For starters today we're looking at the first 2/3rds of a genuinely heartbreaking story from Virginia, about the exhausting struggles that so many of us are going through.
Why only the first 2/3rds?
That shall become clear in the fullness of time.
Why am I leading off this post with a picture of a much younger me decked out in the reddest sports jacket ever created (hand-made for me by my late mother), with my clip-on bow-tie and Kmart shirt, standing in front of our trusty VW Fastback, probably on my way to a freshman debate tournament?
Again, all shall be revealed in the fullness of time.
First, from "The Daily Yonder":
Commentary: Living in the Shadow of the American DreamA father’s reflections on the quiet, unseen struggles of working families today.
I live in Shenandoah County, Virginia. I’m a factory worker. A farmer. A father of two
girls, one still in diapers. I get up before the sun, and most days I don’t sit down until
after it’s gone.
My partner Hannah and I raise our girls on a small farm in the Valley. She works
full-time too-though nobody calls it that. She’s a caregiver, a homemaker, a livestock
handler, and a mother. She doesn’t get a paycheck. She doesn’t get a break. She
doesn’t get counted.
We’ve relied on a cistern for water for over three years. I’m trying to save up to dig a
well before it runs dry. We heat with firewood I cut myself. We raise animals for milk,
eggs, and meat because the grocery bill outpaces my paycheck.
We’ve stayed unmarried—not because we don’t love each other, but because getting
married would kick my partner and our daughters off the Medicaid that keeps them
healthy.
My employer offers insurance, sure—but only if I pay nearly as much as our mortgage. I
can’t, so we stay as we are; in love but locked out.
I’m not ashamed of our life. It’s honest work, and it’s full of love. However, I am ashamed that in a country as wealthy as ours, people like us are left out in the cold.
When the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” passed, it was marketed as a win for working Americans. From where I stand, it looks like the opposite. Cuts to Medicaid, reduced support for struggling families, and a ballooning deficit that somehow still leaves us more exposed than before.
You can dress it up however you want, but if it leaves working families behind, it’s not serving the people. This bill, like so many before it, rewards the already powerful while punishing the people who hold up the economy in invisible ways. It gives to those who lobby and takes from those who labor. It reinforces a message I’ve felt in my bones for years: You’re on your own...
Genuine. Heartfelt. Tragic. So what kind of heartless asshole would side-eye this honest man's real suffering?
Again, in the fullness of time...
But now, a little history.
From dawn of the Liberal blogosphere I've tried to keep this blog (mostly) focused on larger political and media issues that span multiple election cycles. I don't have a staff of 30, and have never been set up to deliver a new hit of Fresh! ALL! CAPS! Outrage! Every! 90! Minutes!
Nor would I want to, even though I understand that there's fame and fortune to be found in delivering INDIGNATION! on an industrial scale.
Needless to say I am indignant and outraged about what is happening to our country, and have been since long before I started blogging. In the intervening decades, like you, I've read thousands of "OMG! Can you believe Republicans are doing this very bad thing?!?!" posts.
And the obvious answer to each of those outrages is, well, of course I can believe it, because for decades they have not only been doing very bad things, but they have been getting exponentially worse.
And the worse Republicans get, the more "OMG! Can your believe Republicans are doing this very bad thing!!" Substacks and podcasts spring into existence, using ever more strident language to reflect your perfectly appropriate indignation and outrage back to you.
But while indignation and outrage may be appropriate reactions to the sad and scary condition our country is in, they are are poor diagnostic tools. They don't get us to the source of the problem, and how can you fix a problem if you can't figure out what's causing it? Which is why, over these last 20 years, I've tried to look at the sad, scary, and exponentially worsening state of our country through an appropriately long lens. To track its trajectory like an interstellar object hurtling our way: where did it come from, where is it going, and does it pose a threat to life on Earth?
This is from me in 2012. I wrote it on the occasion of my 7th blogiversary and I chose it today from among many, many other candidates largely because of the picture I used as the lead graphic (as seen above.)
Here's the quote:
The Centrism of "Both Sides Do It!" is the spider hole into which the Pig People scuttle every time another tenet of their loathsome ideology blows up in their face.
Of course, if you are still a Conservative in the Year of Our Lord 2012, I expect nothing better. You're a cultural dead-loss and beyond redemption, and while the rest of us may be required to share a country with you, we are under no obligation to treat you with anything other than contempt.
