Stephen Collinson is well-known among conservatives as the most hackneyed of the hacks at CNN. The CNN Politics Twitter account promoted his latest online essay with the words “President Biden to showcase his moderate radicalism in his big congressional address.”
“Moderate radicalism”? Doesn’t that make about as much sense as “quiet loudness”?
Collinson argued "Biden's quiet radicalism is expressed through a huge pandemic rescue bill, a larger proposal that redefines the concept of infrastructure, and a massive health and child care blueprint.” In other words, a socialist blueprint
Politico gushed with this headline “Biden Just Gave the Most Ideologically Ambitious Speech of Any Democratic President in Generations.” Our socialist media won’t use the S-word. They use words like “bold” and “ambitious” and repeat phrases like “go big or go home.” As if you couldn’t say a Soviet five-year plan was “go big or go home.”
At CNN, Collinson spun furiously against the radical reality. "Republicans have struggled since the presidential campaign to portray Biden, a classic Washington Democratic centrist for 50 years, as some kind of raging socialist who wants to bring down US society," Collinson wrote. "As a White, elderly man, Biden is a difficult target for Trump-loving conservatives, who like to portray racially diverse Democrats as a threat to what they see as Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions."
Ted Cruz described Biden’s approach as “boring, but radical.” Cruz adviser Omri Ceren tweeted out Collinson’s essay complete with CNN video with these words on screen: “Ocasio-Cortez: Biden Exceeding Expectations of Progressives.” When the socialists say Biden is “exceeding expectations,” he’s proposing a socialist agenda.
The news and entertainment elites are going on defense. CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert – a comedic Stephen Collinson? -- disdained the idea that all these tax increases were socialist, complete with a satirical fake quote from Adam Smith favoring the taxing of billionaires “shooting sports cars into space.”
On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Trevor Noah mocked the fake news of Kamala Harris’s kiddie book being handed out to migrant children as combining “immigration, socialism, and reading, the three worst things in the world!”
On NBC’s Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie cited the Biden line of “go big or go home,” and wondered if Democrats had enough power to pass it. Democrat pundit Claire McCaskill defensively replied “Expanding public school to pre-K is not socialism. Making sure that women can take leave when they have a baby is not socialism. That is smart policies that most Americans really want.”
In the midnight hour on MSNBC, New York Times reporter Elaina Plott guessed “he delivered what was really the most progressive address, I would say, at a joint session, maybe since LBJ.” But he still didn’t give “Republicans a lot to latch onto” and that ”Joe Biden's brilliance in some ways is that he's kind of boring.” Host Chris Hayes said this was because he was white. NBC reporter Sahil Kapur added Biden’s “superpower” is “He makes massive multi-trillion-dollar FDR-size liberal policies sound moderate and middle of the road.”
But his “superpower” here is the media elite. They are the ones who have sold Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, both Clintons, Obama, and Biden as moderates. This has grown increasingly ridiculous, but they keep shifting the “center” into the extreme left.
As we creep ever closer to their dreams of European socialism, the media whisper sweet nothings that this is merely “smart policies most Americans want.” They insist Biden is difficult to “latch onto” and “villainize” because they are energetically working to prevent the argument that Democrats are ever extreme on anything.
This isn’t “news.” It’s just sales.
