Michele Bachmann postures at the World War II Memorial after her party shut it down.

House Republicans continue to be outraged about the fact that, when they shut the government down, even the parts that they liked got shut down. Specifically, various memorials in the nation's capital, led of course by the World War II Memorial. Naturally, being outraged Republicans, they're prepared to spend more time and energy investigating why the memorials are closed than attempting to reopen the whole government and the monuments right along with it.



Senior House Natural Resources Committee Republicans sent their own letter Wednesday to National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis to ask him to “take steps as necessary to keep and not destroy documents related to the decision this week to restrict public access” to open-air memorials and monuments in the Washington area, including those honoring veterans of multiple wars, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth has thoughts on this matter:



“These same veterans that they’re pretending to help today at the WWII memorial, you know, they’re going to have access to their disability pensions is going to be limited after Oct. 15. There’s going to be cuts in prosthetic research for veterans. The National Cemetery Administration is not going to be able to lay our heroes to rest at the same rate that they were,” Duckworth said. “And Michele Bachmann who was there today at the World War II Memorial actually said, ‘The shutdown is exactly what we wanted. We got what we wanted.’ A good day for the tea party is when government is having a bad day.”

It's really hard to decide which is more appalling and mouth-gapingly brazen: That Republicans are more concerned that a few memorials are closed off so that you can only look at them from outside and not go into them than that hundreds of thousands of people are going without paychecks and programs for the most vulnerable are being cut, or that Republicans forced the shutdown and are now trying to gain political mileage off of their outrage that things got shut down.