Grumpa Joe's Place

View of The National WWII Memorial (bottom) and the Lincoln Memorial (top) from the Washington Monument (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A few years ago, Peggy and I visited Washington, D.C. and toured the war memorials on the Washington Mall. All of them are easily accessible and none required opening a door, nor a gate to enter. Public streets surround the Washington Mall on four sides. It has walkways crossing from one side to the next, and from one end to the other. Yes, the responsibility for the mall belongs to the National Park System.

How many memorials are there? Let me count, Viet Nam, Korea, Nurses, World War I, Lincoln, Washington, and yes, World War II. All are totally exposed and in the open.

All the memorials mesmerized us. We found Peg’s cousin on the Viet Nam Wall, prayed for her husband at the Korean, prayed for her father at the World War I, and prayed for all the vets we grew up knowing in World War II. We stared at the size of the Lincoln Monument As President Lincoln saw through us with his soulful eyes. The shadow of the Washington Monument followed us like the wing on a sun-dial. Of all the monuments, the Washington Monument obelisk is the only one that has a door for entry, and it was closed then as it is today for repairs.

What I am getting at here is there is nothing to shut down. The Park Ranger’s assigned to this park just stayed home and John Q. Public missed out on their polished speeches about the monuments.

If Obama really wanted to punish us he would have to drape a huge tent over the area to cover it up, and there is no money in his budget for that.

When I heard that the WWII vets just moved the menacing barricades out-of-the-way and visited anyway, I cheered. They did a lot more to move Hitler and Tojo out-of-the-way during their service time and they were not intimidated by a puny barricade even though many of them were in wheel chairs. There is a doorway into the lower level of the WWII memorial leading to the public restrooms. For an old guy with prostate problems that is a major hurt, but I’m sure they dealt with it heroically and saved it for the bus.

President Obama has again thrown a temper tantrum and most likely ordered his administration to hurt as many citizens of the USA as is humanly possible to make them “feel the pain” of the government shutdown, and to let us know that he is the “one” in charge and Lord over all.  Just add a few hundred WWII vets in wheelchairs to the eleven million people without jobs who have felt the pain to the hurt-the-citizens list.

How stupid can he be? Worse yet, how stupid does he think we are?

Related articles

• Vets Invade Shuttered WWII Memorial in Shutdown Protest – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• It Will Be Illegal to Walk on National Mall if Gov’t Shuts Down, National Park Service Says – How Will They Enforce It? (theblaze.com)
• Tourists Find Sites Barricaded on National Mall (abcnews.go.com)
• WWII Memorial opened to vets (thehill.com)
• Elderly Veterans Barred from WW II Memorial (radio.foxnews.com)
• Democrats Pay Union Members to Protest World War II Vets (powerlineblog.com)
• Breaking: Old Man Vets Go Kamikaze On WWII Memorial Over Bad Barack Obama’s Government Shutdown, Not Even Kidding (wonkette.com)
• Visiting veterans storm the gates of closed war memorials (warhistoryonline.com)

Filed under: Biography, Conservative, family, Government | Tagged: Barack Obama, Korea, United States, Viet Nam, Washington DC, Washington Mall, Washington Monument, World War II, WWII | 1 Comment »