The Democratic Party loses the signal

Electronic communications rely on the concept of a Carrier Wave.  Basically, this is a well-defined electronic signal that all devices can "tune" into, and upon which the actual message is transmitted.  If you lose the carrier, you lose your connection and you can't communicate with anybody.

You Old Farts will remember the old dial-up modem days.  You see, most houses back in the paleolithic age (say, the 1990s) only had one phone line.  Hen Junior wanted to jump on Compuserve (or, Lord forbid, America Online), his biggest worry was often that Mom would pick up the phone to call a friend.  When the phone went off-hook, the carrier signal went all skew-wumpus* and the modem connection dropped.  There was even a long running BBS joke Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

Good times, good times.

Well, the Democratic Party has had control of the carrier wave to the American people for a long, long time.  The first post I tagged Biased Media was way back in 2008, and it was obvious even back then.  They've been used to jamming the Republicans access to the Carrier for a long time.  This has given the Democrat's a big advantage for a long, long time.

That's been going away for a long, long time.  Reagan beat Carter, and then whats-his-name from Minnesota.  The Republicans swept control of Congress in the 1990s.  The whole "Bush lied" (about Iraq) dates back to Hillary Clinton who needed Media air cover for her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion in 2003.  Sure, Obama won in 2008 but the 2010 elections decimated the Democratic Party, as the country reacted in revulsion to the far left-wing policies of his administration.

In my counting, that's 40 years of increasing rejection of the Democratic Party's narrative pushed by an increasingly weak and irrelevant media.

And so here we are at today.  We've had two mass shootings in as many weeks, and three or four in the last couple of months.  It's so perfectly set up to support the Democratic narrative that people are wondering if this is yet more FBI instigation**.  And yet, it's not moving the needle in the Democrat's favor.  Consider:

• Senate Majority Leader (Democrat) Chuck Schumer has refused to move forward with a gun control bill.  This is despite all the recent mass shootings.  Schumer may be a jerk but he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to look at what the polls say about issues.  The American people are entirely uninterested in more gun control, and forcing his party to put their necks on that chopping block is something that he (wisely) will not do.
• Covid is over, and every time a (Democrat) politician or bureaucrat suggests further lock downs or restrictions this "news" disappears from the media in a day.  It's political suicide, any why the Democrats would love to ride that crisis further, they know they'd just ride it into the ditch.
• Russia! Russia! Russia! is over.  Polls are starting to show that people want sanctions to end so we can import oil from them to drop gas prices.  The joke is I can't believe that it's MonkeyPox season!  I still have my Ukraine decorations up!
  

• Oh, yeah - I forgot all about the riots.  And MonkeyPox?  Bitch, please.

Each of these has had a shelf life measured between 2 months and 2 days, but the lifetime is shortening.  And as this has played out, Joe Biden's approval ratings have continued sinking.  He's now the least popular "President" since Harry Truman.  That's 70 years.  If you actually remember Harry Truman, you're really, really old.  Polls repeatedly show that people would prefer Republican candidates over Democrat ones by 5, or 8, or 10 points.

My point is that the media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) is that crisis after crisis after crisis, all blamed on the Republicans, or Vladimir Putin, or White People have had precisely zero effect.  Nada. Nichto.  ничто.  无.

So to my point - The Democrats are very unpopular, and are getting increasingly unpopular.  The Media has lost all ability to change this trajectory.  We will leave for another day the question of whether the Republicans will be any better, but in all honesty - could they possibly be worse?***

We will also leave for another day the question of how legitimacy is established in a "Western Democracy" when elections are repeatedly stolen.  There's no question that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are up to this, and since "free and fair elections" are the bedrock of the American sense of political legitimacy, what happens when this is under minded needs to be explored in more detail.****

I shall endeavor to address these open items this weekend.  But I maintain what I said ten years ago after another notorious mass shooting: no new gun control laws are on offer.  And if Republican s are smart, after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade they should counter all gun control proposals with "Common Sense" abortion control proposals.  You'd have to pop popcorn to enjoy the meltdown that would induce.

* Technical term in computer networking, I was told.

** Remember the jury that refused to convict the people who were "plotting to kidnap" the Michigan Governor because almost all of the folks who were involved were FBI? 

*** Spoiler alert: maybe.

**** Spoiler alert: nothing good.