It’s hard to drain a swamp. The folks in Florida could have told us. The other day a golfer in North Fort Myers had more proof than he asked for. All set to putt out on the fourth hole, suddenly he noticed a 10-foot alligator gnawing at his right ankle. A trusty putter in his possession eventually weakened the attacker, but not before our golfer was dragged into the gator’s pond. A Floridian informs us, “I can’t believe we ‘protected’ these guys for decades (gators, not golfers). Now we’re up to our bums in them.”
It’s a hazard we in D.C. face every day, and now its occupants are determined to bite off the ankles of our friendly new president, and not only when he’s golfing. Their response: “We’re the most protected species in history. You’re not allowed to touch us. We represent the American people and all that is good and trendy and anti-Putin. Lift a club against us and you’ll be impeached, drawn and quartered, broken on the wheel, and guillotined. Of course, we’ll stridently continue to oppose the death penalty, except in defense of women’s reproductive decisions.” Nothing personal, by the way. As CNN’s Jim Acosta told our friendly president yesterday, “Just for the record, we don’t hate you, I don’t hate you.” Maybe he’s not an alligator, just a snake. That means a whole new set of species protections. He should stand warned: There are many ways to skin a snake, before it’s fed to an alligator.
But what a difference a day makes with these pressies. One day all is chaos, and crisis, and scandal, and disarray. The next, it’s the destruction of the First Amendment and who knew what when and a “full, frontal assault” on press freedom — all because a few conservatives (eeew, gross) were allowed to ask questions at a press conference. Today there’s a growing conviction that the friendly president is off his rocker.
A few things to remember: This is Washington, a.k.a. Swampsville. “Capital Reels Amid Tumult” one headline read. “Washington Is Boiling” read another. “The White House Is Already in Flames” was an incendiary third. We heard endless talk of “cataclysm,” “conflagration,” “chaos,” and “cobra-like lunges at newfound enemies.” It will take an Al Franken to diagnose the mental condition of the nation’s capital.
But seen another way, it could be that everything is going as expected. Elections have consequences. California may be beyond repair, but it’s not our nation’s capital. An outsider has come in to shake Washington up — to drain it, not sustain it. At his inauguration he told us so himself, in case we’d forgotten. Apparently, many had, because they were quite upset at the lèse-majesté they detected in his comments in the presence of his big spending predecessors. (Had they known what was coming, those eminences could have spent the day building houses or finger-painting or kite-skiing.) So all is going as planned, despite the panic and fear sewn into a class of big shots who are left to shooting blanks and experiencing an amazing decline in their stature and sense of self-worth.
They did score what for them these days must pass as a major victory when Mr. Andy Puzder withdrew his name from consideration as the next Secretary of Labor. His sin? According to the National Review editorialists who opposed the nomination, it was his too soft approach to illegal immigration. NR’s position was duly noted in drive-by reports on the Puzder withdrawal. Isn’t life ironic? Here we have National Review, best known last campaign for its “Never Trump” attitudes, echoing the views of the Trump base it loathed to defeat someone who wasn’t true blue enough on a fundamental tenet of Trumpism. Now maybe we’ll hear from NR why it backed Marco Rubio for president last year before his candidacy was undermined by his own softness on illegal immigration.
The mysteries of political life confound. Our friendly new president took what everyone who matters described as major hits this week. Turns out he was being pelted with marshmallows — actually, mini-marshmallows — which might as well have been snowflakes. Now it’s off to Florida for another Trump hootenanny. Libs might want to revive Prairie Home Companion.
What next? Expect the lamestream to boycott all Trump pressers. Just to carry them over, how about we give an EOW prize to Jim Acosta, a symbol of all that is wrong with those whom history will no longer call on. It may not do him any good, but anyhow let’s all let him know we don’t hate him.
P.S. How did Jeff Zucker get his job?
