Thanksgiving comes and goes. Ukraine has not signed. The President says the deadline was always 'aspirational.'

Thanksgiving was Thursday. The President was at his golf course in Florida. The Ukrainian President, who had been given Thanksgiving as a deadline to sign a peace document drafted with the Russian envoy, did not sign. He was, instead, at the front, in Sumy, with Ukrainian soldiers, eating, by all reporting, an ordinary meal in an ordinary tent.

By Friday morning the American press shop was telling reporters that the Thanksgiving deadline had been “aspirational.” By Saturday morning the State Department was telling reporters that the document had been “shortened” from twenty-eight points to nineteen, after talks in Geneva, and that the new shorter document was a “framework.” A framework, in foreign-policy language, is what you call a document when nobody has signed it yet and you want to keep using the word.

Hon. The deadline that was firm on Monday became aspirational on Friday and a framework on Saturday. That is three categories in five days. The document keeps shrinking. The country in question keeps not signing it. The President keeps golfing.

I have worked the late shift long enough to know what it looks like when somebody at the counter pretends the menu is what it isn’t. You don’t argue. You just look at the menu. The menu still says what it says.

The truth of this week is that the document, in its original form, did not work. It did not work because Ukraine, which is a real country with a real president and a real parliament and a real army that has held off the largest land invasion in Europe since 1945, did not agree to dissolve fifty percent of its army on a holiday weekend in exchange for a deal nobody else in Europe was willing to bless. The pressure was real. The pressure also, as a matter of fact, did not work, and now the pressure is being repackaged as patience.

The carrier strike group is still in the Caribbean. The shutdown still has eight weeks until the next deadline. The East Wing is still gone. The ballroom is still being built.

The deadline came. The deadline went. The President played eighteen holes.

You ever notice how the great deal-makers always seem to be playing eighteen holes on the day the great deal was supposed to close.

That ought to concern you.