Privatize the National Park Service

No more Obama shutdowns ever again.

The behavior of the National Park Service during President Obama’s shutdown campaign has been shocking. As has been widely reported, Park Service employees have been told to make life as uncomfortable as possible for people, and have flourished in that endeavor. They have acted crudely and unprofessionally as a partisan and ideological arm of the White House and its propaganda campaign.

If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about (that would exclude American Spectator readers), then you listen only to NPR, watch only MSNBC, and read only the New York Times. Just click Google and start searching. There are frightening first-person accounts everywhere. Among the worst examples was a case innocently covered by a small Massachusetts newspaper that reported on a group of tourists traveling to Yellowstone National Park. The tourists, by no means a bunch of Tea Partiers, described the Park Service as “Gestapo”-like in its tactics.

That, of course, is an exaggeration. But the mere fact that a group of apolitical citizens would invoke such hyperbole to describe how they were treated really says something.

The Weekly Standard, a conservative source not given to hyperbole,argues in an editorial that the Park Service’s conduct “might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration.” That’s no small claim for an administration plagued by scandals ranging from Benghazi to the eye-opening overreach of the IRS, the NSA, and (among others) the HHS mandate. The Standard rattled off examples of abuses during the shutdown, highlighting the most egregious of them all, the shameless scene at the World War II Memorial:

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.”

Via: American Spectator

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