Whatever the perceived shortcomings of Ted Cruz and his hardy band of stalwarts, they’ve performed a remarkable public service by highlighting the fate that awaits all who rub wrongly the translucently thin skin of King Barack the Petulant. The Spartans may have had their shields, Native Americans their tomahawks and arrows, the Samurai may have wielded his sword with all the deadly grace of a tiger in mid-attack, but pound for pound, nothing comes close to the audacious stupidity of “Barrycades” and people in pointy little Smokey the Bear hats, poised to protect America’s monuments from law-abiding citizens.

Welcome to liberal utopia, where barriers are not erected against terrorists or illegal aliens on our nation’s borders, but rather against citizens, and where wheelchair-bound veterans enroute to honor their comrades face tighter security than terrorists enroute to murder a US Ambassador. This is where up is down, wrong is right, illegality is celebrated as progress, and where Constitutionalism is derided as racist. No longer relegated to the fever swamps of academic fancy, utopia has acquired real estate and made known its demands.

“Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual…” the First Lady warned us, and she wasn’t just whistling Alinsky either. Under King Barack’s Reign of Error, your life is no longer your own, for you are now commanded to enter into private contracts by virtue of your simple existence on the planet. Why? Because our Sovereign and his fellow travelers are compassionate, of course. Their hearts bleed for you,…almost as much as your pocketbook will bleed for them.

If you suffered the fate of MSNBC’s anchorwoman, you were lucky. Mara Schiavocampo found the Obamacare website impenetrable, throwing in the towel on live television after 35 minutes and saying, “If I were signing up for myself, this is where my patience would be exhausted.” Unhappily, it isn’t just the citizen’s patience that is being exhausted, as Eric Levy of Seattle, Washington discovered.

Eric, who felt his previous insurance was too costly, managed to access Washington Health Benefit Exchange, where he was confronted with the fiction of the President’s sales pitch that insurance would become more affordable. “It’s another $500 a month that you have to think about how you’re going to pay for,” said Eric, adding, “The real thing that jumped out at me is all of a sudden I’m required to have maternity coverage.”

Even in our enlightened age of trans-gendered confusion, one has to grant that the odds of Eric getting knocked up are pretty slim, but Obamacare is a collective baby with an insatiable appetite for our money on one end and little sense of responsibility at the other.

From the Obamacare Facebook page, we read still more reviews on the efforts of our benevolent masters:

The information is not very complete as I don’t see anything about deductible or other detailed info, but it does give an actual price as to the “Premium.” It is VERY SCARY!! For example, my insurance plan right now for my spouse and I costs $545 a month with 100% coverage after my $2,500 deductible. We are both 32 years old. When I looked at this site for 80% coverage it says it will be $954.87 a month!!!! So compare my old plan: 100% coverage for $545 a month To New Plan: 80% coverage for $945 a month. This is only an estimate but it is VERY Scary for me see this kind of increase in rates and reduction in benefits!

Or:

I am so disappointed. These prices are outrageous and there are huge deductibles. No one can afford this!

What happened to the Yes We Can chorus? Then there’s the single mother of two who works full time and says she earns 75 percent less than the poverty level:

Are you [expletive] kidding me???? Where the HELL am I supposed to get $3,000 more a year to pay for this “bronze” health insurance plan!?!??? And I DO NOT EVEN WANT INSURANCE to begin with!! This is frightening.

Not to worry, Ma’am, because in utopia, it’s the intention that counts. You’ve only to see the obvious empathy in Barack Obama’s eyes, which is especially visible in the morning when he’s freshly rested from a vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. He must care after all, otherwise he wouldn’t punish so severely those who resist his tender advances on their “lives as usual,” to use Mrs. Obama’s ominous phraseology.

Please note that when the people’s representatives actually represent their constituents, the majority of whom want nothing to do with the wretched and wretchedly mis-named Affordable Care Act, it is the people who must be punished. Can you believe that men who conquered Nazi Germany’s barricades on the beach at Normandy 69 years ago actually faced barricades from their own damned government? Can you believe that Vietnam vets, many of whom were rebuked for their service, were removed from their memorial by the police? Do the men and women who are ordered to move against law abiding veterans have no soul?

The federal government has shut down some 17 times previously, and at no time were these memorials closed. Is our Sovereign so besotted with power, has his impudent leftism so robbed him of reason that he fails to understand what is so obvious: That in barricading Americans from memorials and icons that stand as testimony to an exceptional culture founded precisely on liberty from oppressive government, he perfectly validates the arguments of the right?

As one member on Ricochet commented, this is no longer about Ted Cruz. It’s no longer about the animadversions of establishment Republicans who have only to see their political shadow before becoming alarmed and settling in for six more months of concessions to the statist. This is about an arrangement the President and his party mean to consummate with the American people; an illusory promise to take care of us in exchange for our abject obedience and subservience. But as the examples cited above show, it is only the subservience that is achieved.

From barricading memorials to the closing of a private inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway, from threatening Catholic military chaplains with arrest should they celebrate mass on Sunday to taking care of back pay for federal workers at the expense of everyone else, the bleeding heart has become, as it inevitably will, an iron fist. Here and there resistance is bubbling to the surface, with Governor Walker in Wisconsin defying federal orders to close seven state-owned forests and recreation areas, and private citizens rallying to escort veterans to and from their memorials.

What began as an effort to reverse a draconian law that even now exacts a high toll in terms of jobs lost and skyrocketing premiums, has become a contest of wills in which a President instructs his apparatchiks to inflict as much pain on the citizenry as possible. Chiefly instructive in all this is the salient reality that any person capable of wielding the instrumentalities of the state in a despotic manner in the present, will prove equally capable in the future when he controls your health care.