begin quote from:https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/13/opinions/shutdown-trump-democrats-weekly-opinion-roundup-wiedenkeller/index.html
America's week of zero
By Pat Wiedenkeller, CNN
Updated 5:58 PM ET, Sun January 13, 2019
SE Cupp to Trump: This is what losing looks like 04:05
(CNN)Call it the week of zero. Zero work for many federal employees (and zeroes in their paychecks) as the government shutdown slipped into the record books on Saturday, becoming the longest one ever; zero movement on a southern border wall, even after President Trump used an Oval Office speech to demand it, and then threatened to get the money by declaring a national emergency.
This did not happen. Zero on the national emergency.
"What a waste," lamented SE Cupp. "On his key issue, his raison d'être, he has utterly and completely lost."
What did shift? Trump's evolving descriptions of his $5.7 billion wall (concrete? Steel? Concrete and steel?); and his explanations of how Mexico would pay for it — no, really -- or taxpayers would, possibly via redirected unspent funds, including those earmarked for civil works projects that are part of disaster recovery in Puerto Rico, Texas, California, Florida, and elsewhere.
Puerto Rico's Gov. Ricardo Rossello was appalled: "No wall should be funded on the pain and suffering of US citizens who have endured tragedy and loss through a natural disaster," he declared on Twitter. "Today it's us, tomorrow it could be you."
On Friday 800,000 federal employees missed their first paycheck. Some Trump supporters will be rethinking the wall by now, wrote C. Nicole Mason. "Furloughed workers and those who sympathize with them have begun to realize the wall will not feed their families, keep their lights on or make sure their mortgage is paid." Trump has failed to deliver on the promise that he would improve the lives of working people, she said.
At week's end the blame game was in high gear. Scott Jennings cautioned that Democrats' hypocrisy on border security -- and the President's threatened overreach to get around them -- could blow up in all of their faces.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has blocked Democrat efforts to reopen parts of the government, was not there when the Senate gaveled in Friday. He was headed home to Kentucky.
Donald vs. Chuck and Nancy
Some 41 million people watched Trump's Oval Office speech Tuesday. But more people watched House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer deliver their rebuttal.
The Democrats came off as "partisan" and "petty," wrote Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post, because they "failed to use the one word that millions of Americans were longing to hear — compromise." He said, "to normal Americans watching in the heartland, and who are not steeped in Trump hatred, the president must have seemed like the adult in the room," noting the President's description of the "human cost of our broken system to illegal migrants themselves."
Communications experts Juliana Silva and Bill McGowan saw it differently: an overhyped heavyweight prize fight in which Trump was scripted, stilted and "stripped of his mojo," and Pelosi and Schumer "about as animated as a modern rendition of 'American Gothic,' minus the pitchfork." America deserves its money back, they said.
Jean Guerrero, a southern California writer who has covered immigrants and the border for years, observed that the immigrants Trump depicts as criminal invaders are real human beings striving to better their lives: Central Americans "dream and plan and agonize about entering the US in quest of an image of their own: the American dream, el sueño americano."
Trump could actually build his wall, insisted Jonathan Turley, writing in The Hill, under the 1976 National Emergencies Act. Unwise, but constitutional, he wrote. Democrats' objection to such an end-run would be more convincing if they hadn't supported President Obama when "he openly circumvented Congress on immigration reforms," he wrote.
Finally, if Democrats want to break the stalemate, suggested Julian Zelizer, they should put the GOP on the spot. "Democrats should shift the debate to different ground. they should propose spending more money to ensure a smarter, more efficient and more humane border policy." This would "give wavering Republicans something they can latch on to."
The President goes medieval
This week the President also tried out a snappy comeback to critics who mock his border wall as a medieval answer to a modern problem. Look, he says, the wheel is medieval, too, like the wall, and they both work -- hah!
Except a real historian of the Middle Ages, David Perry, called balductum on that. "Wheels date to the 4th millennium BCE. Defensive walls are around 5,000 years older than that, dating to the 9th-millennium BCE walls of Jericho," which of course came tumblin' down. The truth, said Perry,is that walls were not the rule in medieval Western Europe. "Peoples, objects and ideas moved easily throughout the region. There were neither borders to protect nor hordes against which to defend, although plenty of key strategic places were well fortified." Trump's wall won't work, "not because it's a throwback to imagined medieval barbarism, but because it's a con."
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