Honor Flight Heroes Threatened with Arrest

One group of Honor Flight heroes broke down the barriers to see the memorial dedicated to their brave service. Another group has been threatened with arrest if they attempt to get into their memorial during the government shutdown:

Honor Flight of Northwest Ohio has a trip scheduled to depart from Toledo next Wednesday, October 9.
"We will make the call this Friday to determine if the flight is still a go, or if we will have to re-schedule," Armstrong explains.
He says they are considering going ahead with the trip even if the government is still on shutdown, but when he called the parks service, he was told they would face arrest. "I said, are you kidding me? You're going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn't for them it wouldn't be there. She said, 'That's correct sir.'"
When Armstrong asked for her name, he says she did not give it to him and then promptly hung up the phone.

This was obviously the instruction this park service bureaucrat was given -- arrest these great men who have come to see the tribute to the sacrifices they made in the name of saving the world from tyranny. It may well be a stretch to say that whoever happened to answer the phone at the park service wasn't just shooting her mouth off if it weren't for this one bit of evidence:

The Obama Administration has decided to block access to public memorials on the National Mall as a result of the government shutdown. Like its decision to end White House tours when the sequester cuts took effect, there is no rational reason for this. The Park Police, nominally in charge of monitoring these spaces, isn't even effected by the shutdown. Shutting off access to these sites is gratuitous and petulant.

 How does Mike Flynn on Brietbart know this? 

Having lived in DC for 18 years, I can tell you, the WWII Memorial is simply an architectural structure in an open public space. There is no official "access" to it. There are no guards. It's a building in a park. Yet, the Obama Administration tried to block veterans from viewing the public memorial, even after hearing about the planned visit.

 Like he mentioned, he's visited a similar structure, the Lincoln Memorial, many times at all hours of the day and it is perfectly accessible -- unless someone doesn't want it to be to prove a point. And Rand Paul made this observation:

 “The president has assigned 7 security guards to guard the World War II monument. That’s two more than he sent to Benghazi. We’ve got more people guarding the WWII monument than we had guarding the ambassador,” Paul said.

 So we can't afford to allow 90-year-old men who sacrificed for the world when they were kids to see their memorial but we can afford to station security guards around the memorial to keep these brave 90-year-old men from seeing their memorial. This order obviously had to come from the top and it is utterly despicable.

Think about it: These memorials as public spaces. They may have guards around them to make sure people don't vandalize them (and we've found out even THAT doesn't work in the last couple of months). They never  guard them to keep law-abiding Americans who sacrificed for their country from visiting their memorial -- many of whom will be dead in a couple of years -- who may never have this opportunity again.

Kick the campers out of Yellowstone and Yosemite, close down the Statue of Liberty, don't allow people to go down into the Grand Canyon. Big deal. But to consciously barricade open public memorials to keep heroes from seeing them is pure evil.