Manchin: The Grinch Who Stole the Commies’ Christmas

BUCK: I told you that the Democrats are finally realizing Joe Biden is a joke, right, that this isn’t working, this is not going well. And in case anyone needed a reminder about all that we have the latest from Joe Manchin, who is the West Virginia Grinch who stole the commies’ Christmas. He is not letting the Build Back Better bill, tough to say, a lot of Bs in there, go forward because he understands that this will be reckless from a spending perspective. He can’t justify it to the very red state of West Virginia that he represents, and so Manchin over the weekend in West Virginia, the Biden agenda hanging in the balance. There’s no bipartisan anything — remember we got a 50-50 Senate, folks. The Democrats should be to Republicans saying, what can we agree on and get done? Instead, the Democrats say, you know, blank you, Republicans.

We’re gonna do whatever the heck we want, even if we don’t have the votes to do it, we’re gonna find some way, we’re gonna mandate it, we’re gonna executive order it, we’re gonna twist arms, we’re gonna act like we have a mandate when we have no such thing, not even close. If anything what the last election showed was that even in a pandemic, once in-a-century pandemic year, and the president in power is obviously gonna get a lot of blame and they’ve weaponized that against Trump, people were still like, I don’t know about these Democrats, though. You know, we’re gonna give Democrats a shot in some places, unfortunately they decided to do this. I’m talking about House races, Senate races too, not just the presidency.

And the promise that the Democrats were implicitly making it Joe Biden at the top of the ticket is we’re not gonna be crazy. Don’t worry, America, the libs will not be crazy. Turns out they had no — ever, no actual intention of keeping that promise. And Joe Manchin is like, that’s not gonna fly in West Virginia. Here you go with him saying “no” to Build Back Better.

MANCHIN: I’ve always said this, Bret. If I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it. And I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t. I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there.

BRET BAIER: You’re done? This is — this is a “no”?

MANCHIN: This is a “no” on this legislation. I have tried everything I know to do.

BUCK: He says “no.” The framing around this issue from the media is hysterical and pretty off-putting at the same time, pretty concerning ’cause of how dishonest it is. You have people like Representative Omar, Representative AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC is not clever enough to be intentionally funny but she is often unintentionally hilarious. So she does provide, it’s great for talk media — talk radio. It’s great for people that are in the opposition ’cause you say, well, at least she’s gonna say something entertaining. She thinks it’s serious, but it’s not. All of a sudden our sacred institutions of government, our sacrosanct Senate is a nondemocratic institution, they’re saying.

If you missed it, yesterday on MSNBC, it was very entertaining. The best thing to watch when Democrats lose important elections, or they lose on an important issue, for me you flip on MSNBC and all of a sudden you’re wildly entertained because they’re gonna say crazy stuff and they’re so emotionally invested in this and they don’t live in reality and so you get to watch all of it unfold, you go, whoo, man, this is rough day over there.

Here we go. We have a whole bunch of people weighing in on this. First let’s start with Bernie Sanders of Vermont and how he is reacting to Joe Manchin. I’ll tell you why he’s reacting this way, but let’s hear from Senator Sanders.

SANDERS: He’s gonna have a lot of explaining to do to the people of West Virginia to tell them why he doesn’t have the guts to take on the drug companies and lower the costs of prescription drugs, why he is not prepared to expand home health care, West Virginia is one of the poorest states in this country. He’s gonna have to tell the people of West Virginia why he doesn’t want expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and eyeglasses. I hope that we will bring a strong bill to the floor of the Senate as soon as we can and let Mr. Manchin explain to the people of West Virginia why he doesn’t have the guts to stand up to powerful special interests.

BUCK: Somebody should explain to Bernie Sanders that you can’t vote for Biden and get the Bernie agenda without some people figuring it out. That’s what they did. That’s why we said Joe Biden was the Trojan horse. The Democrat Party emotionally and psychologically is aligned with Bernie Sanders on stuff like this. It’s increasingly the Socialist Party. Not all Democrats are socialist, but all socialists are Democrats within the Democrat Party, at least those that have any power or influence. And they increasingly are the ones directing the policy — the policy priorities. They’re it. Joe Biden was just meant to lull people into a false sense of normalcy. That was his whole gig, the whole job. “Been around for 40, 50, who knows how many years. No joke.” Everyone goes, okay, can’t be that crazy, we’ve seen this guy forever. Yeah, he’s a loser but he’s been around forever.

It turns out they put forward Joe Biden, they wanted a Bernie agenda. Well, that doesn’t fly. That doesn’t work. People like Joe Manchin, and notice the difference in coverage you get from the media when back in the day John McCain, for example, would break with the Republican Party on an issue like Obamacare repeal and the Trump presidency. He was a maverick, country before party, all this stuff. Joe Manchin breaks with his party on this issue and they lie to you about the math behind it. I can’t tell you how many places I’ve seen in the media them saying, “One Senator should it be allowed to stand in the way of Joe Biden.” It’s not one Senator. It is 51 Senators. Right? It’s not one person. It is every Republican plus that person in the United States Senate.

