Park Service: "No overnight camping in urban park. Oh wait, we'll just call it something else!"

Now that the so-called government "shutdown" is over we can forget about Barry's decision to lock Americans out of national parks and monuments.  With any luck, six months from now no one will remember a thing about it.

But in the wake of the lockout I'd like to revisit a post I made way, way back in 2010, when a bunch of folks from Occupy Wall Street were camping in a D.C. park called Macpherson Square.

Overnight camping isn't permitted in the park--a regulation prominently announced by signs--yet the OWS protesters managed to camp non-stop for the better part of a year without a peep out of the normally-fanatical Park Service.

You may well wonder how that happened.  Did the park service just not notice that people were camped there?  Uh, no.  Well if they knew, why didn't they enforce the regs--which were intended to keep urban parks from becoming--literally--crap-infested disasters?

You'll love the answer:  The Park Service simply re-named what was going on, in a way that would keep it from being a violation: 

They simply called the year-long non-stop camping a "24-hour vigil."

Isn't that too, too precious?  See, Barack wanted the support of the OWS crowd, so he didn't want the park service to enforce their no-camping regs.  In earlier times this would be called "selective enforcement of the law," which is unconstitutional.  But for a Lightworker like Barack it's no problem at all!  Just re-define what they're doing, thus turning illegal camping into something wonderful and protected.

"A 24-hour vigil" doesn't sound anything like overnight camping, right?  There ya go, citizen--problem solved!

If words mean anything the president wants 'em to mean, there's no more meaning to language.