Welcome to the Mainstream, Mr. Furious
The Obama administration gun-running plot known as Operation Fast and Furious exploded into the mainstream this week with a dramatic series of motions that caught many Americans (those not familiar with the scandal) by surprise.
The president asserted executive privilege over tens of thousands of Department of Justice documents related to the plot just hours before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for obstructing their investigation.
After a highly partisan and charged debate split down party lines, the committee then voted along party lines to hold the attorney general in contempt, which sets the stage for a contempt motion to be voted upon by the entire Republican-led House of Representatives. This could trigger a cascade of actions that could potentially culminate in prison for Holder:
A House panel voted Wednesday in favor of holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, a move that inflamed partisan rancor on Capitol Hill and sets up the possibility of legal action against the attorney general himself.
Holder has not yet been formally held in contempt of Congress. The full House would still need to approve the resolution in order for that to happen — and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., afterward told Fox News that such a floor vote can still be avoided.
But the 23-17 party-line vote on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee marked a significant turn in lawmakers’ 16-month investigation into the botched anti-gunrunning operation Fast and Furious. With the vote, Republicans on the committee signaled they had exhausted all other means to extract sought-after documents from the Justice Department — though Democrats had insisted there was still an opportunity to sort out the mess without a contempt vote.
The movement may seem stunning to the American people if they have not followed the scandal closely, as the mainstream media has continued to refer to Operation Fast and Furious as a “botched law enforcement operation” for 18 months. Evidence suggests, however, that the gun-running plot worked precisely as designed. Fast and Furious sent more than 2,000 firearms to the Sinaloa drug cartel, all apparently semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull) firearms that would have been subject to regulation under the attorney general’s stated February 2009 goal of reinstating the so-called “assault weapon ban” of the Clinton-era.
Weapons sold to cartel straw purchasers by Arizona gun dealers were logged by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The ATF worked with the FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, and IRS CID in a strike force that was well aware of how the cartel’s gunmen used their weapons. After committing a violent crime, Sinaloa gunmen dumped their weapons at the scene to avoid capture with murder weapons. The guns collected at the scene had their serial numbers recorded by Mexican law enforcement officials, who sent those recorded to the ATF for tracing. Each weapon recovered was “proof” that the Obama administration used to support the infamous “90-percent lie” they spread in hopes of building up public support for gun control.
Speaker of the House John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced in a joint statement that a full House vote on the contempt charge will be scheduled for next week.
The developments must have shocked NBC News viewers, who would have had to find out about the story on another network. NBC finally mentioned Fast and Furious for the first time in passing last week, and refused to mention it yesterday despite it being the most newsworthy political story of the day.
MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other left-leaning news organizations have tried to minimize the scandal as much as possible, claiming it was “botched” instead of an operation designed to require Mexican fatalities. These and similar news media sought to provide Holder with political cover by noting how many times he’s appeared before the Oversight committee, while avoiding mentioning that he never provided the documentation Congress requested. Also neglected: the fact that Holder refused to fire a single soul involved.
Fast and Furious is the most deadly scandal in U.S. presidential history, a plot and on-going coverup that dwarfs Watergate in both scope and depth of criminality.
Fast and Furious is also the most damning media scandal in American history, with the overwhelming majority of research and investigation into the plot coming not from Pulitzer-equipped investigative reporters backed by powerful media stalwarts, but from bloggers like Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea, and new media reporters like Mary Chastain, Katie Pavlich, and Matthew Boyle, the latter group representing companies that just erupted into existence.
It’s a brave new world where powerful political and media interests face a siege from what one well-known online pundit had the foresight to call “an Army of Davids” set out to slay the mainstream media/Democratic Party Goliath.
Fast and Furious has gone mainstream in a big way despite the best efforts of the gatekeepers to protect the attorney general and president, the two individuals many believe to be at the core of both the plot and the coverup.
Game on.
Also read:
The most corrupt presidency ever.
…truly historic…
Brings up a good point. Where are Woodward & Lothrop, or whatever their names are? Isn’t this kind of scandal exactly their kind of meat? Or do they only salivate when the dinner bell means Republicans are on the menu?
I believe it was Woodhead and Burnbook you refer to, to be played in the upcoming movie about Fast and Furious “All The President’s Czars” by Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, reprising their roles from “Dumb and Dumber.”
