By John Kass

The Democrats are suffering from a self-inflicted wound on the crime issue that will plague them for the 2022 mid-term Congressional elections.

But now they’re hoping that their Democratic liberal allies in the media will lick those wounds clean, like loyal dogs or the witless and wriggling larvae of flies.

The ludicrous and laughable claim of Biden White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki—that Republicans are defunding police–underscores this desperate fantasy of theirs.

And if there were a functioning media in Washington, she would have been laughed out of town. But “functioning” might as well be an outlawed word as far as the Washington Democratic Media Complex, and their useful idiots are concerned.

What’s that line the left keeps jaberwockying about, the one about Republicans and the Big Lie, whatever that big lie is of the moment?

They insist that if you keep repeating a lie, eventually people will believe it.

But when Democrats tell lies, who points it out? The media?

No, the media gives them cover. And the Biden White House wears it all like silk pajamas.

The game the Democrats and the Biden White House are playing is to argue that Republicans balking at supporting the $1.9 trillion Biden social spending spree—which contains some money that could go to police (or to social workers)—is evidence that Republicans want to defund the police.

Pardon me?

That inflationary Biden Great Society package did not win Republican support. Hence, in the Democratic political mind, the Republicans want to defund the cops.

“As you know, didn’t receive a single Republican vote,” Psaki said in a recent White House briefing. “That funding has been used to keep cops on the beat…I think any local department would argue that keeping cops on the beat to keep communities safe when they had to, because of budget shortfalls…is something that helps them address crime in their local communities,” Psaki said.

That’s one way of looking at it, Jen. Here’s another way of looking at it.

You and your allies think the American people are stupid, like country bumpkins in old urban myths, the guy in overalls, open-mouthed, who keeps losing money at the fair because he just can’t find the pea under the moving walnut halves.

But the American people aren’t stupid.  Particularly those in the big cities and suburbs where violent crime is spiking nationally, where murder is on the rise, where cops have gone fetal and where catch-and-release prosecutors and judges keep getting re-elected, as they do in Chicago.

Democratic politicians and their media allies spent most of last year excusing—and supporting the George Floyd riots, and trying to mitigate the looting and arson that followed. Remember the media referring to the “mostly peaceful” protests without irony? To gin up their voters for the 2020 elections, the Democrats demonized law enforcement, demanding defunding of police, excusing the urban rioters, and now blame the crime spikes on the pandemic.

And now they talk of “gun violence” because that’s easy. To talk about “street gang violence” might invite worrisome questions, about Democratic policy that has destroyed the Black family in many towns, and the broken schools run by the teachers unions, the political shock troops of the Democrats come election time.

There are many guns in the American suburbs, but suburbanites aren’t slaughtering each other in mass shootings every weekend.

 And the result of all this jibber-jabber?

The deconstruction of public order, a growing sense of lawlessness and taxpayers who’ve had enough of flinching at loud sounds.

Nationally, without their local mayors having their backs, police manpower shrinks, law enforcement officers from command rank down to patrol retire as soon as they can. And there aren’t enough recruits in the pipeline to replenish the losses. Who’d want to be a cop?

“It’s the untold story, not only here but all over the country,” a liberal Chicago alderman told me. “We don’t have nearly enough recruits coming through, we’re at least 1,500 cops short in Chicago. And the ads aren’t working.”

The Chicago police recruitment ads extolled the money a young cop could make, the excitement, the thrill of the job. “BE THE CHANGE!!” say the ads to potential police recruits.

But the targeted audience isn’t all that enthused.

“I guess they don’t want to be the change,” the alderman said.

No, I guess they don’t. But who could blame them?

The Democratic mayors, dancing nimbly on rolling logs, don’t have their backs. The prosecutors don’t have their backs, the judges don’t have their backs. After all the anti-police rhetoric from Democratic leaders in Democratic towns now short on police, who’d want to be a cop?

Poll after poll tells us that Americans don’t want to defund police. The hard Jacobin left still wants to defund police and deconstruct public order outright. But smart Democrats have become shapeshifters and have stopped talking about “defunding.”

Now they talk of “reimagining” police, as a way to cover their behinds. Because they know the political backlash is coming, if the Republicans don’t screw it up, which is entirely possible.

And that self-inflicted political wound? You can hear their media loyalists, licking, hoping to close that wound before 2022.

Copyright 2021 John Kass