It’s a never-ending quagmire that has taken months longer and cost more money than Trump predicted. Victory has been declared numerous times yet it never quite arrives. We’re still at war over this body of water.
I am, of course, speaking of the Reflecting Pool.
This fun-house mirror of the Iran War features all the lying and incompetence of the real war but with much lower consequences.
But the consequences are very real for the people who find themselves threatened with imprisonment by the Department of Justice.
People like David Hearn, the Olympian who faced a felony with cackling US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro promising swift and certain justice. He was antifa, he was a Democratic operative, he was part of a left-wing conspiracy to damage Trump’s signature accomplishment – this is the kind of rhetoric you heard on Fox News.
And then it all fell apart. This time, Pirro didn’t grandstand before the cameras but, instead, let the news slip out on a Friday night.
She dropped the case. Pirro did so in a very lengthy motion, claiming that she had been misled by another government agency, the Department of the Interior. In her filing, she admitted that there was no evidence that Hearn had damaged the pool. No photos, no videos, nothing.
But it gets worse. The pool liner was damaged prior to Hearn’s arrival – something that had been documented by ordinary citizens (like me) and major news outlets.
The damage was caused, according to the filing, by the contractors that Trump hired in a rush to get the pool painted “American flag blue” by July 4th. They botched the job.
I said back in May that those fucking Okies didn’t know what they were doing. They were painting concrete that was still damp with push brooms, driving over their hoses and haphazardly spraying blue sealant all over the place. Knowing that it would be a clusterfuck, I documented the scene, with visits every couple days to check on the progress or lack thereof.
MAGA attacked me on Twitter for saying this. “Wha ya know about pools, libtard!” This was one of Dear Leader’s few non-disastrous achievements; they could not cope with the criticism.
In their motion, DOJ said that Interior knew that the liner had failed in June, after the water turned green. Knew that it was peeling up. They knew it wasn’t vandals.
Yet, the Park Police, controlled by Interior, still kept arresting people at the Reflecting Pool. Not just David Hearn, but several others were detained, handcuffed and charged with misdemeanors or given citations for touching the pool water.
The lengthy motion filed by DOJ is a desperate attempt to avoid sanctions for the government attorneys involved in the case, who unknowingly (they claim) presented false evidence to a grand jury.
David Hearn has excellent attorneys, who picked apart the non-evidence of the case through discovery motions. DOJ knows that this case has career-ending consequences for all involved so is attempting to get out now.
But Trump never met a situation that he couldn’t make worse.
Rather than accepting the loss and moving on to the next distraction, he doubled down on failure, attacking Pirro, who he said should’ve never dropped the case. There was clear evidence of vandalism!
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum repeated the party line, refuting Pirro’s claims about his incompetence and claiming (falsely) that there was evidence of vandalism.
The Reflecting Pool was drained on July 14. It’s currently empty, peeling up in spots and the American Flag Blue liner is faded and covered in debris. A fence surrounds it to keep people away and is monitored by security cameras on towers, like a prison. The National Guard patrols against illusory antifa types, in service of Trump’s lie.
Will it be refilled? Will the damage be fixed? Will they consult experts and do it right this time? Or will it remain in limbo, half-wrecked and abandoned, like the nearby Kennedy Center?
It’s another forever war fought over a body of water, with lower consequences than the real war, but emblematic of the regime’s cruelty and incompetence.
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