Less than two weeks ago the first small white snowdrops – a pretty little uber-early flowering bulb – had pushed their way through the icy ground along our front walk and had begun to bloom. Then . . . swoosh! Two great snowstorms in less than a week again buried them deep.
With luck they’re blooming still below that snow and will be there for us to enjoy when it ends. If it ends.
The bulbs have been there for more than 20 years, regularly pushing their way through snow for their spring debut and quietly multiplying until they are a dense – if short-lived – floral mat each year.
Like most of the ornamental plants we grow around here, even tiny bulbs are a lot more resilient than we’d think, contemplating their delicate flowers. Maybe more resilient than a lot of us are too, as we absorb one bit of disquieting news after another.
The last few weeks in particular seemed to focus on officials – I’d call them public servants but they’re not – behaving badly. There’s a lot of it going on, especially (surprise!) in our nation’s capital.
We can start – as usual – with our illustrious president. We know that since his swearing in he has demonstrated daily his contempt for fact-based reality. Remember the insistence that his inauguration had the absolutely, positively hands-down biggest audience around the globe of any previous president in history?
But this time he not only has admitted lying. He bragged about it. Publicly. Lying to a foreign leader, no less. And not just any old foreign leader, but the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, one of our closest allies.
And he didn’t lie for any strategic reason. He lied to Trudeau just to mess with him! So he gloated to the audience at a fund raiser. In a private meeting he insisted to an incredulous Trudeau that Canada had a budget surplus in its trade with the U.S. In fact, as Trudeau – in vain – tried to explain, the exact reverse was true.
Trump would have no part of it. He insisted on repeating the falsehood to Trudeau, he told the audience to much laughter. “I didn’t even know. . . . I had no idea,” he crowed. “I just said, ‘you’re wrong.’ ”
He was so proud of his baseless lie he bragged later to reporters about it.
Why on earth would any of our allies – or for that matter, our enemies – ever believe anything the president of the United States says in the future?
And Trump’s cavalier disregard for public norms of behavior is emulated by members of his Cabinet.
Take Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, whose net worth is estimated to be $300 million. (Trump has a great fondness for rich people, he has told us repeatedly.) Mnuchin has no qualms about spending the public’s money. Last year he and his new wife took a military plane (for beaucoup bucks) from Washington to Fort Knox, Ky., to watch the solar eclipse.
He also asked for – and for once was denied – the use of a military jet to escort him and said wife throughout Europe on their honeymoon.
Just between March and October of last year the multimillionaire secretary stiffed the taxpayers for some $800 thousand for military flights he commandeered to attend various meetings – in, I must add, places where commercial flights were abundantly available for a fraction of that cost.
Mnuchin isn’t the only Cabinet member with a yen for pricey flights. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has repeatedly used taxpayer money to charter planes to the Caribbean and to his home in Montana, although commercial flights – for significantly less – were available. It’s worth noting that Zinke was found to have repeatedly padded his travel expenses as a Navy SEAL and was nearly cashiered. Old habits die hard, I guess.
And just a week or so ago we learned that Zinke had spent $139,000 on new doors for his balcony office – the old ones leaked.
Zinke, by the way, has a department employee go to the roof of the Interior Department building in Washington to fly the interior secretary’s flag – yes, he has a flag – when he is actually in the building. Sort of like British royalty. Queen Elizabeth II has her own flag as well, the Royal Standard, and it’s flown from whichever castle she’s using on a given day.
Maybe poor Zinke needs a couple of castles himself.
Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s chief of staff – unlikely on her own – doctored a few documents to allow Shulkin’s wife to accompany him gratis on an 11-day tour of Europe. A shamed Shulkin repaid the government and – perhaps not coincidentally – is rumored to be on his way out.
But Shulkin was a piker compared with Tom Price, Trump’s former head of Health and Human Services, who was forced to resign when it was learned that in fewer than eight months in his post he had improperly racked up close to $1 million in costs traveling on charter and military flights.
Famously sanctimonious Ben Carson, the retired brain surgeon now running Housing and Urban Development (yeah, it makes no sense, but our president is fond of hammering square pegs into round holes), decided to live high on the taxpayers’ dime by ordering a $31,561 dining set for his office and, when caught, said he knew nothing about it before he was proved wrong.
But maybe the king (so far) of the Cabinet’s big spenders is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who – when he’s not trying to destroy the environment by trashing several decades of environmental protection – seems to be single-handedly adding to the destruction with taxpayer-paid air travel.
Pruitt has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars to jet around the world, often in charter planes. According to one recent report, just in the first few weeks of June 2017 Pruitt and a number of aides spent in excess of $90,000 in travel expenses.
Where Pruitt has really distinguished himself, though, is with his phone booth. Yes, phone booth.
Pruitt demanded a high-tech, high-security phone booth for his private office. Really, there are such things. Just like Maxwell Smart’s famous Cone of Silence, although presumably Pruitt’s booth works a little better than the Cone.
Or at least it ought to, considering it cost $25,000. With the construction costs – renovation of the office, etc., to accommodate it – the cost will be closer to $43,000. No word on the identity of the enemy Pruitt wants to thwart. Although presumably it’s not KAOS, Max Smart’s nemesis. More likely nefarious environmentalists – the National Audubon Society, maybe, or the Sierra Club.
Drat, thinking about Pruitt makes my head hurt. Must think about the sweet snowdrops lurking under the snow. And daffodils! Daffodils can make almost anything better.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)