The pro-Biden media perpetually pat themselves on the back. They are a gift to the people, the essence of democracy, as in, "We inform the voters and then we expect the voters to make smart choices" (the ones we recommend). But when journalists lose, they have a disturbing tendency to argue democracy lost.
On March 4, the Supreme Court unanimously disapproved of the Left's latest desperate attempt to rip Donald Trump's name off the ballot, pushed by blue states like Colorado and Illinois. Their novel theory was that the 14th Amendment contains Civil War-era verbiage about keeping "insurrectionists" off the ballot.
To the average American, it might seem odd that it's somehow "protecting democracy" to remove the Republican front-runner's name from the ballot. That looks like throwing large obstacles in the way of democracy, not protecting it. After the 2020 election, the geniuses at Time magazine called it "fortifying democracy" when the "progressives" engaged in elaborate strategies to prevent Trump from victory.
Journalists struggled to cope with this resounding legal defeat. CNN host Dana Bash told her frustrated liberal audience, "Unfortunately for America, the Court isn't necessarily wrong that this is the way the Framers wanted it to be." Those Framers, so annoying.
At another point, professor Larry Sabato groused to Jim Acosta on CNN, "You can't save people from themselves. If they're determined to reelect him after he organized that insurrection, then there's nothing to stop the people from doing that."
To sum up, democracy's erstwhile defenders lament "the people are stupid." Some hotheads like Keith Olbermann decried the Supreme Court as "corrupt and illegitimate" and demanded it be "dissolved." Who are the authoritarians now?
For now, the moping pundits are focused on those alleged idiots voting in primary elections, where Trump has dominated, but they're probably also despondent over the latest polls from Democrat newspapers like The New York Times, which found Trump leading Joe Biden by 5 points. Pollsters find Biden often loses to Trump in the swing states that will decide the race. He's 21 points underwater on his approval rating.
Forget inflation or immigration. Team Biden wants to stick to this arrogant "democracy" posturing as the singular issue of 2024. In a New Yorker puff piece by Evan Osnos, Biden strategist Mike Donilon, the "high priest of Bidenism," claimed the fall campaign should center on what he calls the "freedom agenda." The Democrats aren't the "freedom" party, unless it's the right to abortion or to place LGBT pornography in school libraries.
Donilon predicted that as the election nears, "the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people's minds are going to be of January 6th." And who is assigned the task of putting "images in people's minds"? That would be the pro-Biden press.
They could certainly argue that two entire years of the media putting Jan. 6 "images in people's minds" might have prevented a "red wave" in the midterm elections. But how does that cancel out all the other issues that matter to voters?
Osnos reported that Biden was holding a notecard with all of Trump's trolling talk -- his tweeting about "terminating" some voting rules in the Constitution, his joking with Sean Hannity about being a dictator on "Day One," his description of illegal immigrants as "poisoning the blood of our country."
All these remarks go into heavy rotation (and exaggeration) in the left-wing press -- and Biden is still losing. That might be because Democrats don't want any democracy on many issues. They want debates shut down. That's especially true of our "no equal time" press.