Remember Obama's Vindictive shutdown?
"While there may be parks where a shutdown poses a genuine threat to visitor safety and security, the administration has carried the shutdown to vindictive lengths, inviting these instances of peaceful civil disobedience around the country. "
"As the sun came up over Washington on Monday, National Park Service workers were busy replacing barricades around the National World War II Memorial.
The previous ones, erected ostensibly because of the government shutdown, had been removed by peaceful protesters over the weekend.
Using the supposedly scant resources of the federal government to re-erect barriers around an open-air memorial on public land in this way trumped even the original placement of the barriers in ridiculousness. It also came a day after police in riot gear were dispatched to guard against the protesters — many of them elderly or disabled veterans — who traveled to the nation’s capital to express their displeasure at what they saw as a politically motivated abuse of power by their government.
Welcome to the government shutdown, Obama-administration style. The government has shut down 17 times since the modern budgeting process took effect in 1976, according to The Washington Post. But this time is different, under a president who puts politics before all else. There simply is no reason to close many parks and memorials that never are under lock and key to begin with, especially since it requires more manpower to “close” them than to keep them open.
Both political parties share blame in the current budget impasse, which began Oct. 1. But after announcing weeks in advance that he would flatly refuse to negotiate, President Barack Obama has proceeded to use American citizens, from schoolchildren to elderly veterans, as pawns in his battle with Congress.
This playbook is familiar. After an earlier failure of leadership that led to the sequester cuts, Obama halted White House tours and cut back the number of air-traffic controllers at major airports. The administration’s efforts proved too ham-handed even for his hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, which slammed “the stunt pilots in the Obama administration” for making a “terrible miscalculation” in encouraging the Federal Aviation Administration’s “phony crisis.” It was easily resolved through Congress authorizing the FAA to shift around money — something the president could have championed himself, had he wanted to.
A number of outrageous stories have emerged from the parks shutdown. At Yellowstone National Park, a tour group composed largely of senior citizens from around the world was kept in lockdown in a park hotel under armed guard after the shutdown went into effect. They were told they could not take photographs of wildlife outdoors. When they were allowed to leave, their bus was not permitted to stop during the 21/2-hour trip out; they were even prohibited from stopping at private bathroom facilities." . . . More...
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