Unreal: Park workers installing more barricades around WWII Memorial to keep vets out

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Unreal: Park workers installing more barricades around WWII Memorial to keep vets out; Update: Vets enter Memorial; Update: “First Amendment activities”

posted at 10:41 am on October 2, 2013 by Allahpundit

Not just barricades, either. My friends, it’s come to this:

Mounted Police now protecting the World War 2 Memorial from World War 2 veterans. Sanity restored. pic.twitter.com/EzBpV3HhEm

— BuzzFeedBenny (@bennyjohnson) October 1, 2013

I’m rushing this post out because, per Ed’s stellar round-up from earlier this morning, the Honor Flight vets are headed to the Memorial regardless. Members of Congress, among them Michele Bachmann, are already there, as are reporters of all stripes. If you use Twitter, I recommend following the Standard’s John McCormack, National Review’s Betsy Woodruff, and the Examiner’s Charlie Spiering, who took the photo I used for our front-page thumbnail of the feds actually deploying forklifts to set up gates around a memorial that’s open 24 hours a day with little supervision under normal circumstances. As I write this at a few minutes after 10:30 ET, Spiering is tweeting that the vets are scheduled to arrive within the next 15 minutes. Is your government really about to arrest 96-year-olds who fought at Guadalcanal because this bit of sub-moronic shutdown theater is too precious to them to forfeit? Stay tuned. It wouldn’t be the first own-goal they’ve scored because their pettiness overwhelmed their sense of optics.

By the way, the WWII Memorial isn’t the only one with a gate in front of it this morning. When McCormack strolled over to the World War I Memorial, he found this. No joke:

Check out the barricade at the World War One memorial—> pic.twitter.com/lJEYjY3GtR

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) October 2, 2013

The sign reads, “Because of the federal government shutdown, this National Park Service area is closed, except for First Amendment activities.” So if you want to protest there, you’re good. If you want to quietly remember the dead, get off the damned lawn.

An exit question via Legal Insurrection while we wait for updates: How come the Lincoln Memorial isn’t open now if it was open “>during the 1995 shutdown?

Obama’s America… pic.twitter.com/P38BDsne5d

— Morgen (@morgenr) October 2, 2013

Update: A Park Service spokesman says they were told to close the memorial by the Office of Management and Budget. Paging Darrell Issa: Time to find out who made the decision at OMB. And why.

Update: If you’re near a TV, you might want to turn on CNN. Tapper is there at the Memorial; if there’s some sort of confrontation, I assume they’ll cut to him live.

Update: The vets have arrived.

So many veterans! pic.twitter.com/FrJGxFwxRM

— Betsy Woodruff (@woodruffbets) October 2, 2013

Dan Foster says, “This is President Obama’s Bonus Army.”

 

Read the rest:  http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/02/unreal-park-workers-installing-more-barricades-around-wwii-memorial-to-keep-vets-out/

 

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