Jerry Pournelle Reviews the Government Shutdown
4th October 2013
The President has brought in workers from off furlough to barricade the national monuments in the Mall. Last time I visited that place I was able to walk through the Korean War memorial and up to the Lincoln Memorial, and all along the Mall, at midnight, and I never saw anyone; there were no barricades or barriers and none were needed. Of course there is a need for maintenance, but the money spent putting up the barricades would have paid for weeks of routine maintenance of the mall and reflecting pool, and if that weren’t true then a short appeal for public help in keeping America beautiful would have turned out an embarrassing number of volunteers complete with retired officers to organize them: there is no danger that the national war memorials will be neglected whether the government shuts down or not. The President knows this, but the barricades went up anyway.
This is small and petty, as is the refusal to negotiate anything.
Newt Gingrich visited Mount Vernon – a privately operated national monument and well worth a visit – and has noted that the bus turnaround (a paved turnaround off the national highway) has been closed by the Federal Government. Taking those barriers out there and setting them up cost money: normally it’s just a place for busses to pull off the highway and turn around, there are no facilities and it has no operating personnel, so the barriers are an added cost. No word on whether bus operators have simply throws the barricades off, as the WWII vets sort of did at the WWII monument on the mall.
This is the new presidential leadership. It is probably effective. The Republicans closed down the government. Any inconvenient consequences of that clearly are the fault of the stubborn Republicans who want to keep the poor from getting their free health care.