They lavishly praise Joe Manchin when he’s up for re election (Dan specifically) and then pretend they have issues with him when he does clearly shitty things.

I honestly don't see the problem here. Without Joe Manchin there would not be a Democratic Senator from West Virginia. Any candidate more liberal than him would get absolutely crushed. It's incredibly important to run candidates that fit their constituency, and Joe Manchin fits the bill. Any person who identifies in any way as a Democrat, or left leaning politically should support Manchin in his bids for re-election. We need him in the Senate.

However, once he's won re-election there is nothing wrong with criticizing shitty things that he does. I don't see how it's a problem to want Manchin to win in WV and also criticize him. No candidate is perfect so it's perfectly reasonable to want him to win but also have problems with some of things he does.

I also don't think it's fair to say they're pretending to have issues with him. It seems pretty clear that they aren't pretending to be pissed about his votes on Trump's judicial nominees.

I think how they talk about politics is actually extremely disheartening to your average person and takes the fight out of them.

...They don’t talk about how people should pressure politicians

I've got to be honest, this is a wild take. Almost every single episode they talk about how important it is to get out and vote. They talk about taking friends with you to vote, they encourage people to make sure their friends and family are registered to vote. They tell people to call your members of Congress to both pressure them and to praise them for good things they've done. They work with organizations to help register people at their live shows. I could be wrong but it seems that one of the main goals of the pod and Crooked generally is to get people more involved in politics.

I can completely understand how the way they talk could be disheartening to you but to say that the average PSA listener is discouraged from being politically active by listening to the pod seems unlikely to be true.

This is completely anecdotal but I've worked on a few local campaigns and have talked to thousands of voters. During this time I've met dozens of people who credit PSA with getting them involved in politics. I've seen dozens of volunteers coming to canvass on the campaigns I worked on wearing PSA merch. I know this isn't proof of anything but if campaigns around the country had even half the number of PSA listeners coming to volunteer as the campaigns I worked on had, that would mean thousands of people got involved due to PSA.

I totally agree that the pod isn't super progressive but I don't see how they're centrist. Unless you consider any Democrat to the right of you to be a centrist.