Column By John Young
Everyone should be as angry as my son over the insult.
And I mean everyone – Democrat, independent, libertarian, MAGA true believer. Melania, Ivanka, Don Jr., Eric, Tiffany, Barron. Yes, even J.D. “In a Trance” Vance.
The insult from a petty man with no shame and no sense of duty. It ruined a sparkling notion from my hard-working son.
“I wonder if the campgrounds up Poudre Canyon are open,” he said the other day.
He pulled up the site for the Forest Service and got this message from the U.S. Department of Agriculture:
Campgrounds were closed because “the Radical Left Democrats shut down the government.”
Words from the mind of a president who poked the girls in second-grade class while his teacher explained what upper-case letters do.
My son hadn’t been aware that political poison like this was adorning websites for government agencies across the board since the shutdown. He was furious.
“These are my campgrounds,” he said. “This is my government.”
Not according to the sociopath in chief.
The message said the president “has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”
Every bit as clear as lining up federal employees for ritual firing squads and issuing daily hardy-har-har memes that make sport of a crisis he didn’t deign to avert.
In the media class I teach, the subject of the shutdown came up, and a student quickly pulled up one of the offending messages.
This is on the site for the Housing and Urban Development:
“The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”
Atrocious and flatly illegal.
A key element of the class being current events, we talked about the Hatch Act.
The 1939 law prohibits overt politicizing – “pernicious political activities” — by agencies and employees whose job is to serve people of all persuasions.
As the son of a federal employee and brother of two more, I know how agencies until now have held themselves and their workers to stiff standards. Not so much as a campaign button.
Everyone who works for us in the federal government knows what the Hatch Act means – that is, except for one. Hint: He wears bronze face paint to work.
He’s the one whom a giant Lenin-style banner glorifies on the façade of the Labor Department building right now, itself a Hatch Act violation.
He’s the one who used the White House to stage his acceptance of the GOP nomination in 2020. Yes, a political rally on property owned by you and me — undoubtedly the most brazen Hatch Act violation in history.
He’s the one penalizing “Democrat states” and “Democrat agencies” with precision slights. His all-vengeance-every-day presidency is one history will scorn.
He’s the one making it clear that sending the National Guard to a location is not because the community needs it because he thinks he can shove one more thing in blue states’ faces. More than one federal judge has said he can’t.
He’s the one sitting on federal aid to those states in which the majority spurned his candidacy and his “they’re eating the pets” lies.
His campaign-trail threat to punish political enemies has borne soggy fruit in indictments of two of them. But there’s a principle honored by judges called “vindictive prosecution.” On that count, it is he and his unqualified legal beagles who will be tried.
Speaking of that: If you want to see hypocrisy in action, know that in August, the Office of Special Counsel said it was investigating former special counsel Jack Smith – he who had all that was needed to convict this president of conspiracy to commit election fraud. (“Fellas, all I need is 11,000 votes.”)
Well, this administration says it has the goods to convict Smith on multiple violations of:
Drum roll, please.
The Hatch Act!!
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