But the Pig People would be nothing but a minor nuisance -- a boil on the ass of democracy -- without the Centrists who keep the "Both Sides Do It" spider hole well-furnished and open for business. Pound for pound, Centrism is the biggest and most debilitating lie in American politics bar none. It is the Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible, which is why I focus so hard on those who traffic in it. They are the ones most vulnerable to and terrified of being called out in public. They are the ones we must run out of the media on a rail...
I know this all sounds drearily familiar. Over the decades I have ransacked my Big Bag O' Metaphors looking for just the right turn of a phrase that might break through the media miasma and take down the Cult of Both Sides Do It. In those efforts, I likened the Both Sides Do It lie to everything from Strontium-90 in the milk, to an insidious retrovirus:
Fake Centrism is the retrovirus that is killing our democracy's capacity to defend itself from its internal enemies: it is the immune-system-destroying disease which allows every other kind of Hate Radio/Fox News opportunistic political malignancy to run wild through our body politic. And man, once you start to notice how automatically every water-cooler Cicero and two-bit Tom Friedman uses Fake Centrism to prop up their lazy arguments, it's really creepy.
Obviously I failed. Nothing worked, and the disease still rolls merrily along. All that remains (as we used to say in the olden days of blogging) is to document the atrocities. To show how far and wide and deep the Both Sides Do It plague has spread.
Yesterday I brought you the story of the $67M Newsmax was forced to pay to settle a defamation lawsuit from the Dominion voting machine company over baseless, slanderous claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
And how did the Newsmax spokesnazi spin the settlement? How do you think.
In a statement, Newsmax said it “believed it was critically important for the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that arose in 2020.”
Both Sides Do It: the Scoundrel's Shield.
And now back to the gentleman from Virginia to finish his story.
This is where we left off:
You can dress [the so-called Big Beautiful Bill] up however you want, but if it leaves working families behind, it’s not serving the people. This bill, like so many before it, rewards the already powerful while punishing the people who hold up the economy in invisible ways. It gives to those who lobby and takes from those who labor. It reinforces a message I’ve felt in my bones for years: You’re on your own...
And this, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story:
I’m not writing this as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m writing this as a man watching families like mine wear themselves thin; working hard, doing the right things, and still falling behind.
This isn’t about Red or Blue. It’s about the fact that we’re being divided against each other while both sides forget that real Americans bleed the same when the cost of insulin triples or the cost of groceries goes up again.
And
I don’t want handouts. I want fairness. I don’t want politics. I want policy that works.
I'm not gonna deconstruct everything that's wrong with this, from the reason the price of insulin has tripled to his dividing the country up between "both sides" and "real Americans". You are all plenty smart enough to do that all by yourselves.
I will just say that these two different things can be true at the same time.
First, that the struggles his family is going through are real and tragic. And shared by millions, including by me and my family.
Second, that the writer of this column lives in Virginia's 6th congressional district. Virginia's 6th congressional district is an R+12 district. According to Wikipedia, the 6th district was one of the first areas of Virginia to turn Republican.
Many of the old Byrd Democrats in the area began splitting their tickets and voting Republican at the national level as early as the 1930s. It was also one of the first areas of Virginia where Republicans were able to break the long Democratic dominance at the state and local level. The district itself was in Republican hands from 1953 to 1983. Democrat Jim Olin then won the seat in 1982, and held it for a decade before Goodlatte won it.
Some counties in the district have not supported a Democrat for president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. For instance, Highland and Shenandoah counties last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1932, and Augusta and Roanoke counties have not supported a Democrat since 1944. The district as a whole has not supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
In 2024, Virginia's 6th congressman, Republican incumbent Benjamin Lee Cline, easily won re-election with 63.1% of the vote.
Congressman Cline was one of the 218 Republicans who voted to take Medicaid away from this gentleman's family. The bill went on to a 50-50 vote in the Senate with all but three Republicans voting in favor of taking Medicaid away from this gentleman's family. And it was Republican Vice President J.D. Vance who cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of taking Medicaid away from this gentleman's family.
On July 4, 2025, the bill taking Medicaid away from this gentleman's family was signed into law by Republican President Donald Trump
The bill was passed over universal Democratic opposition in both houses.
Which is why, in addition to being the Scoundrel's Impenetrable Shield, Both Sides Do It also remains the Sucker's All-Occasion Lament.
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