Dreadpool: American Flag Blue, Now In Algae Green

Maximum Effort, Minimum Waterproofing

Behold the only thing in Washington both parties can agree on: draining something that isn’t the swamp, and billing you for it.

People keep saying Trump screwed up the Reflecting Pool job.

(He didn’t.)

It went exactly according to plan, and the plan was never really about the pool.

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This is how you rob a country in broad daylight and get half of it to thank you. You take a maintenance job, a boring one, the kind of thing that has needed doing roughly since Coolidge, and you declare it “urgent and compelling.” That is the magic phrase. Say it out loud in the right building and a door swings open, and behind the door is a room where the normal rules about making companies compete for your money politely do not apply. No bidding. No haggling. No irritating second contractor raising his hand to mention that you are being charged eleven times too much.

Through that door strolled Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia firm that had never held a single federal contract in its entire corporate life but HAD done some work over at the Trump National Golf Club, which is a coincidence in roughly the same way that lightning is a coincidence if you are standing on a roof holding a fork.

The job was estimated at $1.8 million. The final bill came in north of $14.6 million to waterproof the floor of a puddle.

(For the record, that is approximately fourteen and a half million more dollars than I have.)

Then there were the experts. Sika, the company that supplied the materials for the LAST renovation, the people who actually understand how this specific pool behaves in this specific swamp, got a phone call while the job was being slapped together. A contractor working the project rang them up wanting it fast and wanting it blue, and Sika took one look at the timeline and said, in the professional language of people who know what they are doing, no thanks, this is unfeasible, we are coating people and not wizards.

So they hung up on the experts and finished the job anyway, coating Abraham Lincoln’s front yard in Rhino Linings.

Rhino Linings. The truck bed liner. The rubbery black goop they spray into the back of pickups so your toolbox stops sliding into your cooler. You can buy it in a kit. You can roll it on yourself in an afternoon, in your driveway, in flip-flops. It is a genuinely fine product if what you own is a Silverado. It was not designed to be the waterproof floor of a 6.75 million gallon national monument, and when asked to be exactly that, it behaved precisely the way a truck accessory behaves. It peeled. Blue strips of it floated to the surface like a tarp giving up.

And the water went green, which brings us to the OTHER no-bid contract, because of course there are two.

To murder the algae, the government skipped competitive bidding a second time and handed $1.74 million to a company called, and I promise you this is the real name, Greenwater Services.

Greenwater is owned by a man named John Cafaro, who happens to live a short walk from Mar-a-Lago, who has shoveled more than $300,000 into Trump-connected committees, and whom the President once personally described as a “fantastic man.” He is also, and please hold onto this for a few paragraphs, a guy who pleaded guilty back in 2001 to conspiring to bribe a member of Congress. A Democrat, as it happens. We will come back to him.

So that is two no-bid contracts, sixteen million dollars combined, both landing softly in the lap of somebody already inside Trump’s circle, and the finished product is a peeling blue swamp. The algae won. The algae is undefeated.

None of this is hard. Lining a pool is not neurosurgery. Any entry-level kid on any pool crew in America can be taught to lay liner before lunch and be decent at it by dinner. This was not a tragic accident of pool chemistry. This was a faucet. Somebody left it running, and the water pouring out is your money.

So let’s do the math, because the math is insulting.

The pool is 2,030 feet long and 167 feet wide. Coat the floor and the little knee-high walls and you are covering somewhere around 348,000 square feet. A full-size truck bed, the thing this product was literally invented for, is about 50 square feet once you count the walls and the tailgate. Which means, and I want you to really picture this, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is roughly SEVEN THOUSAND truck beds lying end to end.

A Rhino bed liner job at a shop, the price YOU pay walking in off the street with no leverage and no friends in high places, runs about five hundred bucks. Seven thousand of those comes to three and a half million dollars. That is the chump number. Full sticker, no discount, get-fleeced-like-a-tourist retail.

Now run it the other direction. Buy the raw rubber wholesale, in 55-gallon drums, straight from the people who manufacture it, and 348,000 square feet drinks up around 300,000 pounds of the stuff. Depending on whether you cheap out or splurge on the fancy UV version, that’s somewhere between roughly $870,000 and $2.2 million in actual material, before a single human being shows up to spray it.

So. Retail, you’re at three and a half million. Wholesale, you’re closer to one. Pick any honest spot in between and the coating job lands somewhere from $1.4 to $3.5 million.

They charged $14.65 million for that part alone.

