A Chilling Thought

On Friday, John Fund posted a very interesting article at the National Review Online. The article deals with the behavior of the National Park Rangers during the shutdown. On Wednesday the House Oversight Committee began an investigation into that behavior.

The article reports a very obvious question asked by Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina:

Gowdy wanted to know why Jarvis had allowed “pot-smoking” Occupy Wall Street protesters to camp overnight illegally in Washington’s McPherson Square park for 100 days, yet put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. By not issuing a single citation to the Occupy campers, Gowdy argued, the Park Service was treating them better than the nation’s military veterans. “Can you cite me the regulation that required you to erect barricades from accessing a monument that they built?” he demanded.

…Representative Darrell Issa was equally stern with Jarvis, noting that, since the Park Police weren’t furloughed during the shutdown, “an open-air monument was guarded by the same number of people to prevent Americans from getting in as would allow them to safely go in and out.”

The article goes on to list some of the more bizarre closings during the government shutdown. Please follow the link above to read the list.

The article concludes:

But now that the shutdown is over, it’s important for Chairman Issa and others to figure out how it was manipulated politically. Because if the Park Service can become a pawn in the Obama administration’s political wars, does anyone doubt that the integrity of other even more vital agencies wouldn’t be at risk in any future budget showdown?

The fact that the signs closing the parks appeared so rapidly (have you ever tried to get the government to do anything quickly?) and the way the Park Rangers behaved convinces me that this was a planned event by the Obama Administration. Frankly I think the shutdown was used to manipulate the American people, and we fell for it. Hopefully many of us will begin to ask why the Park Rangers followed the orders to make the shutdown uncomfortable for average Americans and how the signs appeared so quickly. I think we were played as fools.

 

 

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