Why Eric Holder should be in jail and the WaPo sucks balls

I’ve got a feeling there is going to be some profanity in this post…

Eric Holder should be in jail, and with this week’s usage of Executive Privilege to head off a congressional investigation, it looks like Barack Obama might get to be his cellmate.If you haven’t been paying attention to the Fast & Furious fiasco, (and I’m not talking about the Vin Diesel movies) you really should start. It is far bigger than Watergate. Watergate didn’t have a body count.

It is understandable if you haven’t heard about this scandal until now, because the mainstream media has mostly ignored it or tried to downplay it so it doesn’t cause any harm to Obama. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/06/20/Big-Three-Networks-Cover-Fast-and-Furious-Updates-Only-CBS-Satisfies?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+June+21%2C+2012&utm_campaign=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+June+21%2C+2012&utm_term=More

However, with the events of the last few days, even those partisan hacks won’t be able to ignore F&F anymore. Now they’ll just try to spin the narrative to make it some sort of republican witch hunt.

I wish that was it. Because the ugly reality is that the federal government committed several thousand felonies, got a bunch of people killed, all in order to push a political agenda, and now it appears that the president is complicit in the cover up.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Fast & Furious was a DOJ/ATF project that knowingly allowed straw purchasers for the Mexican drug cartels to purchase firearms from American gun dealers in order to ship them into Mexico. When the American dealers contacted the ATF about suspicious purchases (like they are required to by law)* the ATF told them to let the transfers go through. Several thousand American guns went over the border to the cartels, where they were then used in thousands of crimes.

The best estimate is that around 300 Mexicans have been murdered using these weapons. The lid was finally blown off of F&F about a year and half ago when a US Border Patrol Agent named Brian Terry was murdered with one of these F&F guns.

The supposed reasoning behind F&F was to track the flow of guns through the criminal underworld… Uh huh… That’s how the DOJ is spinning it now that they got caught, but let’s look at this logically. The DOJ’s justification doesn’t pass the smell test. Gun rights activists, bloggers, and a handful of actual journalists have been working on dredging up F&F details for 18 months now, and it is pretty damning.

The guns crossed the border and then simply weren’t tracked. There was no mechanism in place to track the guns. The Mexican authorities weren’t even notified about the operation. It would seem that for a tracking operation, they might have wanted some… I don’t know, tracking involved.

This week Holder told congress that his DOJ had inherited the project from Bush’s DOJ… (wow, it is all Bush’s fault. We’ve never heard that from the Obama administration before!) Holder was only partially lying this time. The Bush DOJ tried a similar project called Gunrunner, which was also about trying to track the flow of guns, and it was a complete and total embarrassing stupid failure and was cancelled.  But, and this is a huge but, Gunrunner actually attempted to track the guns with tracking devices and aerial surveillance.

EDIT:  as was pointed out in the comments, I w as incorrect, the Bush era operation was actually called Operation Wide Receiver. Gunrunner was part of the F&F.

So with tracking devices and airplanes, GR still failed to actually catch any of the cartel bad guys… So F&F comes along under Holder and supposedly has the same mission as Gunrunner, only it doesn’t have any sort of actual law enforcement investigation attached. It is just guns going across the border in some nebulous hand wave reason of “tracking”. That doesn’t hold up.

So what was the real reason for this big, dangerous, stupid, deadly, illegal operation?  It certainly wasn’t to track the flow of the illicit Mexican arms trade, because once the guns crossed the border, the next time they showed up was when the serial numbers were read at crime scenes around the bodies of dead Mexicans. NBC is now calling F&F a “flawed sting” but it was actually impossible for F&F to serve any legitimate law enforcement sting purpose from the start.

Do you all remember a couple of years ago the deluge of news reports about how all of Mexico’s massive crime problems are the fault of America’s lax gun laws? Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, even spoke about this grave issue. Something needed to be done about this horrible problem! Won’t somebody think of the children!

Yet, when you looked at the actual stats, only a small percentage of Mexico’s crime guns came from legitimate American sources, and considering that we’re talking about a criminal enterprise with a net worth bigger than most countries, that bribes entire Mexican army units, and owns freaking submarines, that narrative is extra stupid.

So, you’ve got an administration that hates civilian gun ownership, laying the narrative groundwork about how we need stricter gun control because of Reason X, and then in that same time frame that same administration starts an operation that directly contributes a whole lot more Reason X. Well huh… Considering that F&F’s stated mission was impossible from the get go, that’s a little suspicious isn’t it?  Or in the words of Sherlock Holmes, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

But as repulsive as that line of thought is, it is irrelevant. For the purposes of justice, we don’t care why they committed the crime, just whether they are guilty or not.

