This Week's Inquirer: Relax. Biden didn’t call anyone a ‘fascist.’

Many were apoplectic following Biden’s recent remarks, but his language is surprisingly soft, as the multiple qualifiers and incomplete sentences lessen the impact. It’s almost, dare we say, sleepy.

All it took was one offhand utterance for “Sleepy Joe” to magically transform from questionable-acuity-in-chief to a guns-blazing, hard-charging, slanderous maligner who hates half of all Americans.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” President Joe Biden said last week. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Feigning the same outrage that they mustered for Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” and Barack Obama’s “cling[ing] to guns or religion” comments, Republicans — from moderate to MAGA — were apoplectic.

But Biden’s language is surprisingly soft. He uses multiple qualifiers, couched in incomplete sentences, to lessen the impact. It’s almost, dare we say, sleepy.

Read the full column at Inquirer.com.