The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room.

It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.

Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.

Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?

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Jtsummers 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The major issue with the East Wing was how it was done, not that it was done ("it": renovations in general, possibly even tear down and full rebuild). Also the costs have been ballooning and the "no taxpayer funding" claim turned out to be a lie.

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Rapzid 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's also majority private sector funded

See if you can spot the ethical problems and corruption in that. It's there, I promise you. Look hard.

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nielsbot 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Die on? It's absolutely a symbol of the incompetent, corrupt and destructive admin--it's not just the dollars.

We should be very suspicions of the potential corruption caused by companies and individuals giving money to Trump's pet project.

Finally, we can criticize multiple things at the same time.

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tekla 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's also majority private sector funded

This is mostly a lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_State_Ballroom#Fun...

Vast majority is to be paid for by taxpayers.

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rhelz 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different.

But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.

No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.

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0xy 19 hours ago | parent [-]

There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?

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OneDeuxTriSeiGo 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans.

If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation.

But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off.

There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects.

Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".

	▲	Rapzid 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Don't forget the part where you then direct the DOJ to arrest and prosecute citizens inspecting the botched repair to THEIR POOL(as in the people's pool) so everyone in the admin can CYA and save face.

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wookmaster 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t remember Obama prosecuting citizens over it