t care whether he won by committing election ‘fraud’ on a massive scale.
The bottom line is that we had someone sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office who actually said there were some good Nazis marching through Charlottesville – and he said it out loud.
As far as I’m concerned, every single so-called Progressive Democrat should be forever grateful to Joe for sending Trump back to his cabana in Palm Beach. And for those Progressives who threaten to sit out 2024 if Joe runs again, to quote Grandpa, they can all ‘chob en drerd’ (read: stick it up their you-know-what).