President Peevish is Peevish

While the question of who is to blame for the catastrophic shutdown of a mere 16 or 17% of the federal government and the subsequent onslaught of zombies and cannibals unleashed on innocent civilians consumes most Americans, Charles C. W. Cooke points out that the effects of the shutdown are entirely within the power of our peevish president to decide.

Yes, government shutdowns have consequences — even shutdowns that leave 83 percent of the government operating as usual. But, consequences or not, there really is no good reason for the federal government to send barricades and wire-ties to unguarded open-air parks, to close off unmanned scenic overlooks, to evict homeowners from their private property on public land, or to threaten the livelihoods of hoteliers whose sole crime is to own a business on an unsecured public route.

There is no good reason, either, for the government to shut down the index pages of some, arbitrarily chosen, websites while leaving the rest of the pages running. No good reason for the federal government to try to close Mount Vernon and Claude Moore Colonial Farm, neither of which it owns or runs. No good reason for the federal government to threaten to cancel the Air Force–Navy football game when there were private donors waiting on the sidelines. And certainly no reason for armed rangers to hold senior-citizen tourists hostage inside their Yellowstone Park hotel for the high crime of stepping outside and taking photographs.

Who gets hurt and to what extent seems to be the president's prerogative. By any measurement, it appears that people who love this county, who fought for this country, and even those who died for this country --oh! and children -- are all crowded into the first place spot on the list of recipients for our Beloved Leader's malicious indulgences of spite.

As NR’s editors observed on Monday, there is a substantial difference between authorities’ barring access to sites that have gates and their barricading open spaces that do not. “It takes federal action to close the sites,” this website’s editorial noted, “and none to keep them open. This is not what an inactive government looks like, but a spiteful one.” An anonymous Park Service ranger confirmed that malice to the Washington Times last week: Staff, the employee said, had “been told to “make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

But really, if you can't screw with people when you're annoyed with them, what good is power? This is something Democrats have always understood. Whenever there is even a whisper that government is taking too much money and wasting most of it, Democrats rush to the microphones to assure us that government is virtually cut to the bone and if you want your money back then they will sadly be compelled to cut teachers, firemen, and police. Every time. I have never once heard a Democrat concede that there might be some bureaucratic desk job somewhere that really doesn't need to be done. Not. Once.

Precious President Peevish is just decidedly more vicious about employing this tactic because, as we all know, any reaction to his nastiness is simply prompted by racism.