Bette Midler has had a successful career, but this does not make one a perfect speaker as her recent tweeting shows.
On Monday, the 76-year-old took to the social media site and slammed Democratic Senator Joe Manchin for his recently announced opposition to President Joe Biden’s social spending bill. Dubbed the Build Back Better Act, the legislation would expand the nation’s social safety net and modify and enact a number of other policies. In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Manchin said that the national debt, geopolitical unrest, and the COVID-19 pandemic moved him away from the legislation getting his vote in the evenly divided Senate where every vote counts.
However, this was not enough for Midler, so she let her scorn stream out.
She apologized a few minutes later after people warned her not to make broadly disparaging comments. Midler explained she was seeing red due to not feeling like Manchin was working in what she sees as the public interest.
While this is ridiculous and shows the generation who warned youth about how to behave online do not practice what they preach, it is also not in sync with reality. For example, West Virginia has a higher rate of its population fully vaccinated than California, as tracked by Google. In addition, the U.S. Census data from 2019 notes that about 21 percent of those in West Virginia over 25 had a college degree as opposed to 34 percent in California and West Virginia had a higher high school graduation rate of 87 percent as opposed to 83 percent of students in California.
It is almost like places are complicated, and stereotypes do not carry weight in the face of statistics. Hopefully, Midler will remember the true targets of her ire are the people in power.