Once Brian Terry was murdered with an F&F gun, the lights came on and the cockroaches scattered. You can get detailed timelines about the DOJ’s ham-fisted response online. Eric Holder tried to stonewall to make the whole thing go away, but congressman Darrel Issa is part pit bull, and has spent the last year kicking Holder’s ass. An investigation was started, and every step of the way Holder either lied, hid evidence, or refused to present internal documents.

At this point it isn’t even a question of whether the DOJ broke the law, but how much they sucked at breaking it, and how high did it go?  A lot of us have been wondering if the president knew about and allowed F&F to proceed. He is on record having made a few cryptic comments about working on the gun “problem” during the right timeframe.

So this week Barack Obama invoked executive privilege for the first time to try and protect F&F documents.

Wow.

Things are about to get remarkably interesting.

Don’t believe anybody who says that this is some sort of republican witch hunt or an election year stunt. The timing is irrelevant since Holder could have simply handed over the requested documents last year, but he didn’t because he had something to hide. The really sad part is that the vote to censure Holder was split exactly on party lines. Surprise. This shouldn’t be about party. If this had been a republican DOJ then I’d want them hung from the nearest tree.

F&F is huge. It is far worse than Watergate or Plamegate, or any Whatevergate. This isn’t Clinton getting a blowjob and then committing perjury about it. We’re talking about three hundred plus dead people.

The media is trying hard to spin this. For example the WaPo, the same dipshit newspaper that can somehow manage to connect Romney to massacres in the 1870s, wrote this bit of tripe: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-congress-blowing-gunsmoke/2012/06/20/gJQA4eULrV_story.html

Every single bit of that editorial is pure spun bullshit. All of Holder’s stonewalling, lies, and refusal to divulge information is glossed over, while everything else is pedantically dismissed. He points out how Holder handed over some documents, but leaves out the 90,000 other pages he didn’t hand over.

This is how he sums up F&F:

 Terry’s death is indeed a scandal, part of the “Fast and Furious” operation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost track of 2,000 guns it was planning to trace on their way to Mexican drug cartels; two of those firearms were found near Terry’s body.

Lost track? Whoops? I could’ve swore I left a couple thousand guns laying around here somewhere… Hmm… That’s either a super nice way to put it, or Dana Milbank is a fucking idiot.

I especially like the quote in there from Elijah Cummings about how Issa calling Holder a liar was highly inflammatory. Personally, I’d call liar a fairly truthful assessment. If he wasn’t a liar, then why does he keep having to retract statements where he was caught lying? An example of a highly inflammatory statement would be saying that Eric Holder is a disgrace to the office of the attorney general, and a scum-sucking bureaucratic parasite that represents all that is wrong with the federal government, who should be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and then sent to serve his time in a Mexican prison where he can get his shit pushed in by friends of the three hundred and some odd Mexicans whose death he was complicit with.

But maybe I shouldn’t hold back and let you know how I really feel about the whole thing… Eric Holder’s Justice Department is a sick joke and a blight on America. He couldn’t prosecute Black Panthers threatening people with clubs at the polls, because he was too busy shipping thousands of guns to a criminal organization so violent they make the Taliban look like the Girl Scouts. The only discernible reason for F&F to exist was to push a political agenda, but they screwed up and killed a bunch of people, got caught, and now they are whining about it. If I’d knowingly sold a gun to a violent criminal, and then that criminal killed somebody, then I would have been considered an accessory and prosecuted, but if I shipped several thousand I’d just be a DOJ official.

Dana Milbank, fucking idiot, referred to congressman Jason Chaffetz as “volatile” for saying “We have a dead United States Border Patrol agent, and we have a government that’s withholding information so that we cannot get to the bottom of it.”

That was volatile? Do you sleep in a helmet, Mr. Milbank? If the press would quit fellating the president for a few minutes, you might want to maybe think about how it is congress’ freaking job to question little things like the executive branch committing several thousand felonies. Milbank brings up congress’ crappy approval rating, like that somehow invalidates them doing their job… Nice try douchebag. In a country where the biggest news organization talked about F&F for all of 8 SECONDS over the last year, how does public awareness and poll numbers have any bearing on them performing their actual job?

FI, Dana Milbank, then closes with this little gem. The indignation would sound more genuine if Republicans weren’t going after Holder over what has happened since Terry died.

Naw. We already know that the DOJ is incredibly corrupt. The real question, Dana Milbank, you quisling ditz, is how much Barack Obama knew about this?

*- As a former gun dealer, believe me when I say that if we have even the slightest hunch that we are dealing with a customer trying to break the law, we don’t do the sale. A straw purchase is when somebody who can pass a background check comes in and buys a gun on behalf of somebody who can’t pass a background check, and a dealer can lose his license and go to jail for knowingly selling the gun.