Please no jokes about a wonderful old local DC Department store chain given the homogenization of retail that has occurred since Watergate. I actually lived in a wonderful old coop apartment in Adams Morgan when Carl Berstein and Nora Ephron moved in. Their stay sojorn there is memorialized in a nice movie, Heartburn.
One of my favorite movies. I always wondered who the husband was based on.
Watergate with a body-count. Two American law-enforcement agents and who knows how many dead Mexicans. Sooner or later, the mainstream media will wake up and realize what they are missing.
“Sooner or later, the mainstream media will wake up and realize what they are missing.”
Understood. However, it seems that we have two cover-up participating parties at the same time. The mainstream media and the DOJ are symbiotic participants. The MSM has known the facts relating to F&F since the story broke. They aren’t “missing” anything. As with most cover-ups they thought the story would die someplace along the line and when it didn’t they now find themselves as ensnared in the lie (mostly by omission) as the Obama administration. Too bad there is no way to impeach co-conspirator Brian Williams, for example, and his disgusting colleagues. No group of politicians have caused more harm than the mainstream media. They are a repulsive force joined at the hip.
The dead people. As angry as we are about this grab at the 2nd Amendment, I think the story really needs to be about these poor lost souls and their families. This will make it hard for Obama’s allies to explain why he would withhold evidence, especially “on principle” as Jay Carney says. Invoking principle when people are dead, when simply turning over the docs could lead to an explanation of why they died? SICK.
I agree you have a good tactic, and Fox has already used it, having one of the families on, demanding when Holder will finally come clean and give them answers and closure. The MSM can paint a repub committee charman, Issa, as a partisan, but it is much more difficult to paint a dead heroes family looking for answers as partisan.
I also agree with others here that F&F is basically another Watergate, but with dead bodies. And it is also a big difference that so far the congressional dems and the MSM have joined in the coverup as well, unlike Watergate where the media was all over it, and congressional/senate repubs showed some real integrity, by honestly pursuing the truth (As an example, one of the most famous questions in Watergate, “what did the president know and when did he know it”, was said by a repub. By contrast, I have never heard of any congressional dem in this scandal that is even remotely interested in finding the truth. At the moment they are all spinning for Obama, it is a mark of how badly the dem house has been corrupted under Pelosi.). This could be very good for us though, since the old rule still stands, the longer you run a coverup, the worse it gets, and this could not only ruin the rep of Holder and Obama, but congressional dems, the dem senate, and the MSM as well. As an aside, the conduct of dems in the leaking scandal has shown much more integrity, as several have both objected to the leaks, and expressed a desire to identify the leakers.
The flailing of the usual suspects is telling. Nancy Pelosi says that it doesn’t rise to the level of contempt, and she could have has Rove arrested any time she pleased, Sharpton called it a frisking, and Carney said Obama is claiming executive privilege as a matter of principle(???).
They know the anaerobic sludge is about the hit the open centrifugal air compressor.
At this point, the administration may welcome the scotus striking down the mandate, just for the distraction….
It seems to me that US federal agencies supervising the transfer of firearms over a international border (Mexico) would need, at the very least, to have informed the US State Department of there intentions. The State Department would have had to say that they would look the other way, or something, for these firearm transfers to occur. Obviously, this is a felonious breach of US Federal Law and International Law. Contempt charges are miniscule when compared to the penalty for sponsoring the breaking of these laws. I think the White House, DOJ and State Department at the highest levels oversaw the entire program. It was not botched, it was exactly what they wanted to happen.
Exactly – the only thing ‘botched’ about this little episode is that they got caught in their own web of deceit and are groping around for a way out.
It seems that F&F was, among everything else, an act of war against the nation of Mexico. Did that not enter into the equation when all the smart people were planning this thing?
Exactly!
This murderous scheme was never meant to be exposed as it did; it blew up after Brian Terry and Jamie Zapata were killed.
There is also the 3rd involved inBrian Terry’s murder, butwas removed from the crime scene by the FBI. Issa has the info as he has so much more, but is unknown to holder and obama.
This is why the investigation of this scandal needs to go wide as well as high. At some point, Hillary Clinton must be called to explain why she didn’t raise holy hell when she found out that weapons were being transferred across a U.S. border without permits. If there were permits, she needs to explain why they were issued.
