It is a universally recognized truth that when a private citizen finds a fellow who can tinker with a garden hose or slap a layer of tar onto a leaky chicken coop, he pays him out of his own pocket and bears the consequences in silence.
But when that citizen ascends to the highest office in the land, a sudden transformation occurs. The backyard tinkerer is instantly elevated in the executive mind to a grand master of global engineering, and the bill, by some marvelous administrative alchemy, is rerouted directly to the sagging shoulders of the American taxpayer.
Consider the grand comedy recently enacted at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a venerable basin that has spent the last century quietly doing exactly what its name implies reflecting.
It was decided, under the guise of an emergency so pressing that the ordinary rules of honest competition had to be thrown completely out the window, that this historic pool must be radically overhauled. The goal was to paint its natural gray basin a deep, patriotic hue officially designated as American Flag Blue in time for The Nation’s Two Hundred and Fiftieth Birthday.
To accomplish this monumental feat of aesthetics, the administration bypassed the public square entirely and handed a tidy contract to a Virginia outfit called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. Their primary qualification did not reside in any prestigious architectural registry, but in the President’s personal recollection of a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools at his golf resort in Sterling, Virginia.
When a leader insists on letting his favorite backyard mechanics tinker with national treasures, he is bound to drop the wrench directly into the gears.
Public records revealed this company had never before won a single federal contract and normally specialized in waterproofing highway culverts and drainage pipes. Under this no-bid arrangement, the initial estimate of one point eight million dollars vanished like morning mist, ballooning by over seven hundred percent to a staggering fourteen point seven million dollars complete with a guaranteed twenty-percent profit margin that made the blunder highly lucrative.
To ensure the water remained pristine, another no-bid contract for nearly two million dollars was dropped into the lap of Greenwater Services, an Ohio filtration company owned by a prominent political donor and personal neighbor of the President’s near Mar-a-Lago.
The administration surely bought a pig in a poke with that arrangement, as the company’s primary qualification was a past water-remediation job on a private pond at the Bedminster golf club.
The results of this coalition of amateur genius proved that when you let a golf buddy try to fix your irons instead of your game, you buy yourself a very expensive pile of scrap metal. Within a fortnight, the grand American Flag Blue floor began to peel away in great, tragic sheets, floating to the surface like dead leaves.
Simultaneously, the specialized filtration system mistook its mission entirely, unleashing a vibrant algae bloom that turned the majestic vista into a giant bowl of split-pea soup.
When the disaster became undeniable, the administration naturally blamed it on secret political vandals armed with corrosive chemicals, though science and the local frogs suggest the true culprits were merely standard pond scum and a catastrophic abundance of unvarnished incompetence.