Voting Against Veterans

Here’s a list of all the Democrats who did that yesterday. And then there’s the idiotic shutdown theater at the Veterans’ Memorial. What kind of moron would spend time and effort to barricade something that’s been open since it opened because the government was “shut down”? Stephen Fleming has been live tweeting it, as the vets take their memorial back. As Dan Collins tweets, apparently the Park Police are Obama’s Revolutionary Guard. If only they had tanks to mow down those recalcitrant geezers. Dana Loesch is calling them #BarryCades.

[Update a few minutes later]

Twitchy has a roundup, with a nice pics of the veterans’ trophy.

[Update a while later]

Here’s a story:

“It just goes to show you why we won World War II,” says Honor Flight of Northwest Ohio President Lee Armstrong.

Many elderly veterans, some in wheelchairs, broke through the barriers set up around the memorial, as police, park service employees, and tourists looked on. “The Germans and the Japanese couldn’t contain us. They weren’t going to let barriers contain them today. They wanted to see their memorial,” says Armstrong.

Appalling. And stupid.

[Update a while later]

Judicial Watch has filed a FOIA request to see who ordered this stupidity. I’d be unshocked if it came from the White House, but they’ll just hide the records.

And as I tweeted a few minutes ago:

[Update a couple minutes later]

Confirmed: it was the White House’s idea. But that lying cretin Harry Reid is blaming the Republicans.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Unbelievable. The government is actually spending money to rent #barrycades.

The Case Against Hope For ObamaCare

I agree with James Taranto:

We resent being told how to feel, and we hope ObamaCare fails, spectacularly and quickly.

We hope it fails spectacularly because that would provide an emotionally satisfying dramatic conclusion. If Barack Obama is forced to spend, say, the last two years of his presidency contending with the undeniable failure of his signature initiative, that would be a fitting punishment for the hubris of his first two years, especially since the imposition of ObamaCare on an unwilling country was the main consequence of his hubris.

We hope it fails quickly for an additional reason: to minimize the damage. Imagine if the Post had written a similar editorial in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, titled “Everyone Should Hope Communism Works.” That would have seemed equally high-minded: If communism didn’t work, tens of millions of people would be made miserable.

Which, of course, is precisely what happened over the next 70-plus years. The Post might respond that that’s an argument against communism rather than an argument against hoping communism works. But when you put it that way, it’s not such a clear distinction, is it? The communist revolution would not have succeeded absent a critical mass of people hopeful communism would work. Nor would it have endured as long as it did if no one had an emotional interest in its perpetuation.

Unfortunately, many still have that emotional interest.

A Lileks Metaphor

The man is amazing:

The tree looks, well, truncated, but unbowed. That’ll end soon, and there will be a brand new hole in the sky where once there were leaves. The Triangle had two old elms; the first fell a few years ago, and a spindly newcomer fills the spot now. It will grow quickly, and the replacement for the old tree will lag behind. The newcomer will be felled forty years hence, the replacement twenty years after that. It’s like a two-stroke engine, pistons rising and falling, the great chug of time pushing the earth around the star.

What a writer.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!