Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

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What evidence do you have that the administration had anything to do with shutting down monuments? Something like that is at the discretion of the director of a given federal agency. Now maybe the director of the National Park Service decided that he was going to shut monuments down as a matter of politics, but you have to recognize that there are good reasons to do so.

In DC in the last year we had a vandal deface the Lincoln Memorial and the National Cathedral. If during the shutdown the National Park Service just left all of the monuments unguarded and someone took a hammer to the nose of a statue of Jefferson, that'd be a humongous price to pay. In a national park, without park rangers to rescue people, if someone got themselves into trouble and died, that would be worse than ruining some people's vacations.

It is possible that the White House ordered parks and monuments closed for political reasons, but that's all speculation at this point. No different than speculating that George W. Bush allowed 9/11 to happen to justify invading Iraq.

Perhaps you need a civics lesson. The national parks service is part of the department of the interior which is run by the Secretary of the Interior who reports to the President. We can't constantly keep blaming underlings. At some point the President of the United States is involved. He certainly didn't shutdown Healthcare.gov yet other HHS sites were shut down. Interesting. No money for Pubmed but plenty for Healthcare.gov

In this case I'm not blaming underlings, I'm just saying that there is no verifiable evidence that the White House ordered park and monument closings. The head of the National Parks Service could have made a decision to keep things open, or he could have made a decision to close things. The Secretary of the Interior could have done the same.

Do you have any evidence that the president sent out an order to close the parks and monuments? In that case, yes he is responsible. Otherwise you are just speculating, just like everyone else.

If you want to make the argument that ultimately the president is responsible for everything that happens on his watch, that's a different argument. The parent post was saying that Obama sent an order to close the parks.

We've been at sequestration level funding for months. Some agencies moved things around to minimize disruption, some didn't. Do you think the president sent orders down to individual agencies on how to mitigate the effects of sequestration, but didn't send that guidance to others? It's possible, but it is more likely that the different agencies figured things out for themselves and some made out better than others.

I don't have any authoritative source to confirm or deny why certain things were closed, but I would like to point out that there were some rangers still on duty and search and rescue employees on hand to rescue people in National Parks.

What evidence do you have that the administration had anything to do with shutting down monuments?

You have to really be taking big gulps of the Kool Aid to have missed all the stories about how far park services went to deliberately shut down monuments. There were even reported stories of government officials showing up at some independent park operators who were utilizing government land. They ordered those parks shut down. So they didn't have money to operate parks but they had money to send people to shut down parks the government doesn't even operate?

If you start questioning the official line from the Administration, you might ask why the President and his spokespeople kept threatening default on national debts when the servicing of the debt is mandated by the 14th Amendment and easily accomplished with one tenth of the incoming federal revenues. It was all a big house of cards once you started looking at it.

It's a bit ridiculous to accuse Kool Aid drinking when you haven't provided any evidence that the White House directly ordered NPS to close parks and monuments. It certainly is possible, but where is the proof? Even an off-the-record statement from a WH official would suffice.

There are plenty of reasons to not take Obama's word at face value, and there are plenty of real things to criticize him over without making up stuff.

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