You are assuming that anything that was done was done in a legal manner through proper channels. This was a clandestine operation designed to do two things: Help destabilize support for the more conservative Mexican government – and undermine the second amendment here at home. Anyone that didn’t need to know was kept out of the loop. It looks like Zero has his teat in the wringer. We can only hope!!!
We can also hope Hillary gets her teat in that wringer and caught up in this mess too – I’d consider that a well earned two-fer.
Mully,
You are correct. This is nothing less than a diplomatic incident in which mexico, in this case, is the aggrieved party. It is interesting that Mexico has largely muted its objections. Hillary Clinton should also be questioned as to what she knew. As usual, the MSM has “overlooked” this aspect to the case.
Nice work Bob,
Keep their feet to the fire.
Talk about the body count evey time this story comes up.
The Standard Intro should always be:
“Operation Fast and Furious, the failed government sting operation that killed (X-number) of citizens in the US and Mexico”
Every. Single. Time.
Make THAT the narrative.
Make THAT the line they ahve to defend.
“…Claiming Exectutive privilage to conceal the administrations involvement in the murder of (x-number) Mexican and American citizens by drug cartel gunmen, who recieved their weapons directly from the Justice Department Operation…”
Say it again, until it sticks.
Holder. Obama. Scandal. Killed people.
Until they both rot in jail for what they did
Excellent! You are a tactician Root83. If the politicos on the right do this every time it would require the lib to defend, before they try to deflect and likely to cause many, many liberal heads to explode. Lol, the increase in the sale of duct tape in order to hold lib (JVmedia) heads from exploding on TV, may just kick start the economy that Obama admitted, he’s just not smart enough to fix.
God Bless America!
Holder, Obama, Clinton lied, People died.
Turnabout is fair play.
I’d put it this way:
“Operation Fast and Furious, the [intentionally and criminally manufactured] government [gun crisis] that deliberately killed (X-number) of citizens in the US and Mexico in order to justify depriving US citizens of their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”
There is nothing failed or botched whatsoever in this operation. It operated exactly as envisioned, planned and implemented…and now the administration in neck-deep in the tar pit.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of lawless statists!
The “botched” part is where they didn’t think this would blow up in their faces. What in the world were they thinking of ? These guys are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
Executive Privilege? The Department of Justice allowed guns to be sold and delivered to Mexican drug cartels.
The barbaric drug cartels work very closely with the A team of Muslim terrorists: Hezbollah.
MURDER is against the Law. Hundreds of Mexican innocents and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry were MURDERED by the guns supplied by the Obama-Clinton-Holder George Soros administration.
Where is justice? Why are the guilty not being prosecuted for the murders of HUNDREDS of INNOCENTS?
Bible, Genesis 4:10 And God said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground”.
“Bible, Genesis 4:10 And God said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground”.”
And we MUST NOT forget that obama believes that we ARE our brother’s keeper. So, let’s keep him and holder accountable!
“an operation designed to require Mexican fatalities”
THIS is the most important point and the one that needs to be driven home. Obama and Holder committed premeditated murder and on a mass scale. This is what they are hiding. As OBL was to America with 9/11, Obama and Holder are to Mexico with their Gun Running Merchant of Death Assault, basically an act of war.
FeralCat, you’re correct: The whole intention of the operation was to get innocent people killed so the Administration could blame America’s liberal gun laws, and try to get more restrictions passed. It was absolutely premeditated mass murder and mayhem, though Obama and Holder didn’t know the identities of any of their victims. Apparently, Obama’s Press Secretary, the appropriately-named Jay Carney, still doesn’t.
And I do believe that if I were a Mexican American, I would take this very personally. And add to all these murders of Mexican civilians by Obama and Holder, their siding with Martin over the Hispanic Zimmerman who was being attack by Martin. I certainly would not want to vote for someone who had no regard for those of my ethnicity.
“Fast and Furious is also the most damning media scandal in American history, with the overwhelming majority of research and investigation into the plot coming not from Pulitzer-equipped investigative reporters backed by powerful media stalwarts, but from bloggers like Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea, and new media reporters like Mary Chastain, Katie Pavlich, and Matthew Boyle, the latter group representing companies that just erupted into existence.”
