President on Strike

Thisbe, Wall, and Pyramus in the 2010-11 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the University of Delaware Resident Ensemble Players.

Well, that's a relief:

JERUSALEM – President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said Sunday that the U.S. military withdrawal from northeastern Syria is conditioned on defeating the remnants of the Islamic State group, and on Turkey assuring the safety of Kurdish fighters allied with the United States.

Trump's not going to pull US troops out of Syria until all the reasons for not pulling troops out of Syria go away. He's totally going to do it, just not as long as it's a really bad idea. As soon as it's a good idea he'll be there.

Or, putting it another way, the Anonymous Resistance is still at work even though "Mad Dog" Mattis has bowed out. All we have to do is wait until Trump's obsessed with some other crazy project and you can correct the current mistake without him noticing, at least as long as the mistake is so terrible even Bolton and Pompeo and Netanyahu know it's a mistake and they all get on board.


And as long as reversing the mistake doesn't entail asking Trumpy to do anything. All you need to reverse the decision to pull troops out of Syria is just not issue any orders to do it. Not issuing orders is something the Pentagon is pretty good at.

Too bad this doesn't apply to, say, cutting off funding for the Transportation Security Agency, national parks and museums, tens of thousands of agents for the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Prisons, Customs and Border Protection, Coast Guard, and Secret Service, some but by no means all investigations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and 88% of the Internal Revenue Service, which should be, but won't be able to, tugboating us through the hazards of the $1.5-trillion tax cut passed a year ago, a nest of typos, errors, and serious contradictions believed to be some of the worst-written legislation ever enacted in US history.

I guess Trumpy doesn't care about that last one. He'd be fine with the bill just introduced by Republican trolls in the House of Representatives to repeal income tax and abolish the IRS, and right in the middle of tax time would be perfect (it is just trolling, of course, but how would he know that?). And he's not bothered by what's happening to the Secret Service, since there are still agents guaranteeing his personal safety, or the national park system, as long as the park site at the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the president (illegally) owns a hotel, continues to be taken care of.

And if the Anonymous Resistance wants to do something about it, they need to get the president to participate, in particular by signing a piece of paper, which is, as we know, one of his favorite presidential activities. But he won't do it because, as he was explaining to Congressional negotiators, this isn't a government shutdown but a "strike".

Trump swore so frequently during today’s immigration meeting that he ended up apologizing to Pelosi. He griped about impeachment. And he called the shutdown a “strike,” drawing puzzlement in the room. https://t.co/j5tVWBTLvG

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) January 5, 2019

Meaning, presumably, that Trumpy's on strike, for better working conditions. He didn't sign up to surround himself with a bunch of soreheaded losers who keep telling him he can't do whatever he wants. All he's asking is $5.7 billion for something. He doesn't even care what it is, as long as it costs $5.7 billion and they let him call it a wall. Is that so much to ask?