It's a deal, and it's no deal. In ordinary times, the agreement hashed out on Friday between congressional leaders and the folks at Camp Runamuck would look completely preposterous. A three-week continuing resolution, taking us into February, when the fiscal year ended back in October, and one that ends right about the time when half the executive branch will be testifying in front of one House committee or another as the spelunking into the depth's of this administration's corruption begins in earnest?

That's some first-class clowning. It does nothing but get the employees of the affected agencies some back pay while keeping them on a knife's edge as to what happens in three weeks. But, as Friday's news budget readily confirms, these are no ordinary times, and maybe this paltry Band-Aid of a solution is worth it just to watch the president* once again get beaten like a tin drum by Nancy Pelosi.

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The government will reopen for three weeks. There will be no money forthcoming for the big, beautiful, stupid wall. Talks on border security will continue. In an act of mercy, the One Great Scorer will not award Pelosi Trump's ears and tail. There is some talk that the president* will threaten to declare a national emergency if there is no money forthcoming in February for his big, beautiful, stupid wall—"a very powerful alternative," is how he put it in the Rose Garden on Friday—but that sounds like a very unpersuasive bluff. He and his party are getting blamed for shutting down the government now. It's killing them out in the country. How much worse will it be if they reopen the government for a month and then shut it down again? At that point, I think, even this supine Senate Republican majority would bounce.

He did the best he could at transmogrifying the big, beautiful, stupid wall for which Mexico was going to pay into "physical barriers," which is his extended euphemism for the catastrophic failure of his primary campaign promise. He then went spinning off into his usual mixture of bullshit and bus-station paperback bondage porn. (The duct tape came out again, rhetorically anyway.) He essentially agreed to what the Democrats in Congress have been proposing for three months. However, give him this: he thanked the federal law-enforcement officials who have been working without pay for 36 days. Presumably, those included the FBI agents and federal marshals who busted his longtime ratfcker early Friday morning.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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