In fairness, one should mention Sharyl Attkisson, who’s been on top of this from the start at CBS’ web site, even if the nightly news show largely ignored it. For example: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20115038-10391695.html
“When the police are corrupt, there is no government.” Come to think of it, there is no vibrant economy, trusting allies, leadership of purpose, or reason to believe the propaganda machine.
Thanks for monitoring the MSM, because I wouldn’t do it. If the MSM is starting to catch on to the Fast and Furious scandal, wait until they broadcast Taxamegnon.
Obama doesn’t just hate Mexicans and want them dead. Obama and the CIA under Petraeus have joined sides with the MB and AlQ and the “Rebels” in a war of extermination against Christians.
“Christians are being systematically targeted for genocide in Syria according to Vatican and other sources with contacts on the ground among the besieged Christian community. According to reports by the Vatican’s Fides News Agency collected by the Centre for the Study of Interventionism, the US-backed Free Syrian Army rebels and ever more radical spin-off factions are sacking Christian churches, shooting Christians dead in the street, broadcasting ultimatums that all Christians must be cleansed from the rebel-held villages, and even shooting priests.”
http://www.aina.org/news/20120615125537.htm
Thank you for this link. How this benefits the US is a a mystery to me. Our policy seems to be all in for the Sunnis, no matter how radical, and to heck with the rest.
I am skeptical that Fast and Furious will get much attention, even now, in the Main Stream Press… Just tune in to a network newscast and see how or if they cover the story.
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How it will be reported by the MSM was clear on WBAP 820 AM (a conservative AM blowtorch) in Dallas/Fort Worth this morning. Brian Estridge, the morning show guy interviewed ABC’s Brad Garrett about it and you could hear the anger in his voice as he basically called it a partisan witch-hunt and implied it was just an insignificant breach of protocol on Holder’s part. His implication was that Holder was justifiably angry at Issa et al for continuing to question his department’s handling of the program and justified Holder’s peckishness as well-deserved against the parisan slings being thrown at him. Very telling. Made me wonder if even Brad Garrett had done his homework and had to brush up on the details from the MS playbook of “this is how we’ll cover this if it ever sees the light of day.”
“Fast and Furious is the most deadly scandal in U.S. presidential history, a plot and on-going coverup that dwarfs Watergate in both scope and depth of criminality.”
I’ve always said that. Nobody died in Watergate. Here we have a dead border patrol agent and roughly 200 dead Mexicans, making Watergate look like a joke. Somebody is going to take the fall for this and I think it’s only going to be a matter of time before Obama throws Holder under the bus. I can’t see Obama wanting this to be an issue going into the November election. Some people have said that Fast and Furious can be used by Obama as a distraction from a bad economy. Well, that type of logic certainly didn’t help Richard Nixon. He had a fairly bad economy too but everybody paid attention to Watergate, espcially when it became clear that he had a part in it. No, this is only going to make Obama look worse as the months drag on. The only question is, if Obama loses in November, will Romney pursue the investigation and hold those responsible accountble for their actions? I certainly hope so.
Actually, F&F isn’t the most deadly scandal — http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/02/the_chemists_war.html probably qualifies for that.
What’s interesting is how comparable the two scandals are — some “do-gooders” decide that people should die in order to sway public opinion toward an unpopular restriction of rights. After all, it’s for the good of the people…..the ones who aren’t dead, of course. And who’d miss a few drunkards or Mexicans?
Makes you wonder why the Founders included the power to ban alcohol or guns among the government’s enumerated powers in the Constitution…..oh, that’s right — THEY DIDN’T!
So, Obama …the guy who had NO idea about running guns to drug cartels…does the cover up two step by asserting executive privilege..about a subject in which he had no communication.
It’s not what you Che that counts, it’s what you don’t Che???
Charles Krauthammer made the point that I was thinking yesterday. This administration will leak military and intelligence secrets to the Daily Duranty and WaPoo…outing Pakistani doctors and Israeli cyber-warriors with stunning ambivalence…but when it comes to protecting information relating to Mexican druglords…well, that’s where they draw the line.
Because, hey…we know who are friends are and who are our enemies.
And, heaven knows…all those fact checkers and editors in the Propaganda and Lies Ministry couldn’t find their burro with both hands.
Jay Carney can’t be bothered remembering Agent Terry’s name and 300 dead Mexicans don’t amount to a hill of jumping beans. That pretty much sums up life under the first Communist President and his imperial guard.
