Just Click Your Heels

It has always irked me that Dorothy could have gone home at any time during her stay in Oz. While travelling the somewhat treacherous path known as the Yellow Brick Road, any concerned Munchkin or Good Witch could have mentioned the deal about the Ruby Slippers to her and she could have been on her way. Magically. With her little dog. Without having been captured by winged monkeys or tormented by any of the strangers and trees she met along the way. But apparently it is important to teach young girls from Kansas a lesson by making her run the Technicolor gauntlet run not by a Wizard, but in his own words "a very bad man."
All of which begins to sum up my reactions to our "President" deciding to go ahead and declare a state of emergency in order to get his "wall" built. After months and months of holding the nation's collective feet to the fire and promising all kinds of different ways to make his multi-billion dollar boondoggle happen, he has landed on this new convoluted deal after having exhausted any sort of legislative deal with an increasingly less than cooperative Congress.
I wonder if Darth Vader would have caved in a similar fashion if denied funding for his Death Star. "You underestimate the power of and Executive Order."
"The President" has pushed the shiny red button labeled "National Emergency." This gives him what he believes is supreme executive power in times of crisis, not unlike Dean Wormer of Faber College. Which may or may not be true, but this means that he really didn't need to shut down the entire government for a month and leave nearly a million federal employees without a paycheck. While Congress did agree to write a check for nearly two billion dollars of new fencing and other security enhancements, there is still not enough money to seal us off completely from the outside world like the Dome that Stephen King once imagined. And Mexico has not made their offer to keep our foolishness from contaminating their airspace, so it looks like we have a good old fashioned Idjit Standoff.
Which means another flurry of lawsuits and counter lawsuits and plenty more legal and political machinations costing billions more dollars than the original ridiculous price tag of constructing a monument to one man's ego that truly defines the man himself: A permanent divider.