Gun dealers are a very law abiding bunch for the most part, yet there is a federal agency tasked with busting gun dealers that needs to continually justify its existence. So since the dealers aren’t trying to commit crimes on purpose, the ATF spends a lot of energy trying to get dealers to break the law, often through snitches and fake straw buyers. So if a dealer thinks something is odd, they aren’t going to sell the gun, because they don’t want to go to jail.

On some of the F&F sales, the dealers called their ATF agent because they were suspicious of the buyer. The ATF had to tell these gun dealers to go ahead and complete the sales. When F&F broke, the ATF tried to hang those dealers out to dry, but luckily they had documented that their ATF agents had okayed the transfer.

EDIT 1:  And this just in. So much for it being a conspiracy theory.  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-57338546-10391695/documents-atf-used-fast-and-furious-to-make-the-case-for-gun-regulations/  ATF was trying to use the F&F sales to justify new regulations. And from CBS of all places!

And a note, I complain about the news media a lot (like for example, the WaPo editorial above, which is just brazenly stupid), however CBS has been doing excellent work. Actual journalistic investigation type stuff! From reporters! I know, right? Way to go CBS.

The Burning Throne, Episode 33: Leaving the Empire
Charity: Nancy Sutter's Vision Relief Fund

63 thoughts on “Why Eric Holder should be in jail and the WaPo sucks balls”

  1. Does this mean we will no longer be seeing news stories that show M4’s, AK47s with full auto, SBR’s, SBS’s, RPG’s, and fucking hand grenades as the narrator talks about guns purchased at American gun stores getting into Mexico?

    This whole thing is bad news for our president, I think, and deservedly so it looks. Even worse though, it makes America look like shit.

    1. The one time they did that, folks in the Blogosphere blew up stills from the video, got the serial numbers on the M-4s displayed, and traced them to sales by Colt to the Mexican Army.

      1. I’d like to see the link to the article.

        Now, maybe those guns where sold to the Méxican Army, but the Army itself rarely uses them, as we locally produce the G3 (Because HK Sucks, but sells licensing), those M4s where likely sold to Mexican police forces, and those where either captured, or sold by defecting or corrupt police officers, it wouldn’t be a surprise.

        But as well as the “90% weapons used in crime comes from America” myth, the “AR-15s found in the crime scene comes from Mexican Army” myth has to stop.

        We have to see the global picture in order to understand the dire threat those fucking cartels pose,
        Cartels bring coke from Colombia, why not AKs too, and why not those juicy AT4s the rotting Chavez sold to the FARCs?
        Drugs pass thru Guatemala, and some M60s and several cases of 40mm stick along the way.
        Ephedrine is shipped in containers full of it from Asiatic hell holes, so that’s where the Type-69 RPGs come from.

        And in the end, it’s not from “where” do they get the guns from, the problem is: “How do they pay for those guns”, and the obvious answer is, with money earned from dopeheads, crackholes and dopesluts who keep wasting it on that shit and generate all the wealth to arm 3 goddamn army divisions every Tuesday.

        And that’s the problem everyone is letting slide, I don’t care how many AKs they have, our Army has more G3s, I don’t care how many RPGs they have, our Army has more APCs, what I want taken away from them is their seemingly bottomless well of money that drugs are, I want that rug violently jerked away from their feet so that they don’t have anywhere to put solid footing in.

        And then, when they have no money to pay their thugs with, the cartels will start to fall apart, it will no longer be worth to risk life and limb if there is no solid incentive from just moving some bricks from point A to point B, sure robbery, kidnappings and extortions will rise, but the population has had it, and the Army and Navy is standing by it, I’ve seen more frustrated crimes this year than any other in my life, blackhawks soaring over my city every now and then, convoys roaming the cities 24/7, it will sound dystopian to some, specially in this circles, but it’s working towards our advantage, and all it takes is for the US to take away their funds.

        Easier said than done.

  2. If Country A provides military weapons to groups in Country B, and the weapons are then used to murder police, army, reporters, and innocent civilians, I think Country B would be fully within international rights to declare war on Country A.

  3. so Gunrunner was the Bush program and it was cancelled? I haven’t heard that bit. I was under the impression the two programs were the same one operating continuously through both administrations.

    I’m not doubting you. It’s just new information to me. It makes the Obama administration look worse.

    1. The Bush program was begun in 2006, IIRC, with full knowledge and involvement of the Mexican government (the Mexican government was completely unaware of Obama’s program) and was ended in 2007 (again, IIRC) after they lost 2 of the guns. It was clear they couldn’t track them and, being responsible humans, they closed the program before they lost anymore weapons.