Bwhahahahahhahhha!
http://www.punditpress.com/2012/06/liberals-turning-on-obama-after.html
Obama, by invoking Executive Privilege, has just spread the fallout area for this scandal to cover himself. There will be no under-the-bus-and-done any more, he’s in it up to his neck. I always suspected the paper trail for this stopped at the White House, now I am certain of it.
So much for that skilled political operator that the media sold the dim witted…
Holder lied. People died.
An operation by our government that requires Mexican fatalities? Isn’t that an act of war against Mexico? And isn’t waging a war without Congress’s permission illegal?
I used to think that the Carter presidency was the absolute worst in the history of the Republic. No longer do I believe that. The facts and evidence definitely proves that the Obama presidency has far surpassed the Carter presidency for the title of the worst of the worst. And we are still on the hook for seven more months of worsening, debilitating and intended destruction of the Republic. That remark does assume that the Obama administration doesn’t stage a coup if Governor Romney wins the election and the Electoral College voting. And there is no assurance that the voting of the Electoral College won’t be challenged or otherwise negated.
What really has me worried is what might happen in the time between Obummo’s defeat at the polls and his officially leaving office.
We should, when the dust has settled and if there’s still a Constitutional republic remaining, consider legally restricting/prohibiting a defeated president’s ability to issue pardons.
And BTW, where in the US Constitution do the words “Executive Order” appear?
obama tried
holder lied
people died
Operation Wide Receiver:
1 – was coordinated with Mexican authorities
2 – included surveillance of the guns
3 – was designed to walk guns TO, not across the border, then sting the criminals
4 – was shut down immediately when some of the guns did make it across the border
Fast and Furious which was started in 2009 under Holder’s DOJ, had none of the safeguards in 1-3 and was stopped only when an ATF whistleblower couldn’t take it anymore.
Another few months and the corrupt ones would have been home free on this one. CBS, bloggers, talk radio, and conservative media: This is your day!
The RNC needs to get the names of as many of the Mexican citizens killed by F&F weapons as possible. Place TV ads with a slow scroll of names starting with Brian Terry and Jamie Zapata and all those Mexicans. Have a serious voice explain how all their deaths were the result of weapons intentionally sent over the border by our own Justice Department under the command of Eric Holder and President Barack Obama. Wouldn’t hurt to cut one in Spanish as well for the Latino communities.
Holder and Obama either knew and approved, or they were clueless as to what their own people were doing. In either case they must be removed from any position of power where they can possibly cause even more harm. November is none too soon.
What a great idea! Maybe some GOP PAC will take this idea up and create an ad. That would be a powerful message.
“Welcome to the Mainstream, Mr. Furious.”
As if by Divine Intervention, today I eventually found myself pushing a “band change” car radio button and suddenly listening to NPR at exactly the time they were doing an F&F piece, which was an amazingly factual presentation from two reporters in Tuscon. But what really startled me was the fact that all of the callers were either well informed or [mostly] rather incredulous at the stupidity of the Program. The first caller was finally simply “flummoxed” by the whole thing.
Later on Fox News I saw Steve Hayes refer to the same NPR program, so it must have really happened!
Maybe we could also call it a botched *media* operation. since the lamestreamers have failed.
As usual, you people have it all wrong, what with your ridiculous talk about dead Mexicans piling up in the streets and blood-splattered border patrolmen spawled on the desert floor.
Anyone with half a brain knows this silly investigation thing is just cover for a political witch-hunt. It’s really about stopping our brave Attorney General from completing his epic struggle against rampant gun proliferation by you Republican Neanderthals as well as your evil drive to supress the minority vote. Just ask Nancy Pelosi. She’ll tell you. It’s nothing less than a Tea Party conspiracy. And Nancy never lies.
She warns that only Eric Holder stands between the forces of racism and the dark-skinned minority voters they so detest. It’s all about keeping the nation’s poor from exercising their right to vote. Republicans actually want these poor, benighted souls to prove their identity before they are allowed to vote! Can you believe that? Right here in America! Just think of the ordeal our little brown and black brothers would be forced to undergo in order to prove their identities. They would actually have to present a picture ID for their vote to count!
Today a photo ID. Tomorrow a gauntlet of uniformed thugs loitering in front of your neighborhood polling place as they slap their threatening truncheons against their jack-boots!
