During last week’s State of the Union Address, when Joe Biden began talking about a spending boondoggle called “Building a Better America,” we had this strange sense that we’d heard all this before. But where? We couldn’t quite put our finger on it.

It kept nagging at us, all night and into the morning. Indeed, we slept fitfully, restlessly, until we were awakened by nightmarish visions of … of … a used car salesman smearing lipstick on a pig.

And then, sweat-soaked and sitting bolt upright, it came to us: The used car salesman — the old guy with the garish polyester sport coat and the half-empty bottle of Aqua-Velva — was Joe Biden himself. And the pig was the zombified corpse of his Bilk Back Bolshevik Build Back Better plan. And the lipstick slathered all about the snotty snout of that porcine phantasm was “Building a Better America,” an audaciously clever bit of poll-tested phraseology so sweet-sounding and patriotic that our eyes began to well up.

It was then that we thought of West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, The Butcher of Build Back Better. How could he resist this marketing miracle, this rebranding tour de force? How could this humble hayseed from the Mountain State first uncover the oh-so-subtle connection between BBB and BBA, and then summon the resolve to keep from voting for it?

It was a tall order, we thought, and it is. It’s true that Manchin had joined all 50 Republican senators to stand against Biden’s original bill just before Christmas, thus killing that budget-busting inflation bomb and sending all fiscally responsible Americans into the holidays with a smattering of good tidings from The Swamp. We knew it’d be back, though — just like herpes, just like MC Hammer pants.

And sure enough: “The White House has dumped President Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ name for his sweeping social welfare and climate spending legislation in favor of ‘Building a Better America,’” the Washington Examiner reports, “an acknowledgment that his signature legislative proposal has no chance of passing Congress.”

Said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki: “No one cares about the name in the American public. They care about what’s in it and what it’s going to do, and so that’s what we’re most focused on.”

And so, his handlers having jettisoned BBB in favor of BBA, there was Joe Biden on Thursday, in Duluth, Minnesota, extolling the “virtues” of Building a Better America, which he tried to marry with a previous legislative success — the trillion-dollar “Infrastructure” package that he signed in mid-November but that, near as we can tell, hasn’t yet fixed a single crumbling bridge or bone-jarring pothole:

We’re the only nation that has always turned every crisis we’ve faced into an opportunity. No other nation you can name has gone through a terrible circumstance and come out at the other end worse off than they were before they — their circumstance occurred.

We’re stronger today than we were a year ago. And we’re going to be stronger a year from now than we are today. So, let’s keep building. Let’s continue to give families a fighting chance. And let’s meet this moment together.

Yes, let’s keep pumping the American people full of hot air. Let’s keep spending and spending “to give families a fighting chance.” Inflation? What inflation?

Asked about Biden’s repackaged plan, Joe Manchin seemed thoroughly unimpressed. “They just can’t help themselves,” he said. “Nothing’s changed.”

The name, Joe. The name has changed.