The Washington Post reverts to printing thinly-veiled opinion on its news pages again this week, with this ode to poor, poor, picked-on Joe Manchin, the last reasonable guy standing against crazed leftist harpies trying to take over the Democratic Party. It will like come as no surprise that this drivel comes from former Politico reporter Tyler Pager.

There’s Joe Manchin, Pager writes, just trying to keep the big tent flap open with (get this) “his ‘fiscally responsible and socially compassionate’ views.” As if there is anything compassionate about taking food away from children. Literally. That’s what Manchin wants to do in opposing an extension of the expanded, monthly Child Tax Credit payments. While all of the surveys done thus far on what people are using the money for, and the majority say food,

“Today’s Democratic Party,” Pager says, is dominated by “the far-left Congressional Progressive Caucus” in the House, and “the senator from West Virginia is often the party’s lone conservative voice on Capitol Hill.” He then quotes a bunch of former Democratic officials—some of whom haven’t been elected in decades—to restoke the old fire of the “classic struggle in our party between the protest wing and the practical wing.” That’s former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard, who left that office at the end of 1990. Then there’s former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost her South Florida seat to a Republican in 2020. She blames her loss, Pager writes, on “far-left rhetoric such as calls to ‘defund the police.’” As if “defund the police” was the Democratic platform in 2020.

The thing about this story that is particularly galling is that it’s presented as the dirty hippies—the House CPC—fighting President Joe Biden’s moderate agenda, the agenda that got him elected, instead of trying to keep it intact. Everything in the Build Back Better bill that the CPC has attempted to keep alive has been negotiated down from what Biden had proposed. Never mind that reality, here’s how it’s presented in this Post news story.

Let us really remember who got Joe Biden elected: People of color. Let us also remember that those are the people disproportionately harmed by the previous administration, by the pandemic, by income inequality, by just about every damned thing. Pager and the Blue Dog Democrats he quotes all carefully avoid the race question, but in a case of both-sidesism actually working, he also quotes. Rep. Cory Bush, Democrat of Missouri, who tells that truth.

Again, that transformative change was Joe Biden’s vision to begin with and the vision of pretty much every Democrat in Congress (at least publicly) with the sole exception of Joe Manchin. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, also a Democratic problem child, hasn’t even complained about underserving poor people using the nice things they’re given to buy drugs or play hooky from work (actual Manchin arguments). She just doesn’t want her new friends among the corporate super-rich to have to pay more in taxes to pay for the nice things for everyone else.

In reality, it’s Joe Manchin, the political traditional media, and a bunch of has-been Democrats against pretty much everybody else, including Joe Biden. But this is presented by this Post story in the news pages as a fight for the soul of the party with Manchin as the hero standing against the hippies—a story that political media has been rehashing since the Clinton era.