In Case You Were Wondering...

...why in the Wide World of Sports Tim Miller hosted Old King Coal at The Bulwark.

MILLER: ...a former United States Senator and Governor of West  Virginia. his new book. It's titled Dead Center in Defense of Common Sense. It's Joe Manchin. How you doing, sir?

MILLER: Got your book right here. Gave me something to distract...

MILLER: You wrote about this um in the book ...

MILLER: So, I'm reading the book . 

MILLER: You wrote a lot in the book about how...

MILLER: Trump kind of doesn't really get talked about that much in the book ...

MILLER: You write in the book about that, right?

MANCHIN:  My book goes into all of the things that we're talking about...

MILLER:  ...most of those reforms in the book.

MILLER:   You can I mean you can tell in the book that you got frustrated...

MILLER:   So, and kind of relate it to what you write  about a lot in the book ...

MANCHIN:  You like the book?

MILLER: I like the parts of  the book ...

MILLER:   I feel it ... sometimes in the book where, it's like, it feels...

Commerce, kids.

Manchin has a shitty book to sell and Miller has an audience.

Manchin: President Trump is the person who can basically bring us together… And I'm really hoping, I believe in him, I believe he can do that… pic.twitter.com/vuhIJuvMdW

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 19, 2025

Commerce uber alles.   

Burn The Lifeboats

When God Closes a Manchin...

Pa. Sens. John Fetterman and Dave McCormick praised the U.S.'s attack on Iranian nuclear sites. 🔗 inquirer.com/news/fetterm...

[image or embed]

— Philadelphia Inquirer (@inquirer.com) June 22, 2025 at 8:32 AM

I Am The Liberal Media.

What Is Dead May Never Die

How It Started...  a post from me from 15 years ago -- three days after the odious "No Labels" scam was conjured into existence.

Note the title.

Dead Center: Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!

Yay!

In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...

...and David Fucking Brooks?

And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?

What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is --

... the "No Labels Anthem"

But nothing we did not expect, right?

I mean, ever since the Republican Base ducked out on paying the tab for a generation of being loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything by putting on funny hats, screaming about liberty and calling themselves "The Tea Party", their sleazy Centrist enablers have been seething with jealously. Quite suddenly the monster they built didn't need them anymore and the skeevy hustlers who had helped create the Racist/ Corporatist/ Dominionist Confederacy on the bones of the New Deal and the grave of the American Dream found themselves cast out and looking for their next meal ticket.

Preferably a meal ticket under a banner that -- like "Tea Party -- wouldn't keep bringing up their horribly inconvenient past as the sleazy, enabling hustlers.

Hey, kids! I have an idea! Lets peel those the icky, damning labels off of everything and -- presto! -- there is magically no longer any difference between rat poison and apple sauce!

Can I haz my million dollars now?...

 

How it's going...15 years later,

From the AP.  Note the title:

Former Sen. Joe Manchin is working on a memoir. ‘Dead Center’ is scheduled for September

Former Sen. Joe Manchin has a memoir coming out in September, what the self-styled maverick from West Virginia calls his “declaration of independence from the extremes on both sides.”

St. Martin’s Press announced Tuesday that Manchin’s “Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense” will be released Sept. 16.

Manchin, 77, announced last year he wouldn’t seek re-election after serving in the Senate since 2010 and becoming the rare Democrat to win in a state which otherwise votes for Republicans by wide margins. Manchin had long branded himself as a moderate beholden to no ideology and would often chastise Democrats or upend legislation when Senate Democrats held a tiny majority during the presidency of fellow party member Joe Biden.

Last summer, Manchin left the Democrats altogether and identified as an independent, although he continued to caucus with his former party. In a statement issued through St. Martin’s, he said that “Dead Center” was a “declaration of independence” and a handbook for governing...

Because, as I wrote 15 years ago, there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities.

And what is dead may never die.

Burn The Lifeboats

Old King Coal Can Take a Bite Right Outta My Left Ass Cheek

Remember the good old days not so very long ago when our Never Trump "allies" were using their MSNBC-adjunct platform to hector Democrats about how we should all be on our knees thanking Sweet Baby Jebus that Joe Manchin was a Democrat, and how lucky we were, and how, if we had any sense, we'd strive to make goofs like him the future of the Democratic party.  

