Going over the Cliff

[Logan Darklighter]

More Shutdown theater vindictiveness.

They’re not going to pay any price. We all know it. Issa will haul the director and his deputies before the Oversight Committee and they’ll mouth the requisite perfunctory regret and warnings not to judge the whole department by the behavior of a few “overzealous” rangers. Maybe someone will receive a few weeks or months of “administrative leave,” i.e. paid vacation, a la Lois Lerner, but then he’ll be quietly reinstated when no one’s paying attention anymore. News outlets and bloggers will get a few days of content out of it when the hearings are being held and then that’ll be that. Nothing will change. No lessons will be learned. No scalps will be taken. That’s how it goes now. If anything, the White House will be more reluctant to fire someone over this than they were over the IRS scandal because ranger-enforced shutdown theater helps them spread the liberal message that closing the government is an unconscionable hardship.
No one’s going to pay for this. Even if it involves a ranger with a gun warning your grandma to get back in her hotel and away from the scenery.

The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.
“She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.
The seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door.
“They looked like Hulk Hogans, armed. They told us you can’t go outside,” she said. “Some of the Asians who were on the tour said, ‘Oh my God, are we under arrest?’ They felt like they were criminals.”

Supposedly, on their way out of the park, the tour guide wanted to pull over at a dude ranch inside the perimeter so that the seniors onboard could use the restrooms there — but couldn’t, because the park rangers told the dude ranch that its license would be revoked if they permitted it. So unbelievable is all this, even by the standards of NPS behavior over the past week, that I doubted whether it was true. But there’s corroborating evidence for at least some of it: The tour guide was interviewed by a different newspaper a few days ago and accused the Park Service of — wait for it — “Gestapo tactics.”

Hodgson said in a phone interview Monday that a ranger pulled up behind the bus and told him he would have to get everyone back on the bus — recreation in Yellowstone was not allowed.
“She told me you need to return to your hotel and stay there,” Hodgson said. “This is just Gestapo tactics. We paid a lot to get in. All these people wanted to do was take some pictures.”
Hodgson said the ranger told him he could be convicted of trespassing if he disobeyed.
“The national parks belong to the people,” he said. “This isn’t right.”

He didn’t mention armed rangers outside the hotel, but he was told that “his group would not be allowed to walk on any of the boardwalks located just outside their hotel, or visit any other geyser basins in the area.” All they could do, per Hodgson, was eat dinner in the dining room, which squares with the claim that rangers wouldn’t let guests inside leave until they were ready to leave the park altogether. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can,” said an anonymous ranger to Wesley Pruden last week. Mission accomplished.
The only redress here, I think, is for tourists to sue. They’d probably lose, but it’ll be useful to know as a matter of law that national parks belong to the National Park Service and not to the public. I’m curious as can be to see a judge explain how trespassing laws don’t apply to park visitors who are engaged in “First Amendment activities” but do apply to tourist photography, which, as a somewhat artistic endeavor, would seem to fall pretty squarely within the First Amendment. At the very least, the bad press from the suit would do some much-deserved damage to the agency’s reputation. Which, it seems, they’re increasingly worried about.

More trifling bullshit.

Driving down the George Washington Parkway outside Washington, D.C. today, I noticed that the two scenic overlooks that offer drivers the chance to admire the beauty of the Potomac River below are closed for the government shutdown. These overlooks are just cut-outs from the highway, providing a few parking spaces. That’s it. No little National Park Service kiosk. Nothing. It’s just a parking area that holds maybe 6 cars at a time.

To close them required someone to come and put up barricades, thus costing taxpayers money.

Is there anyone in the Obama administration with common sense?

Hoo boy. THAT’S certainly a question that nobody needs to bother themselves about answering.

Do they not see how petty and over-reaching this makes them look?

They don’t care; they intend to WIN, by hook or by crook, using any means fair, foul, annoying, or downright embarrassing. We, their lowly subjects, have displeased them, and they intend to make us suffer for it, to whatever niggling extent they possibly can. They’re shitweasels of the lowest imaginable order, contemptible to any intelligent, self-respecting person.

This is the real face of government; this is who they are, and what they are. To allow people like this control over - for that matter, any say in whatsoever, or even knowledge of - our individual health-care decisions would be the gravest mistake a supposedly free people could possibly make.

Your Democrat Socialist party, your pResident, your government.

One would not be altogether surprised to find the feds stringing yellow police tape along the Rio Grande, the 49th parallel, and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, if only to keep Americans in rather than anybody else out. Still, I would like to have been privy to the high-level discussions at which the government took the decision to install its Barrycades on open parkland. For anyone with a modicum of self-respect, it’s difficult to imagine how even the twerpiest of twerp bureaucrats would consent to stand at a crowd barrier and tell a group of elderly soldiers who’ve flown in from across the country that they’re forbidden to walk across a piece of grass and pay their respects. Yet, if any National Parks Service employee retained enough sense of his own humanity to balk at these instructions or other spiteful, petty closures of semi-wilderness fishing holes and the like, we’ve yet to hear about it.
The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations — plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors.
Meanwhile, Republicans offered a bill to prevent the shutdown affecting experimental cancer trials for children. The Democrats rejected it. “But if you can help one child who has cancer,” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Harry Reid, “why wouldn’t you do it?”
“Why would we want to do that?” replied the Senate majority leader, denouncing Miss Bash’s question as “irresponsible.”

