Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Enough already with the speculation on the TARP enveloping the West Wing of the Big White! Boy, Big Guy is right: it doesn’t take much to get people all wee-weed up in August around here.

 West Wing of Big White was hung with TARPs on Sunday. More unfortunate optics.

And since this doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon I guess I’ll have to address it.(I’m still hearing cracks about “finally being able to see the man behind the curtain,; Butt let’s face it folks: we don’t really want to shatter the illusion of Big Guy’s magic, do we?)

On background: The Chicago Sun-Times reported way last May on a big $376 million renovation.

 

Which doesn’t really seem like very good value. Not when you can get a whole NEW mosque in New York, for cripes sake, for only $100 million.

 

So the speculation began, and has pretty much run the gamut. Storm’n Norm’n  surmised that this was just another TARP project. Yuk, yuk. After all, charity does begins at home.

Many people reported that the Big White was being fumigated to get rid of the flies & rodents. But as Larwyn pointed out, they had gone on vacation to the Florida coast.

Rodger the Real King of France proposed it was all a big cover up of  the traditional Ramadan ritual sheep slaughter.

Eeeeuew! And that makes no sense what-so-ever: who would be left to vote for Big Guy in 2012 if we slaughter all the sheep?

 Lucianne’s readers posed some other explanations: most of them dopey. Here are a couple of the more creative ones:

The Big White is going green. I’m not sure I understand that one, but at least I see what triggered it. After all, we did go orange for Halloween and pink for breast cancer awareness week. Why not green and white for Islam?

Pepto-Pink Big White

Halloween-orange Big White

Maybe General Kaddafi (he of the Bedouin tent proclivity) is coming for a visit. If that happens, we’re going to have to fumigate again.

Some of my own twitterers thought that it was just a misguided effort to plug the damn hole. Or that it was another big f***ing mistake, triggered by someone acting stupidly.

Alas, as is often the case,the truth is disappointing compared to the fertile imagination. The fact is, we were just having the facade power-washed, in preparation for the next whitewashing job.

Now, let’s everyone get back to work around here. We’ve still got a few bucks to hand out.

In a symbolic move, Big Guy waves bah-bye to the TARP ($’s)

H/T Larwyn