Can anyone explain what’s up with the WWII Memorial shutdown controversy? The narrative in some media outlets is that the Obama administration unilaterally closed the memorial to inflict maximum pain from the shutdown. I don’t find this very plausible but I’m having trouble finding the straight dope on what happened. Was the memorial closed automatically as part of the shutdown or was this somehow discretionary on the part of the administration?
As I understand it all national parks and memorials are shut down, because staff that normally maintain them (and watch to prevent vandalism, etc) are furloughed. So there’s nothing to the accusations against the White House.
Just curious as to what media outlets those would be…
Manufactured outrage. Minimal import.
Remember, if the President wanted to maximize the pain there are things that certainly could have done that.
That could be their new tagline. 
Helping to manufacture outrage and exploit the stupid was Michele Bachmann.
Move on. Nothing new to see here.
And the essential-personnel skeleton staff and/or the parks police are instructed to block accesses so as to avoid possible safety risks to visitors or damage to facilities. Same thing is happening all over the place, including down here.
And in any case closing the Air and Space Museum or the Lincoln Memorial inconveniences thousands more people per day so this would make no sense as a strategy.
I hope and pray they reach saturation point, if that’s in any way possible, where each senator and congressperson will feel they’ve gotten enough camera time. There seems to be more interest in exposure than closure.
Each one hungers for the opportunity to grandstand, utter their talking points and furrow his or her brow in fake concern. I picture some poor lowly staffer whose job it is to sit with a stop-watch and calculate the on-camera face time, then compare it to the face time of the other nitwits.
To paraphrase Kanye, they don’t care about us.
I think one of the major problems with politics in this country is that many people greatly overestimate the role the President has, and the power that he wields.
The Straight Dope on what happened is that the government shut down.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes, or even Darrell Issa, to figure out that when the government shuts down, that the monuments it owns also shut down.
Sounds like someone has been tuned in to Faux News, again.
The reality is that all of the National Park Service is stopped as a non-essential government function.
On Tuesday, a group of WWII vets happened to arrive at the Washington WWII memorial, found it closed, and knocked over the barriers to go see it anyway. No one was arrested or hindered.
Several furloughed NPS rangers have begun to watch over the site, without pay, to be sure that Veterans in the Honor Flight program still have access to the memorial, even though it is closed.
Texas Republican Randy Neugebauer, who voted to defund Obamacare as a condition of funding the government, visited the memorial, apparently for a photo op of getting in the face of a ranger and telling her she should be ashamed for her actions.
My understanding was that staff wasn’t normally present at the WWII Memorial. If that’s the case, I don’t know why you’d pay extra staff to go forcefully close it now, rather than just leave it the way it is the other 99% of the time. Same goes for .gov websites. Why pay a programmer to put up a “sorry, we’re closed” page and block access to the rest of the site? Why not just go home on Friday and leave it the way it was. It’ll continue running just fine. The answer seems to me that they’re trying to inflict pain on Americans to make a political point. Same goes for closing national forest campgrounds, which have no federal employees present and require no federal funding. They actually make money for the US Government, but they’re chasing campers out and closing them down.
So who empties the trash cans? Who turns on the sprinklers? Who picks up the dog poop? Who cleans the spray-painted dongs off of the monument?
Here is one report on the incident, although, from Huffington Post, it would appear to be a bit slanted in its presentation. (No worse than Fox News, of course.)
Both untrue. The campgrounds are nominally overseen by rangers in the United States Forest Service, who are paid via federal funds. And they can’t take campground fees to pay themselves, just as IRS employees can’t just take tax dollars directly to pay themselves.
That doesn’t sound right. I run by the World War II Memorial fairly often, and I’m pretty sure that rangers are typically there. There’s an office just a few steps south of the memorial that, as far as I know, is staffed during the day with rangers.
One claim is that the memorial was not closed the last time the government shut down.
This is absolutely true and still winds up being a lie.
The memorial was dedicated and opened in 2004. The last government shutdown was in 1995.
The usual Facebook morons are blaming Obama, as always. Personally, I’m more mad at Obama for those blown calls that let Texas steal a win from Iowa State. Plus the SOB didn’t put my tub butter away last night and it got all watery.
I understood that the campgrounds are essentially leased to a private company via contract. Those companies “oversee” the campgrounds, collect the fees, etc.
Shrug What do I know, I’ve only been there a couple of times personally. I’ve read it in a couple of places over the last few days. Here is a recent one: