All across Washington this morning, messages went out from the White House to Cabinet Secretaries ordering them to make a public statement that they were not the author of the mysterious New York Times Op-Ed that assured the nation that the author and his (her?) co-conspirators are saving the country from the raving loon in the Oval Office.
You’ll be happy to know that one of the Cabinet Secretaries who did not write the op-ed was Labor Secretary Alex Acosta. Not a surprise. Acosta was at the top of no one’s list.
Reading between the lines of Acosta’s statement, however, reveals that he’s clearly feeling left out of the “sophomoric Washington games” that everyone else in the Administration gets to play.
We feel his pain. The poor guy will just have to continue to entertain himself going after overtime, the joint employer policy, health care, child labor, harassing worker centers and trying to kill OSHA’s Susan Harwood Worker Training Program.
Useful to remember: as a few TV news programs have been reminding us, “denials” in Washington D.C. are dime a dozen and are frequently, sooner or later, followed by admissions. Most famous case: Watergate’s “Deep Throat”. Make your own list of politician denials of whether they were running for office and then did, or of crimes for which they were later convicted, or Trump’s friends and lawyers who denied one day and pled guilty a few days later. Believe no denial, ever.