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Our Peevish President – It’s Within His Power to Avoid The Ludicrous Scenes of This Shutdown.
Charles C. W. Cooke * National Review
Distilling a theretofore-untamed talking point into a single sentence, The Atlantic’s Abby Olheiser complained somewhat tenuously on Monday that the National Park Service, which has recently been running around the country doing all sorts of unconscionable things in the name of the federal shutdown, “wouldn’t have to become the next iteration of the Benghazi mantra if a bill — which is sitting in the House of Representatives and would fund the government at sequester levels — were brought up for a vote and passed, ensuring that the government, and the parks, would reopen as soon as possible.” This, suffice it to say, is rather obviously true.
It is also wholly irrelevant. Of course the executive branch would be not be playing these games if the shutdown had not happened. In that case, the government octopus would be swimming inexorably forward as it usually does, all of its tentacles intact. The more important point to grasp here is not that the various heavy-handed antics in which the Park Service has seen fit to indulge itself since last Monday are unimaginable absent a shutdown, but that almost none of them had to happen because of the shutdown. The offending behavior has, in other words, been a choice — a deliberate ploy contrived and prosecuted by a man seeking to make a public point.
continue article at National Review:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/360727/our-peevish-president-charles-c-w-cooke
