Obsession over the DC Reflecting Pool is a sad symbol of our times

The furor over President Donald Trump’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has turned into a civic bloodbath.

Longtime liberal commentator Paul Farhi has touted the “massive symbolic/metaphorical power” of the narrative war playing out over the National Mall mainstay, pointing to the contrast between Trump’s “triumphant claims” and “visible failure.”

Namely, the algae blooms and already-peeling coating floating on its surface.

Farhi is right about it being emblematic of our age, but hopelessly myopic about how.

In their rush to put points on the board against the president, the Democrats and their reliable friends in the Fourth Estate have developed a telling obsession with the project.

A NewsBusters analysis found that between June 14 and June 22, CNN, MS NOW, ABC, CBS, and NBC have spent almost seven hours covering it.

CNN alone devoted three hours and 35 minutes to the topic, while MS NOW chipped in another two hours and 40 minutes.

And while the “big three” broadcast networks spent far less time on the nontroversy, that’s only because they run 16 and a half fewer hours of news programming per day.

The coverage was as qualitatively bad as it was quantitatively astounding.

At CNN, cameramen zoomed in on Brianna Keilar’s tablet as she asserted the body of water looked like a “patch of grass” from above.

And over at MS NOW, Chris Hayes gleefully deemed its hue “Kermit the Frog green.”

The newly established “Democrats Against Public Works” coalition is also up in arms.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) declared the $14 million renovation a “bottomless pit of expense and failure,” while his colleague Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) called it an “embarrassing waste of resources.”

Bear in mind: Former President Barack Obama spent $34 million on renovations to the same structure during his time in office.

And since when are Democrats opposed to expenses, failures or embarrassing wastes of resources?

The Reflecting Pool craze is a reflection of all the many maladies plaguing their party.

Most glaring among them: their reflexive opposition to anything and everything championed by Trump.

One might imagine Americans of all stripes could get behind a beautification effort in the capital ahead of the country’s 250th birthday celebration.

But because Trump, a real estate mogul to the bitter end, let on that he was passionate about such an effort, they’ve declared war on it.

Most damning, though, is what it says about the substance of what the Democrats have to offer.

They latch on to these distractions — the pool, the ballroom, the UFC fight in front of the White House — because they’re desperate to paper over their inability to govern.

Recall, if you will, their two humiliating losses at the hands of Trump, both of which came complete with unified GOP control of Congress

A decade after their first defeat, they still prefer churning out tortured metaphors about the Bad Orange Man to articulating a positive vision for America.

In fact, the only Democrats articulating any vision at all are the ascendant, unpatriotic, Third World-worshipping socialists chanting, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

Still, they’re not the only ones with an unhealthy fixation in this story.

By spending months making big promises he ended up not being able to fulfill, clamping down hard on critics’ bait, and, most recently, claiming that vandals bear responsibility for the malfunctions without furnishing any evidence, the president has played right into all of the worst character traits he’s been charged with.

Trump initially boasted that the project would cost $1.8 million.

Oops.

In a barnburner of a Truth Social screed, he railed against the “Failing New York Times” over its reporting on the “Great and Beautiful” project.

Hasn’t he ever been cautioned against protesting too much?

This administration commits more unforced errors than a blindfolded K-2 tee-ball team.

In the meantime, while America’s political elites engage in this great psychodrama over a pseudo-event, its people remain alarmed by the state of the economy and recent events in the Middle East.

Polling suggests that both Trump and the Democrats are astonishingly unpopular.

Were they not running against each other, they’d stand little chance of finding any semblance of success this November.

To the extent the Reflecting Pool should have been a topic of conversation at all — under any circumstances, but the current ones in particular — the dialogue ought to have gone something like:

“Fix it?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

But with shortsighted, self-interested leaders like ours in charge, Americans have come to expect them to eschew problem-solving in favor of manufacturing demeaning debacles.

Much to reflect upon, indeed.

Isaac Schorr is a senior editor at Mediaite.