Wake up America! We need Eric Holder now more than ever! Only he can keep this nightmare from becoming reality!
This is what is known as heavy-handed satire.
The violence spawned under this plan, also cost Mexico, billions of tourist dollars.
Not only has this caused hundreds of Mexicans to die, it cost the Mexican economy billions of tourist dollars.
KT writing underneath #6 mentions the likelihood of F&F consequences in the upcoming Mexican general election. KT has to be right –the previous (they’re every six years) had the following results:
(PAN) Calderon: 35.89%
(PRD) Obrador: 35.31%
(PRI) Madrazo: 22.26%
Obrador is the Obama –if you’ll recall, he and (PRD) did not initially accept the results, and proceeded to do all and everything within their power to start a street revolution in the cities –recall their tent cities in downtown squares, across vehicle traffic arteries, esp Mexico City itself, which was paralyzed for weeks downtown by an almost exact precursor of OWS –had OWS been about ten times as strong.
Recall also that the drug gang shooting war started in the wake of Obrador’s attack on the legitimacy of the state –which was amplified both ways by the takeover of the USA congress by the USA version of PRD, an event which launched the endgame of the MSM “BDS” attack on the legitimacy of the GWB government, and the institutional structures holding it in place. This is when the network talk shows began to feature guests ranting that GWB was ‘the worst president in history’.
So yes, for sure, with the reds in power in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and so close to victory in the last Mexican election, the Obama admin will have wished to destabilize Calderon –at least enough so that the gringo wise guys could come around and tell Calderon that he might could get Obama to help him curb the gun violence, wink wink, if maybe Calderon could owe him a favor.
Instead of Pancho Villa riding north, we had Pauncho Vanilla riding south –to grab onto the Bolivarian Revolution (see Chavez, Hugo, stirring phrase) and drag it northward, maybe all the way across the Rio Grande, should those 20-man Zeta and Sinaloa assault-rifle armed combat teams manage to depopulate via chaos (like Chiquita Banana under Eric Holder’s tutelage did in chunks of Magdalena District in Colombia during Holder’s vacay between Bubbah and Obama), the Gadsden Purchase and the Nueces Strip. You know, after the Dollar might collapse or something and all the LEOs would have hadda quit, maybe twards the end of Obama’s second or third term.
If you’re a lefty, y’know, you gotta think way out in front, and at the same time never breathe a word of it to your neighbors and coworkers (since they’ll hate your guts for presuming to transform everything their generations of ancestors and themselves too have worked for –”who the hell do you think you ARE?”). This dual presentation of self has to dial down a brain’s direct creation of thought, which can’t help but neutralize any sense of humor. No wonder they need power.
The day after The Won asserted executive privilege over Operation Fast and Furious, the headline at NBC news was how to locate the International Space Station in the night sky.
The assertion of executive privilege was in a story about Eric Holder’s contempt citation, and that story was a sort of footnote.
Believe me, we’ve got a long way to go before the American public gets enough information to make it sit up and start paying attention.
No wonder why Obummer was so hot & heavy to promote his version of the DREAM act.
It’s his version of “whaddaya mean I hate Messicans? Lookit this, some of our best people here are Messicans!” Naturally, the lapdog media performed as expected.
Just ignore the pile of dead Mexicans over the border, tyvm.
I part company with Mr. Owens, I do not believe that Fast and Furious will receive legitimate media coverage, certainly not before the elections. If it had not been for Mr. Owens, and others, this epic story would never have come to public knowledge, but it still is not, and may never be. The press is indeed using the terms “botched”, and “political”.
What is never mentioned is crime, serious crime, commited by US employees. The prima facia evidence is overwhelming, but the smoking gun(s) lie in the only US agency which can bring prosecution. There have been several crimes, which requires both criminal intent and action. As with any crime, the presumption of innocence must be maintained until a judicial verdict, but at this stage, the probable suspects tightly hold the evidence. It is illegal for government employees to facilitate the delivery of weapons to killers, and to do this across a border violates more laws. To feed falsehoods to Congress for months, denying it happened, may be simply incompetence, but if the letter was written by the executives in charge of Fast and Furious, it goes further; it is a crime to lie to Congress. When mid level DoJ executives plead the fifth before Congress, most crime reporters would awaken from slumber. Nope. They slept.
