Washington Sucks

Three barbs deep into a digital mano-a-mano with Vice President Mike Pence, Republican Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin told us everything he thinks we need to know about our nation’s capital Wednesday night: “Washington Sucks.”

Over at USA Today, Deirdre Shesgreen asked why. What, she wants to know, is pushing Republicans (and some Democrats) out of Congress at such a rapid pace? Why have 57 of our fair representatives declared in recent months that they won’t seek re-election?

There are two reasons, according to her sources: Representatives are either sexual harassers who have finally been brought to (at least partial) justice or have come to realize, like Manchin, that Washington Sucks.

Here are all the ways D.C.’s politicos tried to quiet-scream how much they hate our capital:

• Former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Virginia): “Washington’s not a very pleasant place for anybody.”
• Davis, again: “The public hates you.”
• Shesgreen herself: “[Washington is a] toxic stew of congressional dysfunction, perilous electoral prospects, term limits on committee chairmen, and an increasingly rightward tilting party with a president widely see as erratic at its helm.”
• Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina): “There is a time to come and a time to go.”
• David Wasserman, political analyst, Cook Political Report: “Many of them are deciding that it’s not worth trying to ride this out.”
• Davis, again: “This is not the party that [Republicans] grew up with.”
• Davis, again: “The Republican base had kind of rotated from the country club to the country.”
• Davis, again: “You look at this and you say, geez, what am I doing here?”

Don’t say Joe Manchin never did anything for you, folks, except denigrate the office he sold his constituents out to obtain.