Posted on 10/10/2013 2:26:49 PM PDT by xzins
“We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.”
—Ronald Reagan
The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration. This is an expansive claim, of course. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, the NSA, the HHS mandate—this is an administration that has not lacked for appalling abuses of power. And we still have three years to go.
Even so, consider the actions of the National Park Service since the government shutdown began. People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” the World War II Memorial takes more resources and manpower than “keeping it open.”
The closure of the World War II Memorial was just the start of the Park Service’s partisan assault on the citizenry. There’s a cute little historic site just outside of the capital in McLean, Virginia, called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm. They do historical reenactments, and once upon a time the National Park Service helped run the place. But in 1980, the NPS cut the farm out of its budget. A group of private citizens set up an endowment to take care of the farm’s expenses. Ever since, the site has operated independently through a combination of private donations and volunteer workers.
The Park Service told Claude Moore Colonial Farm to shut down.
The farm’s administrators appealed this directive—they explained that the Park Service doesn’t actually do anything for the historic site. The folks at the NPS were unmoved. And so, last week, the National Park Service found the scratch to send officers to the park to forcibly remove both volunteer workers and visitors.
Think about that for a minute. The Park Service, which is supposed to serve the public by administering parks, is now in the business of forcing parks they don’t administer to close. As Homer Simpson famously asked, did we lose a war?
We’re not done yet. The parking lot at Mount Vernon was closed by the NPS, too, even though the Park Service does not own Mount Vernon; it just controls access to the parking lots from the George Washington Parkway. At the Vietnam Memorial—which is just a wall you walk past—the NPS called in police to block access. But the pièce de résistance occurred in South Dakota. The Park Service wasn’t content just to close Mount Rushmore. No, they went the extra mile and put out orange cones to block the little scenic overlook areas on the roads near Mount Rushmore. You know, just to make sure no taxpayers could catch a glimpse of it.
It’s one thing for politicians to play shutdown theater. It’s another thing entirely for a civil bureaucracy entrusted with the privilege of caring for our national heritage to wage war against the citizenry on behalf of a political party.
This is how deep the politicization of Barack Obama’s administration goes. The Park Service falls under the Department of the Interior, and its director is a political appointee. Historically, the directorship has been nonpartisan and the service has functioned as a civil, not a political, unit. Before the current director, Jonathan Jarvis, was nominated by President Obama, he’d spent 30 years as a civil servant. But he has taken to his political duties with all the fervor of a third-tier hack from the DNC, marrying the disinterested contempt of a meter maid with the zeal of an ambitious party apparatchik.
It’s worth recalling that the Park Service has always been deeply ambivalent about the public which they’re charged with serving. In a 2005 Weekly Standard piece about the NPS’s plan to reconfigure the National Mall, Andrew Ferguson reported:
The Park Service’s ultimate desire was made public, indiscreetly, by John Parsons, associate regional park director for the mall. In 2000 Parsons told the Washington Post he hoped that eventually all unauthorized traffic, whether by foot or private car, would be moved off the mall. Visitors could park in distant satellite lots and be bused to nodal points, where they would be watered and fed, allowed to tour a monument, and then reboard a bus and head for another monument. “Just like at Disneyland,” Parsons told the Post. “Nobody drives through Disneyland. They’re not allowed. And we’ve got the better theme park.”
Yes, yes. They must protect America’s treasures from the ugly Americans. No surprise then that one park ranger explained to the Washington Times last week, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can.”
“To make life as difficult for people as we can”—that would be an apt motto for the Obama worldview. And now even the misanthropes at the National Park Service have been yoked to his project. This is the clearest example yet of how the president understands the relationship between his government and the citizenry.
I am a simple man. Words and declarative sentences have a meaning.
This “taking back” of federal park land might be a worthwhile discussion to have. What entity has authority to “take back” The Great Smokies? That national park was created with donations from the federal Gov’t and a larger gift from Rockefeller and many small donations, including Appalachian school kids’ Depression era pennies, nickels and dimes.
Agreed that was originally the case but since that time laws and acts have been passed creating many other Federal entities. Do I agree with all of them ??? No but they are law and until they have been judged unConstitutional we will live with them whether you or I like them or not.
Can the Federal government return back to performing only it’s explicit duties and obligations as delineated in the Constitution?? Yes but it will take at leaast a hundred years to undo the past 200 years of growth. That isn’t defeatism...that is reality.
As for owning half of Alaska, I agree with you but remember, it was the Federal government that bought all that land originally in the first place. Alaska is pretty much a creation of the Federal government (thank you Seward)
That’s what I meant. However, what I posted could have been phrased a lot better and I won’t object to any moderators editing it or removing it.
The families of the people who lost their homes, land, businesses, and livelyhoods to an eminent domain process that paid $20 for every $500 acre of land?
The Federal Government should not own vast tracts of land, not even the Smokies.
And, to be honest with you, my mom is from Swain Country, NC, and they tell an entirely different story about the Fed swallowing up farms, homes, and entire villages. She knew the people who were cheated out of everything.
Gore was even trying a few years back to swallow up my grandfather’s farm that sits on the edge of the park.
See below the story of County Bureaucrats selling out their people to Federal Bureaucrats. And it truly was based on MONEY.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Swain County gave up the majority of its private land to the Federal Government for the creation of Fontana Lake and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Hundreds of people were forced to leave the small Smoky Mountain communities that had been their homes for generations. With the creation of the Park, their homes were gone, and so was the road to those communities. Old Highway 288 was buried beneath the deep waters of Fontana Lake.
The Federal government promised to replace Highway 288 with a new road. Lakeview Drive was to have stretched along the north shore of Fontana Lake, from Bryson City to Fontana, 30 miles to the west. And, of special importance to those displaced residents, it was to have provided access to the old family cemeteries where generations of ancestors remained behind.
But Lakeview Drive fell victim to an environmental issue and construction was stopped, with the road ending at a tunnel, about six miles into the park. The environmental issue was eventually resolved, but the roadwork was never resumed. And Swain County’s citizens gave the unfinished Lakeview Drive its popular, albeit unofficial name “The Road To Nowhere.”
On weekends throughout the summer, the Park Service still ferries groups of Swain County residents across Fontana Lake to visit their old family cemeteries for Decoration Days and family reunions.
The legal issue of whether to build the road was finally resolved in February, 2010 when the US Department of Interior signed a settlement agreement paying Swain County $52 million in lieu of building the road. Congressman Heath Shuler, a Bryson City naitve, was the driving force in bringing the settlement to fruition.
You’re right. Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon subsidize scores of other parks across the country.
Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase and opened it up for Americans. He understood that the Federal government is the people and not a corporate business interest.
“Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase and opened it up for Americans.”
Yes and at the time many considered that purchase (as with the later purchase of Alaska) as unConstitutional overreaches of the Federal government.
Arguably a Constitutional purist could argue that all territories purchased from Spain and Russia west of the Mississippi should be returned to them for a refund.
Constitutional or not, I would think that’s a really bad idea.
Thanks for the thoughtful, friendly reply.
I was comparing the opening up of territory to regular people versus the Fed locking up control of Alaska to itself.
Had we done the same with the Louisiana purchase, we would have people living from the Mississippi west. It would all be Federal range.
They are not to have control of other than postal facilities, military forts & training areas, and the like.
They shouldn’t be owning half of Alaska. Would Alaska be different if they didn’t own it? I suspect it would be a lot different. Can’t prove it, of course, but I strongly suspect it.
With a dictator every MOLECULE within his grasp must be brought into alignment with his agenda or die.
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