If we had to have a Democrat in the highest office in the land named Joe, why couldn’t it have been Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who at least thinks about putting the interests of America first? There are a bunch of things that I wouldn’t agree with him on, but he’s light years ahead of Joe Biden.

Manchin was on “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd on Sunday.

First, Manchin said he wouldn’t take things off the table, like the no-fly zone. Now, that doesn’t mean that he was advocating for it. But we saw with Joe Biden, when he took things off the table – such as troops – Vladimir Putin knew he had nothing to worry about, and that likely added into his calculus that he could invade without the only real consequences he was concerned about. While Manchin was not advocating involvement in a no-fly zone, he said we should provide Ukraine with what they needed to defend themselves. Given that we talked them out of their nuclear weapons and a lot of conventional weapons to enter into a security agreement in 1994, that’s something we can do that keeps our word without escalating the conflict.

Then Manchin dealt with the question of why we are still buying Russian oil.

Chuck Todd made the great point that the U.S. isn’t leading on the issue, that on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Administration would be in favor of cutting buying Russian oil if the “entire alliance does it, too.” Why would you not lead on that and/or just do it ourselves? Todd asked if there was support in Congress for doing it unilaterally.

Manchin said we should be leading on this, cutting Russian oil and upping American production.

“I would say this, the people in my state of West Virginia, believe it’s basically foolish for us to keep buying products and giving profit and giving money to Putin to be able to use against the Ukrainian people.

That’s exactly what he’s doing. So why wouldn’t we lead? Why wouldn’t we show the resolve we have? I understand there’s more dependency in the world. But you know, here’s the problem, we have the ability to ratchet up and be able to backfill. We have the energy, we have the resources here. And we have the technology. We’re a million barrels short a day right now that we could just ramp up like that. We can do certain things. And we don’t have to put any more pain on the American people who are already suffering with inflation now.”

Manchin said that there’s a lot we can do.

“Our energy that we produce in America is better and cleaner than any place else in the world. So anything that we backfill is going to be better than what they produce. The gas from L&G that we can send over, expanding the ports, we’ve got basically requests for permits that are still standing and we haven’t given. We need to do that. We’ve got pipelines – I’ve got a Mountain Valley pipeline in the state of West Virginia. It takes two – it will take two BCF, two billion cubic feet a day into the marketplace immediately. And you know what –it’s 95% done. I can’t get it done. That’s the kind of thing that we need to be pushing to get done to have in the bank to secure our own supply.

Is Joe Biden even thinking of any of this? No, he is consciously deciding not to increase our energy production ability or independence. His big claim of addressing American energy concerns, that has already resulted in crushing gas prices, was to say he was releasing 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That would account for about a day-and-a-half of U.S. usage. A laughable response, and hardly something that would deal with the long-term issue. But hey, at least he is pilfering our savings account.

Moreover, Biden appears to be open to reaching out to other countries within the evil empire Axis to enrich them instead. They’re about to re-enter a disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, which by all accounts is worse than the first one, and they’re refusing to rule out they might get oil from them. Then they’re also reaching out to Venezuela, another supremely bad move.

But Biden is just so entrenched in the leftist agenda to destroy American energy, he can’t even consider what Manchin is suggesting or any other ideas that make sense and help American energy independence.

The final thing that Manchin skewered was any talks of re-upping any version of Build Back Better. Manchin said that wasn’t going anywhere with the skyrocketing, that Joe Biden needed to “get your financial house in order.” Amen.