Well, as Old King Coal fades into wealthy, ignoble obscurity, he has one knife left with which to shiv his former party in the back.  From The Guardian:

Joe Manchin warns Democratic party is ‘toxic’ as he steps down from US Senate

Lifelong Democrat who became independent gives series of warnings to former party and predicts US ‘is not going left’

US senator Joe Manchin, a lifelong Democrat who left the party earlier this year to become an independent and is now stepping down from the Senate after 15 years, issued a series of warnings on Sunday to members of his former party.

“The D-brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of – it’s just, it’s toxic,” Manchin told CNN, saying he had not been able to consider himself a Democrat “in the form of what Democratic party has turned itself into”.

Manchin, a wealthy coal tycoon, said the party’s approach had become censorious and dictatorial to ordinary Americans, and he blamed progressives for the shift...

And then, having performed the ritual hippie punching, comes the inevitable...

But he also said he believed it is time for a third party in the US – called the American party – that would serve as center ground for moderate Democrats and Republicans.

“The centrist-moderate vote decides who’s going to be the president of the United States. And when they get here, they don’t govern that way. Neither side does. They go to their respective corners,” Manchin said.

“If the center had a voice and had a party that could make both of these – the Democrat, Republican party – come back, OK, that would be something.”

The coal-ash heap of history awaits you, Senator.

Either that, or an offer to head up Trump's EPA.  

His Ecosystem Plundering Agency.  

To make things, y'know, all "bipartisany".

I Am The Liberal Media

Old King Coal Strikes Again

You will remember not so very long ago one of the most common sermons that our Never Trump "allies" would shout at us us dirty, disreputable hippies was how we must move towards the "center".   

The "center", of course, being defined as corrupt trolls like Joe Lieberman and Joe Manchin.

For God's sake, didn't we realize that the fate of the republic hung in the balance!

One example:

An Ode to Saint Joe Manchin

Democrats are mad at Joe Manchin. They ought to be grateful for him.

-- by Tim Miller

And Manchin didn't just deserve our quiet deference or even our respect: he was the noumenal ideal of "Democrat" to which we should all aspire.  And shame! shame! on us dirty, disreputable hippies for not gratefully accepting this profound wisdom from our Never Trump betters.

And then...some time later...

Joe Manchin Proves Again That He’s an Idiot With Endorsement Decision

Joe Manchin seems to think Kamala Harris is just as much a threat as Donald Trump.

Senator Joe Manchin is retiring at the end of his term, but that won’t stop him from being a Democratic Party pooper all the way through the November election.

On Tuesday, following Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement that she would do away with the filibuster in order to pass federal abortion protections, Manchin said this move was a step too far and that he’d rescind his endorsement of Harris for president...

So where's your messiah now?

I know it's the sheerest abyss-shouting to write these things, but how many times do our Never Trump "allies" have to prove they have no fucking idea what they are talking about and that their political advice is 100% stupid juice before they shut up and sit down.  Remember, these are the same people who were so impotent and so arrogantly clueless that they couldn't even save their own goddamn party from Donald Trump...who easily took over the Republican party using the very same doomsday machine that these smug fuckers spent their adult lives building.   

Well, at least they can still count on Mitt Romney, right?

Right?

When asked if he might endorse Harris in September, [Romney] told a reporter that he's "got nothing more on that front," adding "we'll see" if he writes in Ann Romney again.

I Am The Liberal Media

Emperor Manchin Has Spoken

Sorry ladies, Emperor Joe has decided that your uteri belong to the state.  

Manchin tells reporters he will vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act this afternoon pic.twitter.com/sOvTIjxDwl

— Alan He (@alanhe) May 11, 2022

I guess letting women decide what to do with their own bodies risks the domestic supply of future West Virginia coal diggers.

Better luck in the next life!

Burn The Lifeboats

Area Crack Manufacturers Celebrate Embargo on Russian Crack

 

From The Intelligencer:

Manchin, McKinley: Ban Russian Oil, Boost Domestic Energy

...

“That is the quickest thing we can do to put energy into the market and it needs to be done immediately.”

Coal is also available for use. The senator wants to utilize what the U.S. has available.

“Putin has weaponized energy,” Manchin said, adding the country needs to have a response to that and have something just as good or better.

“We do,” he added. “We have God-given energy and the best way to produce it.”

No Half Measures

Know

Your

Foe.

Burn The Lifeboats