Do You Hear the Vet'rans Sing/Singing the Song of Angry Men?

Les Miserables is pretty much a description of how it feels to be an American in the age of Obama. Just ask those WW2 vets, many of them in wheelchairs, who, in defiance of a government shutdown of their open air monument, stormed what Mark Steyn amusingly calls the "Barrycades":

The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations — plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors.

If Steyn wasn't around to elicit mordant chuckles, things would be very bleak indeed.