... one of the absolute worst was the attempt by congressional Republicans to use the closing of national monuments as an attempt to illustrate their perception of President Obama's alleged abuse of executive power. The epicenter of this nonsense, of course, was the National World War II Memorial in Washington, where Tea Partiers shamelessly congregated to make sure that their "outrage" was on camera for the rest of us.
I'll overlook the fact that the President was acting solely in response to the manufactured crisis that Congressional Republicans had themselves created. Actually, there's a much better rebuttal to this kind of garbage than that.
The National Park Service is, by law, responsible both for the protection and preservation of national parks and monuments, and for the safely of the public when they visit any place under the protection of the Park Service. Far from being a political tactic, the closure of the parks and monuments was a logical extension of the Park Service's lawful authority to do its job. If the Park Service, as a consequence of the GOP-manufactured shutdown, did not have the resources to adequately protect either the sites or the public, shutting the sites down was the only way they could lawfully exercise their authority. To do otherwise would have meant not only abdicating that authority, but exposing members of the public to injury (or worse), and, of lesser importance, risking damage to one or more monuments by vandals (political and otherwise).
And congressional Republicans posing as defenders of the park system would be laughable hypocrisy, if the plans they have for our parks weren't as self-serving as they are destructive.
Oh, but I forgot; there's an even better rebuttal to their argument against the President and the Park Service: it's an absolute, expletive-deleted lie. Sorry about that. Had I remembered that earlier, this post would have been much shorter.
Please don't let that discourage you from reading further.
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