From inflation to crime, reality painfully crashes the illusions of Biden Democrats

The Democratic conductors orchestrating the one-company town that is Washington these days put on quite a performance for most of 2021.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sang an unforgettable rendition of "It's Transitory" when inflation began spiking, while President Joe Biden stirred a few emotions when he declared the deadly, bungled U.S. exit from Afghanistan an "extraordinary success."

Like "Les Miserables" hero Jean Valjean at the barricade, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas proudly proclaimed the U.S. southern border was fully secured as one million-plus illegal aliens poured across. And the grand dame of young progressives, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, belted out her own version of "What's Crime Gotta To Do With It," hoping to convince Americans that the pandemic of smash-and-grab robberies was "not actually panning out."

There's just one problem when politicians peddle illusions: Facts have a strange way of crashing the show. If voters can see reality, they dismiss the illusions. And when they do, the boomerang on the illusionists can be swift and consequential.

A poll last week on Joe Biden's future bore that out: Just one in four Americans want him to run for reelection, a stunning rebuke for a man that has only been in office for 11 months. The president's popularity lingers in the low 30s while Vice President Kamala Harris has an approval rating in the 20s.

"The cumulative effect is that people do not trust him anymore," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told Just the News on Friday. "And you can see this, whether it's in poll numbers, or if you do like I did and go have breakfast with a bunch of people at the Pancake Pantry in Nashville ... [what] you hear immediately from people is, 'We don't believe what they're telling us.'

"They were wrong about the border," said Blackburn in an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about the budget. They've been wrong about inflation. And it causes people to look at what they're doing with China, and look at what they're doing with Russia, and the fact that he's not holding them to account, and what are they saying? 'You have got to be kidding me? This cannot be happening to our country.'"

Republicans aren't the only ones sounding the Biden alarm.

Ex-Democratic New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind blasted his party on crime, saying AOC's denial of an irrefutable smash-and-grab robbery crisis and liberals' larger embrace of defunding the police and offering low- and no-bail releases to repeat offenders — a dynamic that unleashed the driver in the Waukesha parade massacre — are flat out "tone deaf" and handing Republicans a powerful election issue.

"Where are the others in the Democratic Party to stand up and defend the innocent people of this country who are being victimized by criminals?" Hikind asked in a TV interview last week.

He singled out Ocasio-Cortez as a "danger" because she advocates positions in the absence of facts to support her position.

"AOC is out of control," Hikind said. "I don't think she is living on this planet. Facts don't matter. She doesn't want to be confused with facts. All she is interested in is defund the police. Close the prisons down. Defund the prisons. I think it is time to defund AOC. She is a danger. I really think she is a danger. These crimes that are being committed, there are real victims out there."

On mere facts, the last few weeks have been a powerful rebuke of the ruling Democrats in Washington.

Biden's mandates requiring private business, health care workers and federal contractors to impose compulsory vaccination on workers were universally struck down by the courts, and new flavors of COVID began surging in a clear refutation of the president's July proclamation the pandemic had been defeated.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) was able to parlay that string of court losses into a bipartisan rebuke in the Senate, where lawmakers voted to rescind Biden's vaccine mandate on businesses. He told Just the News the mandates are a powerful political issue in closely contested states.

"There's got to be at least 25 or 30 Democrats in swing districts across the country that really have to be kind of trembling," he told the John Solomon Reports podcast. "Do I listen to this crazy policy that Pelosi and Biden are pushing? Or am I going to listen to 86% of my constituents that say this is a bad idea?"

While court losses mounted for Democrats, inflation roared in December to an annualized rate of 6.8%, the worst in four decades, forcing Yellen to reverse course and acknowledge inflation is going to be sticking around as a threat to the economy.

Likewise, a career criminal who was released by a liberal district attorney's office in Milwaukee on $1,000 bail for allegedly running over his girlfriend then ran over dozens of Christmas parade-goers in neighboring Waukesha, killing six.

The Customs and Border Patrol put out staggering numbers, from record illegal entries to an admission that more than a quarter of aliens in the country are repeat criminals.

And Russia massed a large number of troops on the Ukraine border in what U.S. intelligence believes is a prelude to invasion while China rattled its sabers about a possible takeover of Taiwan.

Blackburn traces the aggression of American adversaries to Biden's bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan in August.

"It has such long and profound consequences," she said.

"They're going to embolden Iran," she continued. "And what does Iran want to do? They want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. When you have China that is out there bullying our ally, Taiwan, when you have Russia ... pushing into Ukraine, if you are weak and timid and tepid, it causes people to say, 'Oh, wait a minute, you know, I watched what happened in Afghanistan. And I saw what they did there. And now I'm seeing how they're very weak on holding anybody else to account. I better go out and make myself some new friends.'"

Braun said the Democrats' current record is putting Republicans in position for a successful 2022 campaign to take back Congress, but he fears his own party won't have the will to reverse the policies and spending of the last year if it gets back in power.

"It's our biggest issue, because if we can't win with all the material that the Biden administration and the Democrats have dished out, we better go back to some type of drawing board," he said. "And part of our issue is they again, are movers and shakers. And they play in their favorite places, the federal government. We're generally wallflowers.

"And we don't undo the stuff when we get the reins back. How many programs have we unraveled successfully, once the Democrats seized that window of opportunity and put it into place? We generally nursed them along and don't have the political will to kind of take them down."