Over the last four to five days, we’ve seen a fascinating and occasionally surreal set of contending storylines for what happened on Capitol Hill with the President’s infrastructure, climate and safety net agenda. In advance we saw the continued portrayal of an intra-party fight between “progressives” and “moderates” when in fact we had something closer to unanimity with a tiny but critical number of holdouts. Really it was Manchin and Sinema vs everyone else.

Over the weekend, as Pelosi and Biden finally decided to toss aside the self-imposed deadline for passing the “hard” infrastructure bill, this prog. vs mod. storyline escalated into “Biden throwing in his lot with the left,” or a “left-wing revolt.” A weekend story in the Times actually claimed that in his meeting with House Democrats Biden had said for the “first time” that the two bills were linked. Apparently we all forget that just a couple months ago there was a whole faux mini-scandal when Biden threatened to veto the hard infrastructure bill if the two weren’t passed together. For a lot of the insider pubs it’s been a story of the collapse of Biden’s agenda whereas for most Democrats it seems more like it’s starting to get back on track.

This is all a testament to how a deeply entrenched set of assumptions can have wildly distorting effects on coverage of fairly nuts and bolts factual issues.

Let’s step back and see what I think actually happened here. Because it’s certainly not the collapse of Biden’s agenda. Nor is it the left wing triumph storyline that the elite publications and actually some progressives have each, for very different reasons, latched on to.

Austin Fire Department arson investigators and the FBI have arrested 30 year old Ryan Faircloth after an investigation into who threw a Molotov Cocktail into the Travis County Democratic Party headquarters early Wednesday morning. Security cameras showed a man alleged to be Faircloth first throwing a rock through the building’s front door, then returning with the Molotov Cocktail.

Damage was minimal. Patrons at a bar across the street saw the fire and quickly put it out. Security cameras were installed after a graffiti incident last year. Faircloth is charged with 2nd degree felony arson 3rd degree felony possession of a prohibited weapon.