It is impossible to overstate the partisan jackassery of CNN, which is at once a product of the cynical, ratings-driven scumbaggery of its head Jeff Zucker and the pretentious liberalism of its “reporters,” almost all of whom come from Democratic circles. What an astonishing collection of frauds. With their anchormanish baritones, they try to hoodwink viewers into thinking they are “serious” journalists. But they are all just liberal activists playing reporters on TV. Jake Tapper was a Dem staffer. So was Jim Sciutto. Christiane Amanpour, last heard lecturing journalists on the need to drop “neutrality” in its coverage of Trump, is married to former Clinton staffer James Rubin. And the list goes on and on.
Out of this ethos came Jim Acosta, who, thanks to Trump, has justly become the face of fake news. Acosta’s hectoring of Stephen Miller on Wednesday — behavior indistinguishable from a La Raza activist at a Trump rally — confirms once again the journalistic bankruptcy of Jeff Zucker’s CNN. Acosta doesn’t need any encouragement to be a demagogic jerk, but Zucker has no doubt flashed that green light to him. (By the way, where are the successors to the Kalb brothers to tsk-tsk Zucker for his complete abandonment of “objective” journalistic conventions in pursuit of the cheapest of entertainment values? That even those old charades no longer occur is itself proof of the media’s status as an unapologetic opposition party.)
But conservatives should thank Acosta for pulling off CNN’s mask completely. It reveals the face of an exceedingly dumb and arrogant liberal. Poets, according to the windy adage, are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. But Acosta on Wednesday was determined to turn Emma Lazarus into an acknowledged one. He demanded to know why the Trump administration wasn’t using her poem as the organizing principle of immigration policy.
Of course, he wasn’t literate enough to use her name. He had the “Statue of Liberty” voicing her poem. Miller had to point out to him that the poem wasn’t part of the original Statue of Liberty, a correction the media resented terribly (it spawned a spate of stories dunning Miller for his lack of appreciation for the poetry of Lazarus).
It became quickly apparent that Acosta was out of his depth, as Miller gave him a brief tutorial on the history of America’s immigration policy. My favorite moment came when Miller responded to the lazy retort of Acosta — What policy am I advocating? — by saying: “unfettered immigration.” That’s exactly what he is demanding. Acosta in effect wants the Statue of Liberty renamed the Statue of Open Borders, with perhaps a worthy poetic successor to Emma Lazarus made head of the INS.
Acosta was too much of a dummy to grasp Miller’s point — that liberty and open borders can’t coexist, with the loss of that liberty hitting the poorest, including legal immigrants, the hardest.
The policy of unregulated immigration espoused by Acosta translates into an even larger group of “huddled masses” yearning to be free — to be free of the chaos, economic insolvency and crime that follow a mindless immigration policy.
Only Glenn Thrush — that other “objective” journalist, you know the one who showed his stories to Hillary’s campaign manager before publication — managed to exceed Acosta in sheer obnoxiousness. He demanded of Miller “statistics” to justify his proposal. Miller quickly supplied him with some, but Thrush kept gibbering.
Thrush whined afterwards that Miller’s performance was “Scaramucci-esque.” It was anything but. Miller was relentlessly substantive and serious. That was too much for the media to handle, so it resorted to sophistries and scaremongering. On its idiotic morning shows, the chattering class feigns horror at the Trump administration’s “lack of depth.” But the moment the Stephen Millers provide some the opposition party sends out its clowns like Acosta to shut it down.
