WHITE HOUSE WATCH: OF FRESH LAWN AND VEILED THREATS

By Denny Gulino

THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) – It’s quiet here in the White House press room this Friday evening after an eventful week. So end of story.

After all, you watched the impeachment inquiry sessions, perhaps checked out the dozen or so Twitter feeds you follow, including the fact checkers who are kept so busy these days.

You may have caught President Trump on Fox & Friends in the morning. (Eighteen falsehoods, one fact checker calculates. But he works for CNN. So there.)

You probably, along with everyone else, caught the first two tweets from former National Security Adviser John Bolton since he was either fired or resigned. The most recent was about 4 p.m. in the afternoon. Veiled threats? Mordant humor? We don’t know.

If you missed them at @ambjohnbolton you’ll have to sift through dozens of other tweets in which people try to shame him into testifying, plead with him to testify or mock him for not testifying.

That most recent tweet disputed what President Trump had said earlier, that of course the White House would never block his personal Twitter account just because he was fired. To wit, wrote Bolton, “The @WhiteHouse never returned access to my Twitter account.”

The first tweet was more, say, portentous. It had contained the words wondering why his account had been blocked in the first place, “Out of fear of what I may say?” he asked. Whoa, thousands of readers’ voices in their heads said. This could be interesting.

For John Bolton to be so explicit, suggesting the White House may be fearful of what he might say, seemed to confirm what everyone already supposed, that yes, Bolton might not wait until his book comes out to shake things up.

So why bother catching up with the news? It may be a waste of time, all rendered irrelevant when something new comes along. How many besides Bolton now can determine who holds the keys to the White House? There’s a bunch who may rather not have been “in the loop” yet who now can fashion figurative nooses if they decide to.

So just because Congress has left Washington for the Thanksgiving holiday doesn’t mean something else won’t pop any minute that will change everything, or maybe nothing – or maybe just one important thing. There are staffers for several impeachment inquiry committees in the House ready to hear from anyone who is having second thoughts about not testifying. They won’t mind weekend calls.

As wives and mentors and friends may be advising those who may not speak for now, subpoenas from the House of Representatives don’t necessarily evaporate after being ignored. Or they may be saying that once articles of impeachment are formally drawn, a lack of response this time may make it even more likely they could be subpoenaed during the Senate trial. Those Senate subpoenas would be so much harder to ignore.

Instead of all that, let’s just relax and contemplate the one area of the White House where there is nothing but seamless beauty and symmetry, without any big gaps or questionable discontinuities.

Just outside the press room door, in fact, not far from the Oval Office, still somewhat visible in the landscape lighting, are several hundred square feet of freshly installed lawn, the work of a couple dozen workers from Davey Landscape.

In two days this week they lifted the old brownish turf and carefully laid a lush carpet of new grass, beautiful to behold for anyone whose own lawn is brownish and ugly.

Will the new White House carpet of green make everyone forget what was there before? The days of more turbulent weather ahead may reveal the answer.

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Contact this reporter: denny@macenews.com