The DoJ was treating it as a personnel performance matter, which deserves confidentiality, or an on going criminal investigation which also deserves confidentiality. Until yesterday. Now the claim of Executive Privilege seals the documentary evidence. The claim is that internal executive deliberations must remain confidential, but the Supreme Court has already told President Nixon that in matters related to crime, here murder of a peace officer, that veil must fall.
None of the above is reported by the media. America has fallen into a constitutional crisis, which is being ignored, replaced by nonsense, above the fold on page one, or the lead in the nightly news. America’s living rooms have not, and will not get vital truth. There are two ways to lie, by commission, or omission.
The media is lying, about crime within our government. Mr. Owens is incorrect.
I have yet to see the list of the dead resulting from the Tea-Pot Dome, and Watergate, scandals; where real people who were in the respective administrations went to prison.
BP Agent Terry, and ICE Agent Zapata, both died at the hands of gunmen using F&F associated weapons. Who are the DoJ/ATF agents that allowed these weapons to be provided to the cartels and to be subsequently used to murder their fellow Federal agents?
Who thought up this FUBAR’ed, SNAFU’ed, operation; and who signed off on it?
All of those individuals are complicit in the deaths of Terry and Zapata, and for the deaths of hundreds/thousands of Mexican Nationals – which I’m sure the Mexican Judicial System would like to deal with also.
Why did Jay Carney say ‘That’s why WE have provided all the documents….”?
He also misspoke when he said that Holder’s DOJ ended the Bush program Wide Receiver. Wrong. Mukasey ended it under Bush when they learned that despite putting tracking devices on the weapons and continuing surveillance with an aim to make seizures and arrests, some 300 weapons eluded surveillance and disappeared across the border.
It is also instructive to note that there never was an attempt to cover up Wide Receiver, nor were there to my knowledge, any whistle blowers who came forward in WR. Maybe because there was no need to?
No way local ATF agents conceived this insane scheme. It had to come from the highest level of DOJ and ultimately, the WH.
If the last 48 hours is any indication, the claim of executive privilege and the contempt vote is now forcing the MSM to cover this story-even if they try to put their own spin on it.
Gary Fouse
DEA retired
Steven Hayes on Fox’s Grape Vine last night mentioned that that afternoon NPR aired a nice precis of the F&F issue.
Too bad I missed the show. I wonder how it went. Maybe something like this?
“Dear Listeners, This story has been unfolding for at least the last 6 months. But we didn’t think it was worth bothering your little minds about until now. But the time has come. Here’s what you missed so far…”
Mitt Romney needs to take on this problem –working large, from the general philosophical problem of political propaganda, moving on to the specific problems created by the political filters and selection bias in a system of government that uniquely actually runs on the fuel of information, that is, when it’s running according to model.
He could say that an analogy of today’s media would be that while the defense is telling the truth, that the media does transmit info, it is like saying that a diesel truck engine can still get cargo across the country using it as the counterweight in a line of trebuchets.
It could make a major speech. He could introduce the need for the speech with a brief recitation of the data –the time-on-target of selected issues per outlet. He could be very frank, and say that he knows he will make enemies who buy ink by the barrel, an act contradicting all political practice, but that the country is in trouble, it is being attacked by a system the main weapon of which is precisely the sort of media subversion we have been seeing here since at least Katrina, when the major outlets learned they could not only get away with ignoring large aspects of the story, but could in fact simply make up a new one, out of sheer imagination.
He could say that if this speech dooms his candidacy, then that right there would prove his point, and thus allow the subsequent American voter to make an informed decision about what to believe, long before he had to make an uninformed decision about who to vote for.
He could say that unless and until he makes this speech, it will be his own fault if his message fails on the grounds that he had not fought to deliver it.
He could end the speech by calling on American communications industry workers young and old, with retirement near or long careers yet in front, to please for goodness sake to take a long look at themselves in the mirror, and realize that the health of the body politic demands that information move with as little weight and drag as possible, rather than as much as can be loaded on, and that if the boss needs to face a quiet revolt, well, now is the time for it, the hour is late enough, the thing has been given as much time to ethically evolve as there was time available for it.
IF the objective had truly been to take some sort of action against the drug cartels, there is a way that could have worked with far fewer Mexican casualties and no loss of American life. Instead of sending guns across the border, send some ammunition doctored to produce weapons malfunctions.