The White House ballroom being built by Emperor of the Heavens Donald Trump remains a monstrosity, a shanda, a monument to one man’s greed and corruption that will stain the most famous symbol of American government long after the rapidly decompensating man who okayed it has been covered by a flag and rolled out of the Oval Office feet first. You know, unless and until the next Democratic president makes a point of knocking the whole monstrosity down and letting every American who wants it the opportunity to grab a sledgehammer and hasten the destruction along.
But until that glorious day, we suppose we will have to listen to gaseous neckbeard Ross Douthat at The New York Times and the Jeff Bezos-anointed lickspittles currently taking a wrecking ball of their own to the once-venerated Washington Post take the considered editorial opinion that so long as everyone ignores the corruption and likely illegality of building this monstrosity with privately provided donations from billionaires, skip over how the public didn’t get a say in what Donald Trump does with a building that they own, and throw out irrelevant comparisons like Durrrrr Richard Nixon once put a bowling alley in the basement durrrrrr, this is all perfectly allowable and unoffensive.
How badly determined are some of America’s most visible mainstream media organizations to cradle the balls and work the shaft of the Trump administration? Well, the Post wants everyone to know that Democrats are secretly in favor of a new ballroom that will somehow be twice the size of the rest of the White House. Which Democrats? Dunno, we suppose we have to guess:
Privately, many alumni of the Biden and Obama White Houses acknowledge the long-overdue need for an event space like what Trump is creating. It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners.
Whether the White House needs a larger event space is completely irrelevant to whether Trump can just willy-nilly knock over the East Wing and replace it with a gilded ballroom that Peter the Great would have thought was a bit much. And it is certainly irrelevant as to whether he can do this with absolutely zero buy-in or input from Congress or the public. And no, the slobbery verbal blowjobs by congressional Republicans (and Cabinet members) praising Trump as some sort of genius master builder who gets shit done do not count as buy-in. They count as … well, slobbery verbal blowjobs.
The Post also dings progressive urbanism for being too slow and too obsessed with process and environmentalism. We look forward to a couple of decades from now, when the government is perhaps being sued by former White House workers who developed chronic mesothelioma from breathing in the dust and asbestos and toxic metals kicked up by the sudden teardown.
East Wing To Be Turned Into Golf Court Filler. Oh, The Indignity.
The East Wing Of The White House Is Gone. Completely Obliterated. Sorry For Thinking It Matters.
Father Douthat, meanwhile, was also concerned with having enough space to feed foreign leaders shrimp cocktails (he also mentioned the horror of the tents) and progressives’ penchant for caution when making irreversible changes to urban landscapes. But still, while those two items might be important in what passes for Douthat’s mind, he mostly seems to think that the big problem is that progressives have bad aesthetic taste:
But there is another issue besides bureaucratic sclerosis that makes it hard for left-leaning jurisdictions to overcome opposition to new building: namely, the widely shared awareness that when development happens under progressives auspices, it is often soul-crushingly unattractive.
This is one hell of a statement to make when the other option is Donald Trump, whose taste is essentially “What if Siegfried and Roy weren’t so dang understated?” For Christ’s sake, most recently Trump has been redecorating the Oval Office with golden baubles that appear to come direct from Home Depot.
STEAL THIS LOOK: Trump’s Cheap, Ugly Gold Oval Office Sh*t, Available At Home Depot?
As an example of Democrats’ apparently offensive taste, Douthat cites the Obama presidential library. That building is a towering monolith that will loom over Chicago’s South Side when it is finally done. But of course presidential libraries are built with private funds on private land. Obama can make his into a Six Flags park if he wants to, and the people of Chicago are welcome to fight him on it. This has zero bearing on what Trump is doing to the White House. Last we checked, the South Side of Chicago was not the seat of American government.
Has Obama considered making his presidential library a Six Flags park? Because that actually sounds like fun.
And while the nation’s illustrious print journalism organs are busy running cover for President Bulldozer, one of our major news networks is, as noted by The Fucking News, also falling in line:
[Editor-in-chief Mark] Thompson told the CNN Thursday morning editorial meeting last week to lighten up on the flattening down of the historic American landmark. CNN denies it, but I seem to recall hearing that they’re fake news and, according to Status, Thompson told his team that CNN’s viewer(s) weren’t all that interested.
Thompson said this after he had a meeting with someone at the White House. He’s reportedly hoping that CNN can have better relations with the Trump administration, and what better way to achieve that goal than to ignore Trump’s destruction of national landmarks?
Contrast all this sucking up with The New Yorker, where Adam Gopnik points out that the small size of the White House is precisely the fucking point:
The same restrained values of democracy have always marked the White House—a stately house, but not an imperial one. It is “the people’s house,” but it has also, historically, been a family house, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a little place, by the standards of monarchy, and blessedly so: fitting for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief time, and at the people’s pleasure.
“Restrained values of democracy” is a nice phrase. America should try that sometime.
OPEN THREAD.
[WaPo / NYT / TFN / New Yorker]
With mainstream media having nearly completed its metamorphosis into right-wing gibberish, there has never been a better time to support independent outfits like Wonkette.
www.wonkette.com (Article Sourced Website)
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