THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER

My mother used to say: “You might as well get hung for a goose as a gander.” I always wondered where this came from. Later I realized she probably got this from the phrase “might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.” The point is that if you are going to pay for a crime anyway, you might as well do something worse as the penalty is the same.

This reminds me of a personal moment of enlightenment during my second combat tour in South East Asia. I suddenly realized that, short of committing a crime, there really was nothing else the Air Force could do to me that would be worse than my current assignment.  I was flying daily combat missions on rickety aircraft over hostile territory.Then at night we could look forward to rocket and/or mortar attacks.Even the coveted re-assignment to Fairbanks, Alaska wasn’t much of a threat. I literally laughed out loud.

I suspect Donald Trump is in a very similar position. Granted, he will be blamed, by the MSM, for the government shutdown. But he is blamed by the MSM for everything anyway. He was even blamed for daring to visit the troops in Iraq over the Christmas Holiday. We are at the point where it is literally impossible for Trump to get worse press coverage. When you think about it, Trump has almost nothing to lose. He is hardly going to get impeached over this.

If Trump refuses to budge, the only way Democrats win is if they can get 2/3rds of the House AND 2/3rds of the Senate to override a Trump veto. Good luck with that. Republicans are not pressuring Trump to fold, they are instead encouraging him to stay the course.

At some point, sooner rather than later, the American public is going to realize that unless Democrats compromise, this partial shutdown will continue. The people most affected will be public sector employees and odds are a high percentage of them are Democrats. Don’t assume that Chuck and Nancy won’t start to get a lot of heat. Dumping on Trump is great fun, but so is paying the mortgage.

There is a long history of Republicans snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and it would be naïve to expect anything different. But this time there is at least the potential for a different outcome, if for no other reason than Trump actually has little left to lose.

TDM