A slimy, crooked, lying little toe-rag like Reid has a lot of nerve saying that about anybody. But then, he has a lot of nerve even showing his face in public without a bag over his head or some kind of mask.

And yes - they really do think they own everything - 

The Monstrous hubris, in the service of pure spite, is breathtaking: 

Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was “closed” due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown.

The Park Service will also have rangers on duty to police the ban…of access to an ocean. The government will probably use more personnel and spend more resources to attempt to close the ocean, than it would in its normal course of business.

This is governing by temper-tantrum.

Still think these are reasonable people that can be bargained or negotiated with in good faith?

You ARE dependent on government for any and everything, by God, and if you dare to doubt it, they intend to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.

Think it can't get worse? These people have yet to begun to dig down to the depths of hell. Here's yet another Obama-Reid Shutdown story:

Joyce Spencer is 77-years-old and her husband Ralph is 80. They’ve been spending most of their time in the family ice cream store since going home isn’t an option.
The Spencers never expected to be forced out of their Lake Mead home, which they’ve owned since the 70s, but on Thursday, a park ranger said they had 24 hours to get out.
“I had to go to town today and buy Ralph undershirts and jeans because I forgot his pants,” Joyce Spencer told Action News.
The Stewart’s Point home sits on federal land, so even though the Spencers own their cabin outright, they’re not allowed in until the government reopens.
Park officials said property owners can visit only to retrieve belongings; they sent Action News a statement which reads in part, “Unfortunately overnight stays are not permitted until a budget is passed and the park can reopen.”

Yeah, and also “unfortunately,” soulless vampires like those at the Park Service who are perfectly willing to obey blatantly immoral orders from their masters on high are what most of this monstrous, abominable government is comprised of. Plenty more at Twitchy, including this gem:

If senior citizens in private homes on fed lands are thrown out of homes, then people in taxpayer owned homes should leave too.

Absolutely–like, for starters, Il Douche himself, whose bleeding heart has become an Iron Fist. 

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[url=http://ricochet.com/main-feed/When-The-Bleeding-Heart-Becomes-The-Iron-Fist]Welcome to liberal utopia, where barriers are not erected against terrorists or illegal aliens on our nation’s borders, but rather against citizens, and where wheelchair-bound veterans enroute to honor their comrades face tighter security than terrorists enroute to murder a US Ambassador. This is where up is down, wrong is right, illegality is celebrated as progress, and where Constitutionalism is derided as racist. No longer relegated to the fever swamps of academic fancy, utopia has acquired real estate and made known its demands.

“Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual…” the First Lady warned us, and she wasn’t just whistling Alinsky either. Under King Barack’s Reign of Error, your life is no longer your own, for you are now commanded to enter into private contracts by virtue of your simple existence on the planet. Why? Because our Sovereign and his fellow travelers are compassionate, of course. Their hearts bleed for you,…almost as much as your pocketbook will bleed for them.

Please note that when the people’s representatives actually represent their constituents, the majority of whom want nothing to do with the  wretched and wretchedly mis-named Affordable Care Act, it is the people who must be punished. Can you believe that men who conquered Nazi Germany’s barricades on the beach at Normandy 69 years ago actually faced barricades from their own damned government? Can you believe that Vietnam vets, many of whom were rebuked for their service,were removed from their memorial by the police? Do the men and women who are ordered to move against law abiding veterans have no soul?

The problem really is that it stopped being “their own damned government” a long time ago. 

As one member on Ricochet commented, this is no longer about Ted Cruz. It’s no longer about the animadversions of establishment Republicans who have only to see their political shadow before becoming alarmed and settling in for six more months of concessions to the statist. This is about an arrangement the President and his party mean to consummate with the American people; an illusory promise to take care of us in exchange for our abject obedience and subservience. But as the examples cited above show, it is only the subservience that is achieved.
From barricading memorials to the closing of a private inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway, from threatening Catholic military chaplains with arrest should they celebrate mass on Sunday to taking care of back pay for federal workers at the expense of everyone else, the bleeding heart has become, as it inevitably will, an iron fist.

Indeed it has. Glenn beautifully sums up the wonderful “achievements” possible under King Barry's regime in his usual pithy, straight-to-the-heart-of-it way:

There are two Americas, all right. There’s one that works — where new and creative things happen, where mistakes are corrected, and where excellence is rewarded. Then there’s Washington, where everything is pretty much the opposite. That has been particularly evident over the past week or so. One America can launch rockets. The other America can’t even launch a website.

But take heart, people; as always, the "useful idiots" leading the charge to tyranny are once again the first to be put up against the wall:

Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.

Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.

“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”
Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level — the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn’t realize they would rise so much.
“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Pardon me for a moment while I tune up the World's Smallest Violin... A couple of caring-sharing morons find out firsthand how much it costs if it’s “free”– now how perfectly delicious is that? Stupidity should be painful, and in the case of homegrown halfwits like this bint, it’s entirely possible they may Darwinize themselves right out of existence before we ever have to get to more extreme measures to get them out of our affairs. Ace:

Oh My God. Yes, you thought yourself very virtuous, self-righteously declaring “Everyone should have health insurance!”

But you never expected to have to sacrifice anything except for mouthing that ego-pleasing slogan.

And you always put yourself morally above those who you thought would have to pay for all this — even though those people were the only ones who would be doing any sacrificing at all, in your mind.

And now you find out that You have to pay for your folly — and suddenly you’re not quite so self-righteous, are you?

The schadenfreude is rather small recompense given everything else going on. But I'll take my jollies where I can.