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Hello and happy Saturday. You did not have to look too hard if you needed a laugh this week, as social media ran rampant with memes mocking the bungled renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. My favorites were Cousin Eddie, of Christmas Vacation fame, emptying the contents of his chemical toilet into the pool, and a declaration that the Pantone Color of the Year was (a very green) “American Flag Blue.”
But for all the jokes, the whole fiasco is sobering in that it encapsulates so many problems with the Trump administration: the dishonesty (blaming the problems entirely on vandals), the vanity (Trump rushing to leave his imprint on the capital), the incompetence (pushing through no-bid contracts to beat a deadline only to create more problems). Kevin D. Williamson chalks it up to the president’s character, or lack thereof, writing, “To assume that the reflecting pool work would be done incompetently and corruptly is far from absurd. If you happen to be among those who believe that character is destiny, then it is, at the very least, a reasonable assumption even if it is something short of an existential certainty.”
