All but lost in the flooded zone of current events is the fact that the trumped up vandalism charge against former Olympian David Hearn in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool fiasco has collapsed. One might as well add, as expected. The NY Times and other legacy outlets that do old-fashioned investigative journalism have uncovered the real facts of the case. Not vandalism but the administration’s monstrous incompetence and malignant corruption caused this debacle. A no bid contract was given to a friend of the president who had little relevant experience; corners were then cut in a hurried, sloppy, corrupt process to have the Reflecting Pool renovation done by July 4.
It backfired spectacularly, so naturally they needed a scapegoat.
No wonder we are where we are now, $16 million and counting later with the Reflecting Pool drained again and surrounded by industrial fencing that prevents public access to it.
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As a resident of the DC metropolitan area who frequently bikes into the National Mall for exercise and pleasure, I have a personal interest in this matter. I know the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and environs well, and feel an abiding gratitude for the tangible and symbolic importance of this most impressive and gratifying of American public spaces. Every time I go, I take a few moments to marvel at its sober beauty, its democratic openness, and the untrammeled public access to the grand spaces. I always feel a sincere appreciation for the tourists I see there too, generally the best kind, student groups, families, clusters of community organizations and friends, pleased to be there together, genuinely curious, happy to discover and rediscover. They come from every walk of life and state of the union, and seemingly from every nation on earth, to roam at will and to admire the great sites of the capital city of the world’s greatest democracy.
America at its very best. Apart from our fantastic national parks it doesn’t get any better than this.
As for David Hearn, from everything I’ve read and heard, he is close to being a model citizen, the kind of honest, hard-working, civically engaged professional American who makes our open democratic system work, quietly, without a fuss, behind the scenes. Not only that, given his background as an Olympic canoeist and the company he bought that makes waterproofing materials for canoes, boats and other watercraft, he has a perfectly understandable and authentic professional curiosity about the material reasons for which the administration’s “renovation” project had gone south so quickly. His decision to take photos of the floating flakes in the algae-bloom-infested Reflecting Pool and to pick up one of the detached pieces of the newly renovated blue plastic coating to examine it, was framed as criminal “vandalism” at a felony level, as though he were responsible for the fiasco that impelled his curiosity to begin with.
Come again? Are you serious? Is this supposed to be a joke?
That such a patently absurd and utterly sensationalist bogus charge was even allowed to be made in the first place, much less actively pursued, sums up the current political inversion perfectly.
Headline: Innocent gesture of model citizen framed as criminal vandalism to cover up corrupt machinations of criminal administration.
The point is worth repeating. An innocent man is corruptly framed and knowingly scapegoated for a crime he didn’t commit to cynically reflect and promote the president’s patent lie and to cover up the results of his transparent corruption. Now it seems one’s only job as a senior administration official is to make the president’s delusions and lies appear true in the eyes of the public. A perfect reversion to the pattern of adhering only to “alternative facts”; that is, the perfect inversion of reality.
Thank goodness our judicial system still has a measure of independence, which compelled a politically motivated and proudly mouthy showboating prosecutor to admit her case was a sham and to eat crow with her lying criminal boss and a credulous public. (Has she confessed to the sham on her former stomping grounds of Fox News?)
Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse! I’m sure JD Vance is right on it. How long can our democratic system hold under such obscene pressure?
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The Corruption is the Point
Less obvious to most Americans is why this matters. To those with even a passing familiarity with corrupt political systems elsewhere in the world, it matters a lot. To naturalized Americans who fled corrupt (opaque, broken, personalist) systems to be able to live and work under the more open, clear, impersonal “rule of law” American system, and to natural born Americans like me who served as diplomats or otherwise worked in “developing” countries and saw how corruption works and its enormously corrosive consequences up close and personal, it matters in a way we can taste.
What most Americans don’t understand is that corruption is the very point of these boondoggle projects. From the Reflecting Pool fiasco, to the Big Beautiful Ballroom and the Arc de Trump, and whatever other backroom construction deal or other is in the works under this criminal administration, the point is the corruption. The project itself, not to mention the public good or the national interest, is an afterthought. That is, if any such thought occurs at all at any point from start to finish in the administration’s concealed from the public, criminally corrupt calculation.
As I’ve written before, established processes for public construction projects exist for this very reason: To make sure the public interest is reflected in the design and, if approved, to ensure the quality of the ensuing construction meets or exceeds the standard. The decision to jettison these established processes, whatever the bogus “emergency” justification, is done for one reason: to skip these critical steps and to provide opportunities for intermediaries and the big boss himself to take their cut.
All construction, all public construction, and particularly all public construction done on iconic public lands like the National Mall and the White House, needs to be strictly bound by and conducted within processes established for this purpose, to ensure the public good and the national interest is represented at the core of the calculus. This includes the Big Ballroom, the Arc de Trump, and everything else.
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I fear we have seen only the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger, deeper, and more extensive corruption problem. In light of ongoing scandals like the preposterously corrupt scheme to sell priority access to the president’s Truth Social posts, this seems like the emperor of understatements. Fasten your seatbelts folks, because we’re just getting started.
Unless the American people and their representatives in Congress tell the criminal administration their time is up, it’s going to get a lot uglier.
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