Now grant them every excuse. Draining six and three-quarter million gallons, prepping old concrete, sealing the expansion joints, prevailing wage, bonds, the forms they fill out and lose and fill out again. Real money. Give them a few million for all of it and the number still does not come close, because buying 348,000 square feet of anything makes it CHEAPER per square foot, not more expensive. That is how bulk has worked since the first guy bought the second goat. You do not pay a premium to coat seven thousand truck beds at once. You get a DISCOUNT. The government’s OWN first estimate was $1.8 million, and the final bill lapped it eight times, for a product that peels, applied to a monument to the man who freed the slaves and got shot for it.

That gap, the canyon between what the math says and what the Treasury actually paid, did not evaporate into the humid DC air. It went somewhere. It went into a pocket. And the official who waved the no-bid contracts through went on television, gestured proudly at the green soup, and called it beautiful.

And now the magic trick. While every bit of this was happening, that same crowd was on television, red in the face, hollering that it’s the DEMONCRATS who are scamming you. The Democrats. Those people. The real crooks.

It’s both parties. BOTH.

The Bipartisan Theft Olympics

I know this is a hard sell for folks who have picked a team and bought the hat. The hat is comfortable. The hat hands you somebody to be furious at who is conveniently not you. But the hat is lying, and I can prove it with a quick lap through Washington’s recent highlight reel, color-coded so nobody gets lost.

On the red side, beyond the pool, the marquee act is George Santos, the New York Republican who got himself into Congress by, and I am choosing my words carefully, fabricating roughly his entire human existence and then lifting his own donors’ identities to run their credit cards. He pleaded guilty. He drew 87 months, the maximum. He served about three of them before the President commuted his sentence and announced that George was “somewhat of a rogue” but, crucially, “always voted Republican.” Which is a thrilling new standard for justice in this country. (Steal from the elderly, vote correctly, home by Christmas.)

On the blue side, allow me to introduce Bob Menendez, Democratic Senator from New Jersey and, until recently, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a job that sounds important because it is one. The FBI searched his house and found gold bars. Actual gold bricks, like a cartoon villain. They also found $480,000 in cash, a healthy chunk of it stuffed into the pockets of jackets stitched with his own name, the kind of detail a screenwriter cuts for being too obvious. He was moonlighting as an agent of Egypt the entire time. He got 11 years. His wife got four and a half. The gold was real. The jackets were monogrammed. And the man ran Foreign Relations.

One red congressman, donor fraud and stolen identities, out by spring. One blue senator, foreign bribery, bullion in the closet. Two different jerseys, both of them reaching into the exact same drawer, and that drawer is the one you are legally required to fill every April under direct threat of prison.

And now we come back to Cafaro, the algae man, like I promised. His old bribery conviction, the one from 2001, was for greasing a congressman named Jim Traficant, an Ohio Democrat who was himself later expelled from the House and shipped off to federal prison for his own corruption. So follow the thread. A Republican president’s government hands a no-bid contract to a Trump-donor algae salesman whose claim to fame is bribing a Democrat who then went to prison for being bribed. One guy. One bribe. Both parties filthy. That is not me reaching for a metaphor. That is just the man’s resume.

The hats are the distraction. They were ALWAYS the distraction. While you are out on the lawn arguing with your uncle about which team is more evil, both teams are quietly at the register, and the register is your wallet, and not one of them is putting anything back.

So here is the only takeaway that matters, and you can write it on your hand. There is no red wallet and no blue wallet. There is your wallet, and there is everybody in Washington with a hand in it, and they are not fighting each other for it so much as taking turns. The donkey and the elephant are not two animals. They are two glove puppets on the same pair of hands, and the hands have a yacht. You keep waiting for your team to win so the looting stops, and the looting is the one thing your team and their team agreed on years ago, probably over a very nice dinner you paid for.

It is not left versus right. It never was. It is them versus you, it has always been them versus you, and they are on the same side, and that side is not yours.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Speaking Of Money Disappearing

Four bucks a month makes you a paid subscriber. What does that get you?

(HONESTLY? Not much.)

But you DO get a guy in a motel room angrily typing depressing, true diatribes into a latptop from a rundown motel room. No gold bars. No no-bid contracts. No truck bed liner. No nano-bubble algae system.

What it does buy is food, and a roof over the guy doing the yelling, and maybe, one of these days, a car for Lily so she can stop riding the city bus.

And if four bucks isn’t in the cards right now, that’s cool. We get it. Money is tight in this motel too. But you CAN hit share, and you CAN restack, and that costs you nothing, and it lets a few more people suffer right alongside you the next time you think about how much of your money ends up in the pockets of men and women already worth more than you could earn in twenty lifetimes.