[W]hat truly astonishes is the lengths to which the liberal media will go to cover up these evils as if they are mere political banalities, while flat-out lying about the source of the shutdown woes.

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Sometimes it’s really hard to know where to begin. The sheer scope of the meanness, the petty viciousness, of Barack Obama and his minions is astonishing.

So we all have read by now of the park ranger who said his superiors ordered his team to make the government shutdown as painful as possible for the public. We know about the park service going out of its way to spend more money closing down the open-air World War II Memorial on the National Mall than it would spend to leave it open by doing nothing. We know the park service has closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, closed a privately owned inn, forced octogenarians out of their privately owned home, closed roads that allow the viewing of Mount Rushmore, blocked access to Old Faithful and the Gettysburg battlefield, and even tried to shut down part of the open ocean.

If you’ve paid attention, you’ve seen that military chaplains have been forbidden from holding services (as even the Huffington Post attests), and that the White House is deliberately trying to collect shutdown sob stories (after creating the conditions for them in the first place!) as a form of political hardball that amounts to using the public as pawns for the benefit of His Eminence Barack. Not even the Amber Alert web site has been spared (although, in an example of how arbitrarily discretionary the Obamites’ shutdown decisions are, the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” campaign continued to operate).

But what truly astonishes is the lengths to which the liberal media will go to cover up these evils as if they are mere political banalities, while flat-out lying about the source of the shutdown woes.

The simple, undeniable fact is that the ordinary course of business is for Congress to pass 12 individual Appropriations bills funding the “discretionary” part government at overall levels previously dictated by a five-year budget agreement. And the simple, undeniable fact is that the House (controlled by Republicans) already has passed five of those twelve bills for the current fiscal year, plus 10 individual “continuing resolutions” to keep the government operating for what amounts to every purpose but those touching on ObamaCare. In sum, the simple, undeniable fact is that virtually every part of government other than some health-related functions would be open today if President Obama or Senate Democrats had not shut them down. And they would be open at levels agreed to, by law, via bipartisan budget votes in agreements Obama himself approved.

Yet almost nowhere in any “mainstream” reporting are those facts ever mentioned. The Obama shutdown is treated, again and again, as a “Republican shutdown” – even, in some instances, after the simple, undeniable facts have been noted on the air by conservatives, only to be completely ignored as if the point were never made at all. It’s as if you said “the rain comes from clouds,” and a liberal media maven answered that “rain comes from conservatives”; and then you showed him the clouds spewing out rain but then he, without pausing, said, “well, because we know rain comes from conservatives, we therefore can blame the conservatives for all these flooded streets.”

Again, one hardly knows where to begin: When the ordinary rules of discussion don’t apply, and the ordinary rules of courtesy don’t apply, and the ordinary rules of decency don’t apply, and when even the ordinary rules of reality are ignored or treated as nonexistent, then how can people even converse, much less approach even the simplest agreement?

Yet even amidst all the problems of government run amuck without much of an honest press corps to stop it, hope arrives. A civilian mows the lawn by the Lincoln Memorial. The mayor and U.S. Delegate of Washington, D.C. rightly blame their own Democratic Party leaders for shutting down municipal government. And Wolf Blitzer, a consistently liberal reporter who nonetheless tries admirably to maintain his journalistic integrity, had the good sense to say that Republican requests for a delay in ObamaCare seem entirely reasonable in light of the outrageously widespread problems last week with its launch. A few other “establishment” journalists, glory be, seem to be coming around to that same conclusion.

So maybe the answer as to where to begin is to decide not to begin ObamaCare just yet. In fact, as noted more than a month ago, the delay also would achieve Republican goals of cutting deficits (by $35 billion) and, if played rightly by Obama, could help him avoid further embarrassment from the system’s launch failures.

Obama and his minions might not be troubled by mistreating ordinary citizens for political effect, but they might want to avoid the political effects of mis-serving the millions of Americans who can’t navigate the failed ObamaCare websites. This might be the way out of the current morass – in order to clear the way for the next morass to come.