Bette Midler would like the world to know that Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Senator who recently doomed the entire Democratic domestic policy agenda, is not her hero. He is not everything that she would like to be. Manchin, a Democrat, recently announced that he wouldn’t support Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, essentially making that bill impossible to pass. (It’s part of a long pattern for Manchin.) Bette Midler is mad. Unfortunately, in voicing her disapproval, Midler ended up insulting the entire state of West Virginia, and she immediately had to backtrack.

Yesterday, when Manchin announced that he would block the bill, Midler tweeted, “What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible. He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.”

That tweet seemed designed to go viral for all the wrong reasons. 40 minutes later, Midler apologized to West Virginia but made it clear that she was still absolutely disgusted with Manchin: “I apologize to the good people of WVA for my last outburst. I’m just seeing red; #JoeManchin and his whole family are a criminal enterprise. Is he really the best WV has to offer its own citizens? Surely there’s someone there who has the state’s interests at heart, not his own!”

Of course, we all understand that Bette Midler takes environmental issues very seriously.

But West Virginia has things bad enough right now without the stars of stage and screen clowning their entire existence. In any case, you can watch Bette Midler’s Kennedy Center Honors on tomorrow night.