People (Democrats) are harping and carping about President Donald Trump’s efforts to clean up DC, both literally and figuratively.

And Democrats in the terminal stages of TDS are taking the lead in opposition to cleaning of statuary that were defaced by their constituents, parks filled with the detritus of industrially manufactured “protests” (curiously, tarnished by people who allegedly love the environment), and returning things that are supposed to be beautiful and functional to a state of being beautiful and being functional.

Democrats need DC and our public spaces to look like the aftermath of a nuclear blast to support their OMB (Orange Man Bad) narrative, even though the unprecedented level of neglect reached its nadir during Joe Biden’s regime.

What President Trump is doing makes a lot of sense, even if we weren’t less than a month from celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

And in many (if not most) cases, neglect costs more than keeping things in good condition.

As is often true with neglect, ugly and expensive go hand in hand.

By any account, as Trump 2.0 began, the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, looked more like the retention pool of a sewage treatment facility than an architectural feature designed to reflect and magnify the beauty and solemnity of monuments to two of America’s most consequential presidents.

In truth, the retention pools of a sewage facility were cleaner than what was once a national treasure. Some accounts say that close to 20 dump truck loads of garbage were removed from the Pool. The National Park Service estimated that maintaining the Pool required about 17 million gallons of replacement water per year, or around 327,000 gallons a week (and rising) — and that was after Barack Obama took two years to “fix” it.

You may still be wondering why the Reflecting Pool is important, so allow me to present some facts and ideas to help your understanding.

I have written several times about something called observable cues — the visible, audible, and measurable signals people use to interpret situations, behavior, and intent. They include facial expressions, body language, posture, eye contact, tone of voice, word choice, clothing, physical appearance, actions, and interactions with others.

Observable cues can also extend beyond people to environments and events, such as neglected property suggesting a lack of maintenance, a long line outside a restaurant indicating popularity, or a person’s hurried movements suggesting urgency. While these cues often provide useful information and help us make quick judgments, they are not infallible because they reveal only what can be directly observed and may not accurately reflect underlying motives, circumstances, or beliefs. Effective reasoning requires recognizing observable cues as evidence to be considered rather than conclusions to be accepted without further examination.

We can draw inferences from other observable cues to help us understand our current social and political landscapes.

Two major, immediate, and informationally rich cues are a person, Graham Platner, the Democrat Senate candidate from Maine, and a thing — actually an activity — the California voting and post-election vote counting process.

Platner is extremely valuable as a walking, talking example of the massive degree of hypocrisy that exists within the Democrat Party ranks and the sheer magnitude of cognitive dissonance it takes to ignore the logically crippling levels of contradiction that exist within their ideology. John Kerry revealed much about his party when he expressed his being “for it before he was against it” ethos those many years ago because he revealed a core principle of his fellow Democrats, one that allows them to turn on a dime when faced with any issue that might prevent them from achieving or retaining power.

In a sane world, the “for it today, against it tomorrow” contemporary Democrats would be relegated to wearing sandwich boards emblazoned with “The End Is Near” printed on them while wandering the streets.

And then there is the other observable cue, the Great State of California.

California is, in many ways, the Reflecting Pool of America, and like the one in DC, it has become neglected and filled with waste and corruption. The difference is that nobody in California is interested in cleaning it up.

As much as I will admit I personally have no conclusive evidence that an already mentally compromised Joe Biden didn’t get 81 million votes in 2020, I can also admit I have no direct evidence that the Democrat-controlled machine is manipulating the LA vote counts to eliminate Spencer Pratt (who is NOT MAGA or even a Republican) from contention in the runoff — but I also don’t have direct evidence that they aren’t.

Cuban-trained Comrade Karen “Let it Burn” Bass was always expected to take the lead, and we know the California system was designed not for legitimate competition but to decide how much of a communist Democrat to elect. As a result, outside challenger Pratt has lost his second-place standing, falling due to some statistically impossible ballot drops that have pulled the supposed third-place Democrat into second place.

My observation is that the Pratt Fall is eerily similar to the late-hour “anomalies” that propelled Biden into the Oval Office.

Voters for change have apparently been Californicated once again.

Combine that with the constant “anomalies” that the longer election counts go on, the more the Democrat candidates benefit from it, and if anomalies keep happening with the same outcome, one might legitimately question if they are really anomalies at all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the American jurist, legal philosopher, and U.S. Supreme Court justice, once wrote, “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”

I guess the real question is whether we are as smart as Holmes’s dog and if we have any bite left.