Jim Acosta: the Don Quixote of fake news

Let’s face it, reality show star Jim Acosta could get a cover charge for his rendition of the Man of La Mancha. There he is, press conference after press conference, crooning his ‘unheard melodies’:

‘To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go.’

Don Quixote tilted at windmills and was ridiculous but lovable.

Jim Acosta accosts his ‘unbeatable foe,’ Donald Trump and is ridiculous but disgusting.

Think back to his performance in August before the President’s Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. Acosta kept badgering her to assure the scribes in the White House press pool that the President did not think the were ‘enemies of the people.’ Sanders refused to let him fulfill that impossible dream, which sent the CNN reporter into one of his signature windmill-tilting frenzies. ‘For the sake of this room, the people that are in this room, this democracy, this country,’ he said with characteristic understatement and politesse, ‘the president of the United States should not refer to us as the enemy of the people.’

Thanks for the lesson in civility, Jim. It was almost as pertinent as his invocation of ‘Nazis’ in response to the President’s observation that there were ‘some very fine people on both sides’ at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a couple of years ago.

Nazis, eh? Someone should tell Jim Acosta about Godwin’s law and the perils of reductio ad Hitleram.

It’s not all peril, of course, and I have at times wondered whether Jim Acosta pays the president a retainer for making him such a recognizable figure. Someday, probably, Jim Acosta will do television ads for ED or hair loss and harken back to his glory days barking at the President of the United States on camera.

It was Rudyard Kipling who supplied his cousin Stanley Baldwin with the famous denunciation of the irresponsible press as wielding ‘Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ The dreadful behavior of the American press — of which Jim Acosta is a poster child — is a bit like the behavior of children at a fun-fair who discover that, for the next half hour, they can hurl water balloons at their schoolmaster with impunity. The teacher, committed to help the local school raise money for a new roof, takes it in his stride. After the outing, he returns to his serious work, while the children snigger together in the corner.

That’s what Jim Acosta is like. A feeble Don Quixote without his trusty servant, only a chorus of deluded sycophants. They pretend to be doing the public’s business but really their are just on a mad, boastful, self-aggrandizing quest to topple the ‘unbeatable foe.’

At least Don Quixote was a gentleman who endeavored to treat those he encountered with respect.