By Beau Elliot
It was well-known during the not-so-recently concluded presidential campaign — which somehow never seems to conclude, actually. It just keeps going on and on and on like some sort of Sisyphean contraption that the media gods have doomed us to watch. And watch. And … you get the idea.
Kind of like that Wednesday afternoon when you got lost in Bowen and accidentally wandered into a lecture on some type of enzyme that does something more obscure than Patagonia and you came out two hours later with eyes like two glazed doughnuts. But not so nourishing.
Oh, well. Whatever.
(What’s a Sisyphean contraption? you wonder. Don’t sweat it; it’s just another rock band. There won’t be a pop quiz.)
In any case, the campaign showed everyone that the Trumpster had the thickness of skin that you could only measure in nano units. Or something equally obscure. The bad news is he’s now in the West Wing. The good news is his skin is still that thick.
Remember the brouhaha over the size of the Trumpster’s inauguration crowd? And many people contending it was relatively small, like small hands? Well, Grumpy Trumpy didn’t forget. He hung — well, his minions did — some photos of the crowds in the White House.
And the photos hanging in the White House of the crowds during the Trumpster’s inauguration do indeed show an incredible number of people, thus backing up the Fake-News-in-Chief’s claim that 17 billion people attended the event.
Of course, given the non-alternative fact that the Earth’s population is around 7 billion, 17 billion people at the inauguration means that many billion illegal immigrants from the moons of Neptune and Uranus (Grumpy Trumpy’s old stomping grounds) had somehow slipped into Washington, D.C. But they weren’t Muslims or Mexicans, so they were OK, the Trumpsterites say.
There is one problem with the White House photos showing the swarming mass of crowds: The photos are dated Jan. 21. The Trumpster was inaugurated on Jan. 20. The Women’s March on Washington, which drew many, many more people, occurred on Jan. 21.
Hmm.
Maybe White House trusted adviser Kellyanne Conway, who in her side job as a cosmologist discovered alternative facts, will come out and tell us that the Trumpster was actually inaugurated on Jan. 21. Or that the fancy-dancy high-tech camera’s interior calendar thought it was still a leap year. (Though that actually takes a leap of faith, but what doesn’t, these days?) Well, maybe that would take everyone’s mind off Conway’s recent sally into advertising.
It seems that the White House was particularly miffed that Nordstrom had decided to nix Ivanka Trump’s line of clothes. The Trumpster himself led off the offensive, tweeting: My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!
Then Press Secretary Sean Spicer waded into the fray. (Why do human beings always wade into frays? Isn’t there another way to fray?) “This is a direct attack on his policies and her name,” he told reporters on Feb. 8.
And, of course, trusted adviser Conway couldn’t contain herself, either. On Feb. 10, she told “Fox and Friends,” “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would tell you. I hate shopping, I’m going to go get some myself today.”
Ah, what a White House we have. Of course, there is the slight problem that in Conway saying what she did, she violated government ethics and may have broken the law. But details, details. Russia? China? North Korea? ISIS? No, the real problem is Nordstrom.
Makes one long for the days of Sisyphus.