CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta appeared on the Hugh Hewitt radio show on Thursday, and under questioning from the right, strangely claimed he's all about bringing Americans together and that he wrote his book Enemy of the People....for Republicans?
Hewitt was typically collegial with Acosta, and let him spin his tale about how the president's hostile talk about "Fake News" reporters is endangering their safety. Then Hewitt asked who is to blame for James Hodgkinson shooting at congressional Republicans (after all, Hodgkinson was a big Rachel Maddow fan). David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon noted that Acosta suddenly began the bipartisan-unity talk:
It's an excellent question," Acosta said. "I blame this climate that we're in right now in this country. We're at each other's throats, and as I write at the end of the book … We've just got to get back to a place where he have more faith in one another."
We're all on the same team," Acosta added.
"Some folks may accuse me of writing this book for the Resistance," he said. "I'll tell you, if you read this book, I'm writing this book also for the Republicans, because I really feel deep down in my heart that Republicans are just as patriotic as everybody else, and they want a country handed off to the next generation that is just as strong as the one they inherited."
Yes, when you think of unifying people -- the kind that want to grab a Coke bottle and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony -- it's not Jim Acosta. If you wonder why Acosta doesn't sound like this on CNN, the answer is simple. CNN isn't television for Republicans. It's Resistance TV.
Acosta was truer to form at the beginning of the interview. "People have asked me are you staying in your lane as a straight-news reporter, and you know, as I talk about in the book, on several different occasions, sometimes it's hard to stay in your lane when the president is trying to run you off the road. And so we do have to hang tough, we do have to stand up for ourselves."