Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right, with his wife Jane, raises his hand as he speaks during a campaign event in San Antonio, Saturday, Feb. 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Imagine this being what you are worried about. Not that a guy has decades of expressing support for communism, but that the opposition party might use that fact against him.

NBC News decided to be the first media outlet to try this tack, complaining that Republicans are sure to weaponize Bernie Sanders’ past praise of communist regimes, from the USSR to Cuba.

If Sen. Sanders wins the nomination, some Democrats worry President Trump will hammer him on his long-buried words in defense of governments in Nicaragua, Cuba and the USSR. https://t.co/RnUP5Kt7jy

— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 22, 2020

Long-buried, eh? How very interesting. It’s not like Bernie is a newcomer to politics or even the national stage. Exactly who buried this stuff and refused to report on it until Republican groups brought it to the surface (and to be sure, The Reagan Battalion was exposing this stuff last year, long before the media took notice)?

But the framing here is the biggest issue.

The story isn’t that the front runner for the Dem nomination has spent decades praising and promoting some of the worst Communist regimes on the planet (& even attacking Dems like JFK for speaking out against them), but that Republicans might pounce on that fact. https://t.co/kOVIilfsXQ

— (((AG))) (@AGHamilton29) February 23, 2020

The story here is not that Republicans will obviously use the fact that Sanders is a communist against him. Of course they will and they should. No, the story here is that Sanders is a communist. That seems sort of like the priority issue here. You’d hope that the media’s derangement toward Trump would have lines, such as not fluffing someone who praised the Cuban revolution and rallied with the Sandinistas, but I guess not.

Look, I’m not asking for NBC News to go full Trump here, but is it really too much to ask for them to not try to whitewash someone like Sanders? Republican reaction is the least of anyone’s worries when it comes to the Vermont Senator. His policies are extremely radical, to the point where socialized medicine is one of his more mundane pushes. Further, even when faced with time to think about it, he still chose to praise the Cuban regime on “60 Minutes” yesterday. This isn’t a guy who’s not what he appears. He’s exactly what he appears to be and he keeps telling us over and over again. Perhaps it’s time to believe him?

But you can expect this kind of strategy from the media throughout 2020. Even when they can’t bring themselves to directly defend something Sanders has done, they are going to still spin it as a Republican story when it’s clearly not. That’s the only bullet left in their chamber.