Well, That Was Fruitless

Ha! Suck it, Coulter. Five weeks into the pointless fray, and Trump caves, the shutdown ends, albeit temporarily, and it winds up exactly where it was 35 days ago, with a clean continuing resolution providing interim funding, and not a dime for Donald’s lousy wall. Net result: Jack/Shit. It’s nice to see Donald lose, but Jesus, what a brainless waste of time; what a gratuitous infliction of misery. Now, with nothing changed, three more weeks of furious negotiation can begin, culminating either in a deal, or, supposedly, another shutdown.

Trump wouldn’t dare force another shutdown – would he?

If he tried, this time Mitch would put his foot down and shove a veto-proof funding bill right up Donald’s wa-zoo – wouldn’t he?

And surely to God, Donald wouldn’t suddenly grow enough of a pair to declare that state of emergency he keeps threatening – right?

Here’s the meagre best your would-be pundit can muster up in these days of strange distemper: who knows? Who the f#@k knows.

Imagine, all this sturm und drang over an impossible barrier that will never, ever, be anything more than a fever dream. In fact, that’s all it was ever supposed to be, in essence. Unbelievably, the reporters are saying that the idea of a great big border wall was born of the need for a mnemonic device – no fooling – so that Trump would remember to rant against the scourge of immigration at his campaign rallies. Donald forgets things. He needed something huge and Trumpy to visualize, an exciting mental image to spur him along so he wouldn’t neglect to vilify the brown people. Like, if you needed to remember to pick up your referee’s uniform from the dry cleaner, you might visualize a zebra taking a bubble bath. Easy to remember now, right? Same thing with a border wall. Roger Stone is said to have come up with it. Roger, who got arrested Friday morning in the pre-dawn. The guy with the tattoo of Nixon’s face between his shoulder blades. That guy.

And I thought it was bad when the wall was a metaphor.

Here’s where they fell off the beam with the whole mnemonic idea: it’s supposed to remain an absurd, fantastical mental image. To aid your recall. Kept inside your head. You see the big beautiful wall in your mind’s eye, sure, 50 feet tall and 2,000 miles long, spikes on top, ‘gators in the moat, the works, but when you talk out loud you simply rant about brown people, and how awful they are. Just like in that very first speech. They’re thieves, and rapists, and some, one supposes, are good people. That sort of thing. You don’t promise the masses that you’re going to build them a real world version of your zany mnemonic device. Though I guess you do, if you’re dumbass Donnie. It’s as if our hypothetical referee marched into the dry cleaning joint and demanded that the poor schmuck behind the counter fetch him his zebra, and make it fast, I’m running late.

I suppose this is no great surprise. Donald has always had trouble with the real/not real dichotomy. Maybe, now that Nancy’s through with him, he gets it a little better. Maybe.

Sigh. I wish this meant it was over, but I don’t know. Donald was thoroughly whipped Friday, by a woman, no less, and now Ann Coulter is all but calling him a girly-man in pink panties. That smarts. That’s going to fester over the next couple of weeks. Trump is apt to lick his wounds, talk himself back into believing he’s the greatest, smartest, bestest, winningest President ever, and come back swinging.

It seems certain that three more weeks of negotiation aren’t going to get him his wall money. Maybe at that point Donald, mad as a wet hen, really does try to invoke emergency powers.

In a better world, as soon as he did that Congress would use its statutory authority to declare the emergency over. More likely, it’ll wind up in the Courts, as would all the eminent domain cases that’ll flow from attempting to seize the vast stretches of private land upon which to build the idiotic thing, if it ever got that far. With any luck, Trump will be nothing but a bad memory before any of that got resolved. In any case, it certainly seems like his argument for the use of emergency powers is too weak to succeed, and gets weaker every time he agrees to defer action until he sees if he can get Congress to play ball. After all, an emergency is, well, an emergency. If you can put off acting upon something for months and months, it likely doesn’t qualify.

On the other hand, it’s the Courts, so once again: who knows?

Who knows anything anymore? We’re all clueless, living in the Upside Down. Look:

It’s off to the races! Jesus H. Christ. A few more weeks of this, and it’s not going to be funny anymore.