Radical leftists who exert total control over the Democrat agenda are feigning surprise, once again, at how progressive their empty-vessel leader, President Joe Biden, has been since his installation in the Oval Office, according to the Atlantic.
“Washington in the first days of the Biden administration is a place for double takes: A president associated with the politics of austerity is spending money with focused gusto, a crisis isn’t going to waste, and Senator Bernie Sanders is happy,” wrote the far-left magazine.
“… Few of us expected that this president—given his record, a knife’s-edge Congress, and a crisis that makes it hard to look an inch beyond one’s nose—would begin to be talked about as, potentially, transformational,” it said.
The piece noted that even Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was pleasantly “taken aback” by Biden’s unexpected capitulation to any leftist demands that crossed his desk.
“[T]he administration understands that we are not willing to be taken for granted anymore,” Omar told the Atlantic.
Speculation is rampant whether Biden’s transformation from segregationist glad-hander to woke Marxist revolutionary may be the result of dementia, communist kompromat concerning his many personal scandals or simply a willingness to “prostitute” himself to the highest-bidding globalist oligarch.
However, little doubt exists that the 78-year-old career politician is not fully in the driver’s seat as the country careens toward catastrophe on several fronts.
Some, such as Politico, have addressed Biden’s astoundingly hands-off approach to leading the country, while delicately framing the lack of access and transparency by the administration as a sort of “less is more” strategy.
“It hasn’t always gone according to plan—on occasion, the White House has had to walk back or clarify comments Biden has made in the interviews he has given,” Politico noted recently. “But as a strategy, it is a return to an era that predated the Obama White House, when the country heard from the president sparingly.”
By staying strictly on message, sympathetic and incurious journalists have been pivotal in the effort to normalize Biden and curate his public image.
Hence, outlets have begun to echo similar-sounding refrains that Biden’s bold agenda is a departure even from the moderate-by-comparison Obama administration, and that a more suitable analogy would be to the four-term presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Indeed, Biden’s penchant for unmitigated spending sprees seems akin to the nearly insolvent welfare programs first established under Roosevelt’s New Deal. Likewise, his threat to pack the federal courts hearkens to one of FDR’s biggest scandals.
Yet, media lapdogs, themselves, may be the biggest parallel.
Roosevelt, who was wheelchair-bound after contracting polio as a young man, was so protected by the press that few knew of his infirmity in the days before regular television broadcasts.
Moreover, during World War II, many in the FDR-fawning media were later mobilized as active participants in the propaganda effort to build wartime public support and boost national morale.
Contemporary left-wing reporters now are approaching the abstract, ever-mutable crusades against causes like “systemic racism” with the same zeal that precursors in the newspaper industry once tackled the Nazi and Japanese threats to the global order.
Of course, when it came to covering the Holocaust in papers like the New York Times, “The Roosevelt Administration’s determination to downplay the news also contributed to the subdued coverage,” noted Northeastern University journalism scholar Laurel Leff.
Similarly, what might otherwise appear more like a hostage situation for Democrats—with “Squad” members and their activist allies effectively hijacking control of the party—has been softened for the sake of the “movement.”
“The conversations I’ve had in recent weeks have painted a portrait of an improbable coming-together of people and forces: a moderate president, with an ascendant progressive movement at his back and at his throat, facing a once-in-a-generation window of opportunity,” wrote Atlantic writer Anand Giridharadas.
The Atlantic‘s paean to the president was chock full of progressivist praise, even from perpetually disgruntled and cantankerous Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
The socialist senator described a multi-trillion-dollar pork-barrel bonanza packaged as a coronavirus relief bill and tucked into Biden’s daily “needs signature” pile as “the single most significant piece of legislation for working-class people that has been passed since the 1960s.”
Critics contended that the bill, which funneled funds for leftist wish-list items to places like wealthy Silicon Valley, offered less than 10% in direct stimulus payments. Meanwhile, Biden-era inflation and skyrocketing cost-of-living expenses were bound to offset the $1,400 one-time payments in very little time.
The bill also bailed out many blue cities and states that had prioritized subsidies for illegal immigrants over fiscal responsibility. And it added billions in tax hikes, along with a clause preventing states that accepted the relief funds from implementing their own tax cuts.
“The $1.9 trillion package that they put forth was a surprise,” Omar told the Atlantic. “A lot of us made recommendations when the administration was in their transition space, and I don’t think a lot of us expected many of those things would make it in.”
Among the clearest casualties of the Biden era have been the democratic processes and institutions outlined under the US Constitution to provide checks on unrestrained political power-grabs and ensure that the best ideas are able to thrive in the marketplace of ideas.
“The old emphasis on bipartisanship and outreach has quietly been displaced in Joe Biden’s Washington with an emphasis on coalition—attending first and foremost to your own side, everyone balancing the holding of their own with the holding of their nose, so as to get the good-enough thing done now instead of waiting for what might never come,” spun the Atlantic.
Amid the endless streams of effusive praise for Biden, though, a few hard-line leftist might inadvertently have slipped in moments of unguarded candor.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at UC Berkeley, acknowledged that the brilliance of making Biden a figurehead was that he had no guiding moral principles or political convictions of his own.
Biden “is a politician in the best sense of the word—that is, he sees a parade and he runs and gets in front of it, as long as the parade is not inconsistent with his values,” Reich said. “The secret here is that he has no strong ideological preconceptions.”
