“Is American democracy on the brink?” asks White House Reporter Stephen Collinson
Just when I thought I politics couldn’t get any weirder, I read this piece of “news analysis” by CNN White House Reporter Stephen Collinson published earlier today. Filled with dramatic hyperbole and wild assertions, this “journalist” has apparently shed all pretense of objectivity and flown from propaganda artist straight into raving lunacy.
What does it mean to call something “insane”? If you saw a person on the street corner raving about pink elephants lumbering down the street, you would probably say that person is insane. There is no substantive difference between what Stephen Collinson is writing on CNN and that person raving about pink elephants.
What new threat menaces our republic? A battle over a report that was, until recently, available to the public to read, aside from some redactions that would be illegal to make public.
Attorney General William Barr has released everything he’s legally allowed to publicly release when it comes to the Mueller Report. He’s even provided a special room to twelve privileged members of Congress, six Republicans and six Democrats, to view a nearly complete version of the report (zero Democrats have bothered reading it). And yet, in an act of political theater, Congressional Democrats intend to hold Barr in contempt anyway.
Consequently, President Trump invoked blanket executive privilege over Robert Mueller’s full report. There’s an argument over whether he is able to do so, and so this battle will be fought in the courts. “Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all invoked executive privilege in response to congressional investigations,” Jan Wolfe explained in Reuters.
In 2012, Republican-controlled Congress held Obama Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena for documents regarding the Fast and Furious investigation.
These kinds of political battles happen all the time when different parties control different branches of government. It’ll be hashed out in the courts, and that’s an example of our system working as it should. But reporter Stephen Collinson believes today’s fight amounts to an unprecedented threat to American democracy.
He’s simply parroting Democratic Party talking points, which is a strange thing for an allegedly objective reporter to do. Jason Chaffetz points out that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D) now says White House efforts to stonewall Congress is an attack on “the essence of our democracy”. But in 2012, Nadler claimed Congress holding AG Holder in contempt was a “shameful, politically-motivated GOP vote.”
It’s one thing for political partisans to play these word games and to feign outrage over something they had no problem with a few years earlier. We all expect it by now. Politicians are like the scorpion who stings the fox taking him across the river. It’s just in their nature.
However, shouldn’t news outlets at least try to convey accurate information about what’s taking place? Shouldn’t their reporters at least pretend to care about objectivity? You shouldn’t expect to open a news aggregate like Google and read nothing but naked partisan propaganda disguised as “news analysis” spewing wild assertions about the end of democracy as we know it.
His entire article is designed to jinn up outrage, fuel partisan speculation, and conjure up images of President Trump as an ongoing threat to “democracy” and an illegitimate usurper in the White House.
Stephen Collinson knows he’s in a minority when it comes to these feverish hallucinations. He even pointed out: “…while Washington is consumed by the confrontation, polls and anecdotal evidence suggest indifference among many Americans about the momentous goings-on in Washington, which so far are not resonating much outside the capital.”
“A strong economy, extreme political polarization and the daily struggles of millions of people to pay for essentials like health care and a college education are understandably seen as more important.”No, Stephen, it’s not people’s “daily struggles” keeping them from sharing the same delusion. Maybe it’s just that you’re ranting on a street corner, and no one else can see the pink elephants.
M.A. Kleen 