And you can tell the Democrats, for all their whining, for years under the Trump presidency about our sacred institution, the moment they don’t get what they want from the process, those institutions are no longer sacred. They have to be burned to the ground, reformed, redone, remade. Doesn’t matter. Run roughshod over constitutional separation of powers. They want what they want and they want it right away. And if they don’t get it, oh, then they declare that it’s antidemocratic. That’s right. They say these things. AOC says it is antidemocratic, the United States Senate, as if this wasn’t the whole point of setting up a Senate that you would have states that were actually represented, that you would have a balance of powers and federalism, ah, doesn’t matter, forget about all that. So they don’t teach basic civics in school anymore, as you know, in most places. And that’s how you have CNN anchors who go on to, you know, make millions of dollars and know nothing about the government they talk about day in and day out nor its history. They just know that they’re really into diversity and inclusion and preferred pronouns ’cause that will do it, that really matters a whole heck of a lot. That will get it all done. All right.

I told you about some of the joys of watching the left wing meltdown on MSNBC yesterday when Manchin came out and said no. Okay. He’s told them for months this is what I would be willing to do, and they keep saying, no you’ve gotta spend a whole lot more than that, and he says “no.” This is the way it works. This is the system we have. Representative Omar was very displeased.

OMAR: We all knew that Senator Manchin couldn’t be trusted, the excuses that he just made I think are complete bull (bleep). It is really disheartening to hear him say that he has been trying to get there for the people of West Virginia because that’s a complete lie. There are just so many things that, you know, the people of West Virginia desperately need. And we know that he is not working on behalf of their interests. And I really am just completely disappointed and disgusted by his reasoning.

BUCK: I’m sure he’s so scared. She’s disgusted by his reasoning. It’s pretty straightforward. They don’t have a mandate for the biggest spending bill not during a war, not emergency spending bill in history. They don’t have a mandate for it. The American people did not vote for it. And they don’t, even more importantly right now, have the votes for it in the Senate. Too bad, libs. Take the L. But there’s something broader here too. There’s a fellow, he’s not a conservative. He’s just an interesting public thinker, a former, or still Silicon Valley investor guy, his name is Naval Ravikant. You might have seen him on the Joe Rogan show in the past and other shows. Very interesting guy. And he had a thought that I found particularly profound on the issue both of the covid situation we’re in right now on that as well as on just everything you see right now from the Democrats’ approach, the way they think that — oh, I’m sorry.

It actually isn’t Naval. It’s a guy that Naval retweeted. I had to pull this up right now. Some guy named Pomp on Twitter. I’ve never seen this guy, before but Naval was the one who retweeted. Naval says very interesting things too. But here’s the tweet. I just wanted to share this with you. “The United States is self-organizing into two groups: one that believes the government is going to save them and one who knows that is a lie.” That is true about covid. It is true about the economy. It is true about everything. there are people who want to live by the lie that the government is their friend and is there for them and cares for them and will take care of them if only they turn over their property and their freedom and their dignity.

And then there are other people, whether it’s on covid or it’s on economic issues, on anything who say, “Enough. We see the failure all around us. We know that the other side is living by lies.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Here’s AOC, part of the Manchin is making us all very sat chorus out there.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: This idea that we can just go on Fox News and legislate through television and say that that we’re going to threaten to block ambassadorships or threaten a filibuster, or threaten to vote no, have that result in actual institutional inaction is unacceptable. And, again, it takes the president of the United States, who I believe needs to be more forceful on the filibuster.

BUCK: Forceful on the filibuster. Do you hear that, folks? Remember our sacred institutions and other democracy and all this? Oh, the president is supposed to be forceful. I understand. They’ll say, well, he’s supposed to sell the idea that they break the filibuster. But now who’s the one who’s being autocratic? Can you imagine if during the Trump administration the filibuster had been broken to get through an enormous and consequential piece of legislation, the Democrats would have acted like it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor every day for as long as that conversation was underway. That’s what would have occurred. But because you have a Democrat in the office who can’t actually sell his proposals who’s just not very good at this, they come up with, oh, Manchin’s breaching his commitments to Biden. Commitments to Biden? Has no commitment to Biden.

His obligation is to the people he represents of the state of West Virginia who don’t want this massive socialist spending bill. It’s pretty straightforward, folks. And they keep saying, no, you have to spend more, and Manchin says, not gonna do it. And they say, okay, okay. That’s cool. But you’re gonna spend more. And Manchin says, not gonna do it, as I told you before. They just think with the institutional power they have of the Democrat legacy, corporate media and all the different levers they can pull that they will just strong-arm Manchin into breaking that. And I will be honest with you. I thought they might have been successful with that too. Turns out no. So far they are not. Now, that could change in the new year. I’m sure there are all kinds of phone calls being made to Joe Manchin about this.

But he is a “no” to Build Back Better, which means that the Democrats right now are running into a midterm election in the first term of Joe Biden where they have no major accomplishments to point to of any kind and a lot of disasters, the border, the economy, covid mitigation. Let’s call it what it is. This is disastrous for a Biden administration that said that if 200,000 people die under your watch you shouldn’t be president. Well, almost, what, 400,000, close to it, have died under Biden’s watch? But it’s different, it’s so different, right? That’s what they’ll tell you ’cause they have no principles.