Comparing Apples and Lemons

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Comparing Apples and Lemons 
“President Obama Compares ObamaCare Rollout Glitches to Apple iOS 7”–headline, Investor’s Business Daily, Oct. 2

The Lonely Lives of Scientists 
“As Shutdown Takes Hold, an Essential Few Scientists Still on the Job”–headline, ScienceMag.org, Oct. 1

Hey, Kids! What Time Is It? 
“It’s Time to Teach Venezuela a Lesson”–headline, Investor’s Business Daily, Oct. 3

Why would we want to do that?
One reason this column was wary of congressional Republicans’ government-shutdown strategy against ObamaCare is that it seemed unlikely to succeed. ObamaCare is unpopular, but so are government shutdowns, and both the president (for structural reasons) and the Democrats (for ideological ones) would appear to have a natural advantage in such a confrontation. Hence the Democrats’ “victory” in the last two shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996.

It may still turn out that way, but we’ve been surprised this week at the Democrats’ tactical maladroitness. As Josh Jordan quipped yesterday on Twitter: “Since the shutdown began, Obama and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid have taken tough stands against the two most villainous groups: WWII veterans and kids with cancer.”

The World War II veterans were targets of the classic Washington Monument ploy. “Tourists will find every one of America’s national parks and monuments, from Yosemite to the Smithsonian to the Statue of Liberty, immediately closed,” the president announced Monday night.

The next day a group of veterans arrived in Washington for a visit to the World War II memorial. They were there, Fox News reports, “as part of Honor Flight, a program that enables World War II veterans to partake in an expense-paid trip to view the memorial.” They arrived to find the National Park Service had erected barricades to keep the public away from the site.

That didn’t deter them: “With bagpipers playing ‘Amazing Grace,’ nearly 200 veterans from Mississippi and Iowa swept past barricades and security guards,” Fox reports. Republican lawmakers, including Mississippi’s Steven Palazzo, helped the elderly vets get in. “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” Palazzo said. “We lined the veterans up along the blockade, we saw an opening and we took it.”

In a press release, Palazzo noted: “This is an open-air memorial that the public has 24/7 access to under normal circumstances–even when Park Service personnel aren’t present. It actually requires more effort and expense to shut out these veterans from their Memorial than it would to simply let them through.” We can vouch for that. We recall strolling through the memorial one afternoon in February 2004, before its official opening that April. As far as we remember, it was unsupervised. So shutting down the memorial was a political stunt that wasted taxpayer money.

Yesterday more veterans visited the memorial. PJMedia reports they were met by an “SEIU rent-a-mob” (that’s the Service Employees International Union). “About 20 protesters arrived on the scene chanting ‘Boehner, get us back to work’ and claiming”–falsely, it seems–“they were federal employees furloughed because of the shutdown.” One of the protesters told PJMedia’s Patrick Poole he was being paid $15 an hour.

As for the kids with cancer, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday on the consequences of cuts to the National Institutes of Health: “Director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center for clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said.”

The Washington Post‘s left-liberal Wonkblog picked up the story: “As long as the government is shut down, the National Institutes of Health will turn away roughly 200 patients each week from its clinical research center, including children with cancer.”

Healio.com reports that the House today passed a bill to restore NIH funding–but Obama has already issued a veto threat. Yesterday, as the Washington Free Beacon notes, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Reid about it at a press conference:

Bash: You all talked about children with cancer unable to go to clinical trials. The House is presumably going to pass a bill that funds at least the NIH. Given what you’ve said, will you at least pass that? And if not, aren’t you playing the same political games that Republicans are?

Reid: Listen, Sen. Durbin explained that very well, and he did it here, did it on the floor earlier, as did Sen. Schumer. What right did they have to pick and choose what part of government is going to be funded? It’s obvious what’s going on here. You talk about reckless and irresponsible. Wow. What this is all about is ObamaCare. They are obsessed. I don’t know what other word I can use. They’re obsessed with this ObamaCare. It’s working now and it will continue to work and people will love it more than they do now by far. So they have no right to pick and choose.

Bash: But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn’t you do it?

Reid: Why would we want to do that? I have 1,100 people at Nellis Air Force base that are sitting home. They have a few problems of their own. This is–to have someone of your intelligence to suggest such a thing maybe means you’re irresponsible and reckless–

Bash: I’m just asking a question.

Even diehard partisans in the press are on the defensive. “Come On, No. Harry Reid Doesn’t Hate Kids With Cancer,” reads a headline on The Atlantic’s website. When you feel compelled to answer a question like that, it’s a sign you aren’t winning the argument.

Which of course is not to say Republicans have won. Roll Call reports that “a bloc of moderate House Republicans” are pushing to “end the government shutdown as soon as possible” without winning any concessions on ObamaCare. According to the story, 18 Republican House members have said publicly they favor a “clean CR”–the legislative jargon for a no-strings-attached funding bill. Six more would be enough to deprive the GOP of a majority.

But New York’s Rep. Peter King, the informal leader of these so-called pragmatists, says some of them are hesitant for pragmatic reasons: “because of their districts, they’re afraid, they’re concerned about a primary.” Democrats are hoping that enough of those wavering Republicans can be persuaded to “start acting with more abandon,” as Roll Call puts it. The hard-line conservatives have to be hoping that is as out of character as it sounds.