The big loser in the shutdown battle is public trust trust in the civil service -- especially the National Park Service

It looks like the government shutdown is over, but what stays with us, unfortunately, is the lengths to which this administration was willing to go to try and make the shutdown hurt. Or at least hurt somebody besides our oh-so-pampered federal employees who, unlike most people who get laid off temporarily, will still get paid for the time they did not have to report to work. I don't say "the time they didn't work" because I know far too many federal employees, many of whom by their own admission don't work much even when they have to report to work. But I digress.

Barry clearly told agencies to go out of their way to make the shutdown painful for the American people. As near as I can tell, this was out of a fear that most people wouldn't view the shutdown as painful. Why should they? Most federal  government activity is designed to regulate and control daily life, not assist it. Barry might think you didn't build that, but you know you did. Government was the problem while you built it, not the answer. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame argues in USA Today Tuesday that shutting down the federal government just isn't that bad on almost any level:

The big lesson of the shutdown is that -- in a time when so-called "draconian cuts" usually refer to mere decreases in the rate of growth of spending on programs -- America was able to do without all the "non-essential" government workers just fine. (The same AP poll cited above says that 80% have felt no impact from the shutdown; a majority also oppose increasing the debt limit.) Turns out that most of those nonessential workers really are non-essential. And it's a safe bet that some of those who stayed on the job -- like the National Park Service people who chased veterans away from an open-air memorial -- could be done without, too, in a pinch. Under the shutdown, new regulations also slowed to a trickle, suggesting that we can do just fine without those, too.

Well, Barry, who loves big government, can't have that, so he enlisted the supposedly non-partisan federal civil service to be his good squad in making the shutdown painful.  He made it clear that he wanted the American people to feel pain from the shutdown in order to build pressure on the Republicans to relent fund everything Barry wanted -- as if the function of Congress is to simply give the president what he wants:

On October 8, Obama was asked by Mark Knoller of CBS if he was “tempted” to sign the numerous funding bills passed by the GOP-controlled House that would greatly alleviate the pain of the shutdown. Republicans have voted to reopen parks, fund cancer trials for children at the NIH, and to keep FEMA and the FDA going through this partial shutdown. But Obama has threatened to veto any such efforts, effectively keeping the Senate from considering the legislation.
“Of course I’m tempted” to sign those bills, Obama explained. “But here’s the problem. What you’ve seen are bills that come up wherever Republicans are feeling political pressure, they put a bill forward. And if there’s no political heat, if there’s no television story on it, then nothing happens.”

To create that political heat, Barry decided he had to make the shutdown visible and painful for the average person. Unfortunately for America, Barry's primary goon squad in trying to make the shutdown painful was the National Park Service. The Park Service went to extraordinary lengths to keep Americans out of parks that had no barriers to access before the shutdown -- or in any previous shutdown. Park rangers set up barriers around memorials that normally are open 24/7 without Park Service employees, expending far more effort to keep people out than they ever expended to assist people at those same memorials during non-shutdown times. Putting up barricades to keep octagenarian World War II vets out of the WWII memorial a) didn't work, as the guys who stormed Normandy in their teens and 20s were likewise unafraid to cross NPS barriers while in their 80s and 90s and 2) looked like crap on TV. The administration backed off. At least on that one.

Of course, the Park Service -- and make no mistake, this was not a strategy they developed on their own with no guidance from the White House -- made far more efforts nationwide to make the shutdown painful, and the rank and file were told to do so:

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and they’re only here to help.
“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

What are the odds that people will look favorably on park rangers after this, knowing they were the Brute Squad for Obama?