Finding the bottom isn’t always easy.
I remember fishing trips as a kid where, in the eternal pursuit of whoppers to catch, my boatmates and I -- Dad and my older brother -- would sometimes troll across a lake looking for a shallow area (marked by buoys or visible weeds) or drop the anchor with a certain length of slack to test the depth of the water.
Of course, electronic fish finders were just being introduced at the sporting goods store back then, but those seemed too technological and newfangled -- and expensive -- to purchase one. We were purists. We sought to locate on our own the elusive areas where the fish hung out and then reel them in with the skill and speed the good Lord had given us along with the accumulated knowledge of decades of experience… at least in my dad’s case.
The one thing that remained a mystery pretty much the whole time -- how deep would we need to go to find the mysterious lunkers? It depended, somewhat, on what type of fish we were seeking. Regardless, there was no foolproof method -- a lot of times it was just relying on instinct to guide us.
It appears Democrats are going through similar struggles as they desperately try to discover the bottom of their months-long popularity freefall. It won’t be easy to find the magic person or policy that will halt their skid. As a lot of people -- including myself -- have been saying lately, there’s apparently no limit to the bad things that can happen when you’ve got intellectually bankrupt politicians running your show. This defines today’s Democrat party.
Put it this way -- I wouldn’t have wanted modern Democrats in control of finding the fish all those years ago. If that were the case, we’d certainly starve at the campsite that night, and people were depending on us to provide dinner, too. Democrats would discover the bottom, alright, but most likely by carelessly sinking the boat and going down with the ship. How low can they go? We might just find out.
In a column titled “Do Democrats really believe things can't get worse?” Byron York wrote at The Washington Examiner:
“[T]hings can get worse. Biden stubbornly discounted the danger posed by inflation. He rejected the views of respected experts who warned that his own policies — his party's massive stimulus bills — would make the problem worse. On COVID, he misjudged the threat of variants and did not know what to do when the delta wave hit. And on Afghanistan, he ignored the advisers who said his exit plan could become a fiasco. Given that record, why believe that Biden, who turns 79 [tomorrow], will suddenly develop better judgment?
“There are two issues here — the substance and the politics. Will inflation worsen, wiping out wage gains and making it more difficult for millions to get by? That's the substance. Will inflation continue to eat away at Biden's job approval rating? That's the politics. You will probably not be shocked to learn that Democrats are mostly talking about the politics...
“Every politician facing falling approval ratings wants to believe that his real problem is communications. That way, he doesn't have to change what he is doing; he only has to sell it more effectively. But Biden does not have a communications problem. He has a substance problem. And there is no reason to believe that it will get better.”
As usual, York does an excellent job of synopsizing the Democrats’ conundrums. I would agree that there’s a tremendous substance issue with the liberal party, namely that they don’t have any [substance]. But there’s just as serious a communications problem in Democrat ranks, too. They’ve been fibbing about so many things for so long that they don’t know quite how to stop.
It's kind of like the liar’s paradox. According to Wikipedia, the liar’s paradox is, “the statement of a liar that they are lying: for instance, declaring that ‘I am lying’. If the liar is indeed lying, then the liar is telling the truth, which means the liar just lied.”
It's not a perfect fit because no Democrat would ever admit that they just lied. It’s the sense that they’ve lied to get elected, lied once in office, lied to keep themselves in office and lied in order to pass whatever it was they were trying to pass. Everyone who pays fleeting attention to the news knows that Democrats are a collection of shysters, hustlers, operators, con men (and women), and swindlers, so if they go about trying to sell people on the benefits of ‘Program X’ -- smart Americans automatically assume it’s a lie.
The media goes about its daily business spreading and perpetuating the Democrats’ lies, and it’s worked to maintain their power. Party registration across the country (at least until recently, who knows?) has consistently favored Democrats. Their liberal coalitions, connections to labor unions, dominance among university and college faculties and the education establishment, total control of Hollywood and popular culture and a willingness to sell their souls to win elections (“America is a racist country and you’re voting for systemic racism if you choose Donald Trump”) has succeeded for them.
Perhaps up until now. Democrats haven’t yet found the bottom, primarily because certain segments of the American people are only starting to wake up to the lies. The Democrats’ communications shop is running out of ways to spin their schemes. Telling people to devote half of their after-tax paycheck to buy gasoline is not making their lives better by purportedly staving off “climate change.”
By the same token, dumping trillions of dollars into the economy for no apparent reason -- after trillions were handed out last year by both parties during the COVID pandemic -- has to manifest itself in some way. There’s no value behind the outlays -- it’s just numbers on a balance sheet and printed bills in the federal treasury. Democrat thinking goes like this -- “Make this number bigger and people will have money to buy food and pay rent and it’ll benefit food producers and landlords and nobody will be any wiser for it.”
Imagine playing a game of Monopoly using two boards’ worth of currency but not increasing the prices on the properties themselves or instituting some other rules that would help regulate supply, such as, “you can only purchase a property every other turn.” Immediately everyone would buy up the lots as soon as they landed on them without worry of not having sufficient cash to improve them. If there were enough players rolling the dice, the game would last in perpetuity, because there would be very few monopolies and everyone could afford the “rent” if they landed on the ones that did exist.
Great family fun on game night, right? But no one would ever win and everyone would be ticked off that they weren’t able to spend all the money they’d accumulated. I doubt telling the kids that the game really was fun would convince them of time well spent.
Similarly, Democrats can’t get away with telling Americans that their policies are the way out of today’s multitude of government caused problems. Passing the infrastructure slush fund was bad enough, what would happen if “Build Back Better” sneaks through as well? With supply chain problems and worker shortages and way too much money in circulation, inflation will go through the roof. The value of lifelong savings will be eroded away. Desperation will replace hope.
Decades’ worth of lies have finally caught up with the Democrats and they’re acting like this is their last hurrah at governing. Far from their typical hubristic boasts of a permanent majority, Democrats are ignoring the bottom in order to act now, naively believing it will help them. Here’s one misguided Democrat (Brad Bannon) who argues “Build Back Better” will pull them out of their nosedive rather than dig their hole deeper.
It's not hard to see why Democrats are in such a rush. 81-year-old Nancy Pelosi will enter the last year of her speakership next year. Joe Biden is visibly struggling. Chucky Schumer sees longtime veterans like Sen. Patrick Leahy retiring and knows his days as the upper chamber’s leader are numbered as well. Even if Democrats keep the senate after 2022, his chance of passing anything to please the angry socialists goes by the wayside.
Democrats find themselves locked in a corner by their own over-the-top rhetoric on COVID and over reliance on the once-popular but now thoroughly discredited Dr. Anthony Fauci for advice on how to beat the pandemic-turned-endemic. The virus isn’t going away no matter how many government appropriations are dedicated to stopping it. People are tired of masks, and they’re sick of being told they have to restrict their own freedoms to fight a health issue that for most people isn’t all that dangerous.
It could be said Democrats are leading the race to the bottom but they have no idea how much farther they have to fall. As long as they delude themselves by believing that Americans aren’t being told about how great Democrat policies really are, the worse it will become for their electoral prospects. Good news for conservatives and Republicans, but bad for the country.
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