Joe Manchin cut an ad for a Republican? Eeenteresting, but ask yourself this. What Democrat would ask Manchin to cut an ad this cycle? The man has to do something to keep himself occupied in the midterms, no?

Actually, the context here is more complicated:

lol Joe Manchin brags about sinking Build Back Better in an ad he just cut for a Republican candidate for Congress.

Democrats were never going to get this guy on board for any part of their agenda. pic.twitter.com/0ILc2pScCu

— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin) May 1, 2022

Manchin cut this ad for David McKinley in the GOP House primary for West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District. Both McKinley and Alex Mooney are now fighting for the same seat in the GOP primary after redistricting jammed them together. Mooney is the 2nd CD incumbent, while McKinley is the incumbent for WV-01. It’s R+17, so the primary winner will almost certainly keep the seat.

So why is Manchin getting involved? Mooney is the MAGA candidate in this race, and he tried to rally his base by claiming that McKinley supported Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, apparently a false charge. Manchin wants to push back and help the less-MAGA McKinley to stay in Congress, which is pretty much what Democrats would predictably want to see anyway.

However, it’s certainly fair to notice that Manchin doesn’t sound remorseful at all for torpedoing Biden’s massive progressive spend-o-rama. And while Manchin has offered some support for climate-change legislation, he wants it to be in the form of a regular-order energy policy bill with rational approaches to all forms of energy production. Politico reports today that Democrats are now despairing on using reconciliation for their green-energy agenda now, too:

The man in the center of it all says the blunt force of a party-line filibuster sidestep “is for taxes” and that he’s “committed to an energy-climate bill that makes sense for the United States of America.” So does Manchin want a bipartisan energy bill and a Democratic-only tax bill that includes some climate spending?

“I’m keeping all options open,” he replied in vintage fashion.

The West Virginia Democrat, who four months ago derailed Democrats’ $1.7 trillion bid known as “Build Back Better,” met privately with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last week to talk about inflation. Schumer told Democrats afterward it was a positive meeting and remarked that because Republicans don’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy, the filibuster-evading effort is “the only way to get rid of inflation.”

Is that really what Manchin communicated, though? Not according to Manchin:

In an interview, Manchin was pretty blunt about his message to the Democratic leader.

“I said, ‘Chuck, if you do anything, you’ve got to be serious about inflation. You’ve got to be serious about paying down the debt,’” Manchin recalled. “We’ll be facing a hell of a mess on Social Security in 2026. We haven’t addressed that. There’s so many things that need to be addressed, and it’s not by spending more money.”

Clearly, Schumer and Biden aren’t on the same page as Manchin. They’re not even in the same book, and maybe not even in the same library. And whose fault is that? These are discussions that should have taken place in January 2021 while crafting the agenda, not in May 2022 as part of an agenda rescue plan. It’s not as if they didn’t realize that Democrats only had 50 votes in the upper chamber until last week, after all.

Democrats want to blame Manchin for their woes. The truth is that their leadership is entirely comprised by fools and incompetents, and their failures can be easily traced right back to that core problem. The focus shouldn’t be on Manchin; it should be on the one-note president who doesn’t have a strategic brain cell in his entire head.