This wasn’t how it was supposed to play out. Barack Obama had it all figured: He’d hang tough on his dreadful health care law, force a government shutdown, and let the American people blame it on the evil Republicans. It was a great plan not only for diverting attention from his pitiful performance on the world stage in August and September but ratcheting up enough antipathy to permit the Democrats to retake the House in 2014.
But the angry mob didn’t materialize, so the president took steps to help foment citizen outrage. He erected barriers around open-air monuments and shut down national parks. He even forced a few senior citizens out of their privately owned homes, but the plan backfired. The People (capital T, capital P) saw the erecting of barricades as petty and vindictive … on the part of the administration. Park rangers, enforcing the president’s bidding across the country, have become public enemies as the hashtags “#Barrycade” and “#SpiteHouse” trend on Twitter.
The most recent citizen revolt occurred over the weekend in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the fall foliage has arrived, bringing tourism season with it. It has also brought this year, by government fiat, signs like this one.
But the citizenry is having none of it. The Mining Journal reports (h/t Twitchy):
[O]n Saturday, park visitors were disregarding closed signs, police-style tape, construction barrels and hazard cones put up by Pictured Rocks staff.
On Miners Castle Road, half the roadway remained blocked at the park border, but someone had pushed aside a construction barrel, opening traffic to Miners Castle, Miners Beach and Miners Falls.
At Munising Falls, park visitors avoided the blocked off parking lot and instead parked along Washington Street in Munising. Many of the vehicles had out-of-state plates. An 800-foot pathway leading up to the falls had two strings of the tape strung across the entryway.
A woman heading for the falls simply stepped over the first tape.
‘Well that worked, huh?’ she asked rhetorically.
So what’s next? When a sizable segment of the American people speaks loudly and with one voice, the administration is ill-advised to dig in further. Will the smartest president in the history of the universe read the very conspicuous handwriting on the wall?
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