Obama Goes Off The Deep End, Bans Fishing?

Appalling news from Washington is coming so thick and fast these days that it's impossible to keep track of it all.  What's more, some reports are so outlandish that they seem like they must be from the Onion, yet are perfectly true.  For instance, who would have dreamed that Mr. Obama would have tried to appoint as Safe-Schools Czar a man who encouraged one of his underage male student in the pursuit of a homosexual relationship with an older man, which is by definition statutory rape?  It sounds like the stuff of bad late-night comedy, but apparently it is a fact.

Today comes news of perhaps the most far-out infringement we've yet seen presented as truth.  ESPN, not normally noted for either political parody or right-wing bias, reports:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters... [NOAA official] Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June.  [emphasis added]

Normally, this tale sounds so fishy that we'd file it in the "Yeah, right" folder.  But then, for the Federal government to require all Americans to purchase a private product (health insurance) from private companies under penalty of fines or imprisonment seems far-fetched and blatantly unconstitutional, yet not only is this being seriously proposed in Obamacare, the entire Democratic party and media establishment do not even consider its Constitutionality to be a valid question.

Can the Federal government actually ban fishing?  The history of waterways regulation does not provide much reassurance.  For decades, we've heard of individuals whose privately-owned land was rendered useless because of the presence of "wetlands" where laws forbade construction of any kind.

Your humble correspondent's own grandparents fell foul of these ever-growing regulations when they purchased an attractive but small building plot next to a stream many years ago.  Some decades later when they wanted to actually build something on it, they discovered they could no longer do so - it had become illegal to build anything too near a waterway.  Once the new setback distance was applied, the property had been filleted so finely as to be totally useless - though still heavily taxed.

The heavy regulations of "navigable waters of the United States," which makes some sense if applied to rivers that boats and commerce can use, have been extended even to tiny streams navigable only by fish.  If Mr. Obama's environmentalist activists have their way, you wouldn't be able even to catch those fish!

Of course, this won't inconvenience our elites who do so like their sushi; they certainly wouldn't stoop to catching it themselves.  Even notorious bully Rahm Emmanuel, who once sent a rotting dead fish to a pollster who dared produce results Rahmbo didn't like, probably just bought his fish at a store.  Now he can send his opponents to sleep with the fishes without worrying about an angler hooking one by accident!

For all you little people, you can now add fishing rods to the guns and Bibles you're bitterly clinging to.  At least this way we won't have to appoint lawyers for the fish like the Swiss do.