But a spark ...

 

Midjourney

Ironically, the Reflecting Pool CF, as ridiculous as it truly is, indirectly relates to the Storming of the Bastille because in that scenario, people thought there would be thousands locked but no, only 7 were released. Why is this a big deal? Well, this was the start of the French Revolution, the bloodiest revolution the west ever experienced beginning in 1789.

For the Trump Administration, the Reflecting Pool debacle shows part and parcel, how grossly incompetent and evil this entity truly is but for the orange menace, it's even worse, he's now being laughed at, something most humiliating to the stable genius residing in the White House. 

There's no question that the debacle surrounding President Donald Trump's rehabbing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool doesn't rise to the level of, say, his choice to wage war with Iran, his dumb and legally challenged imposition of tariffs, or his insistence on socializing businesses.

But it's equally true that this fetid little episode, not yet fully resolved, provides a shorthand of everything cloudy and foul-smelling about his so-far terrible second term, especially his unwillingness to own his failures (such as admitting he lost the 2020 election). Jimmy Carter fought killer rabbits. Gerald Ford fell down staircases. And George H.W. Bush puked on foreign dignitaries. Trump is now fighting an algae bloom in such a way that he is becoming a laughingstock.

"You won't be seeing this Biden filth and incompetence much longer!," he declared triumphantly last fall on Truth Social when announcing plans for the job. It was supposed to cost just $1.5 million. This April, he bragged endlessly about his expertise in swimming pools, telling the media, "I've probably built more than 100 swimming pools….There'll be no leaks; there'll be no anything….It'll look gorgeous, beautiful." On June 3, he unveiled a bizarre, decidedly Freudian graphic comparing the length of the reflecting pool (2,030 feet) to the heights of the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, and One World Trade Center. The chart was titled "Our Pool Is Bigger than Skyscrapers."

When one becomes the butt of a joke, courage to question arises. The Senate actually implementing the War Powers Act is a start. Will it actually do anything? Probably not but this small act of defiance is akin to the Storming of the Bastille back in 1789. The herd mentality rules, in the end.

Storming of the Bastille

The French Revolution[a] was a period of political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the Coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799. Many of the revolution's ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy,[1] and its values remain central to modern French political discourse.[2] It was caused by a combination of social, political, and economic factors which the existing regime proved unable to manage.

Financial crisis and widespread social distress led to the convocation of the Estates General in May 1789, its first meeting since 1614. The representatives of the Third Estate broke away and re-constituted themselves as a National Assembly in June. The Storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July led to a series of radical measures by the Assembly, including the abolition of feudalism, state control over the Catholic Church in France, and issuing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

But a spark applies, doe it not?