      Obama’s program — Fast and Furious — started in 2009 with nothing but the sales. No tracking. Agents were told NOT to track the guns. It’s beyond disgusting. When someone tells you this was a Bush program they are either disinformed, ignorant or lying.

      1. One minor addendum: the guns trafficked in OWR were equipped with GPS tracking devices. The operation was terminated when we discovered the devices had been found and were being removed by the Mexican Drug Cartels.

        OWR:
        Guns had tracking devices implanted
        Guns sold to straw buyers for Mexican drug cartels
        Mexican government advised of sales
        Mexican government followed guns on their side of the border

        OF&F
        Guns sold to straw buyers for Mexican drug cartels

        See, they were practically identical operations!!! With all the flaws of the first effort corrected in the second. /snark

  4. My prediction is that this goes absolutely nowhere. To the average American, it will appear to be more political interparty bickering. The government and this nation are so divided that a person could get away with gas chambers and concentration camps, and his own party would defend the practice.

  5. I continue to be puzzled by the “Bush did it too” defense. Setting aside that it’s not quite true, when did Bush become a beloved paragon of statesmanship to the Democrats? You’d think they’d aspire for a better legacy.

    1. No, they’re not. Bush’s program was put in place with cooperation and full knowledge of the Mexican government. Actually tracking of guns took place. They lost a couple of guns and shut the program down very quickly.

      Obama’s program started in 2009, perhaps using the basic framework of Wide Receiver to start from, but they never, ever tracked any weapons. They coerced gun store owners to sell guns to people they didn’t want to sell to. They didn’t inform the Mexican government. Agents were told not to bother tracking the guns.

      To say the programs are the same is simply not accurate.

  6. I, David L. Burkhead, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

    Since being promoted to civilian I am under no regulations “according to” which I am required to obey the orders of the President, nor are there any officers appointed over me. The rest, however, is still in force. The only question is the best, most effective, means of honoring that oath.

  7. They took a stupid idea which failed and was canceled and was revived and made doubly stupid.

    Just like the dept of Energy loans to Solyndra and other green energy companies. The Bush admin. pulled the plug on the loan due to some dicey finances by the company but Obama not only approved the loan but gave them even more money. Every green company that has gotten money from the gov. has since gone belly up.

    There should be a law or process where in the case where the DOJ is accused of wrong doing a special prosecutor is automatically appointed independant of the DOJ in cases where the AG has been held in contempt of Congress. Since you can’t expect the DOJ to investigate itself.

  8. Excellent write up. I suspect that the people to blame will be as hard as cockroaches to ferret out and crush. It’s amazing how the usual suspects are already trying to spin this. What’s mind boggling to me is the people on the left’s absolute ignorance of the crimes that have been committed.

    I’ve snatched a bit with credit given, to deconstruct an apologist’s argument.

  9. To get to the number of weapons that are being reported, the DOJ and media sources are counting any weapon that had a component cross US soil at any time.

    This includes, but is not limited too: weapons sold to the Mexican Military that have been subsequently stolen; WWII, Korea, Vietnam and modern military surplus weapons purchased anywhere in the world; or weapons with components like magazines that can be traced to the US.

  10. Good post Larry! Since this whole thing showed up in the back on my mind this little voice kept saying “this was done on purpose”. The easiest way to get people to approve anti-gun legislation is to get people killed.
    Honestly I think the public was never supposed to know about F&F. I think eventually numbers were going to be released saying Mexicans were killed with American guns so we have to make it harder to buy guns.
    When an American agent died the deification hit the ossolator, and since then they have been trying to hide everything.
    I don’t think they are trying to hide the fact that they ran the operation, I think they are trying to hide the memos that say “lets scare the public into hating guns”.

  11. I also enjoy the fact that of 80,000 documents subpoenaed, the DOJ turned over about 7900. I’m pretty sure if the DOJ subpoenaed documents from someone, and said someone only turned over 10% of them, said someone would be in a BOP issued jumpsuit.

  12. I’ve been following this putrid example of anti-gun ideology since I first heard of Brian Terry’s death. Info has been hard to come by and difficult to verify but based on everything I have found here is I what I understanding is:

    As mentioned above, the Bush era program was called “Operation Wide Receiver”.
    It was a cooperative effort with the Mexican Gov’t., who was fully informed and involved. It was shut down when Mexican agents missed the handoff from US to Mexican observation and lost track of a shipment of guns on the Mexican side of the border.
    No OWR weapons have been recovered at any crime scenes, at least that I can find anywhere.

    In OF&F, there was no Mexican government involvement at all. They were completely unaware of the existence of F&F, at least until Terry’s death and the following – minor – ruckus.
    OF&F had no tracking methodology or intent to track the weapons whatsoever.
    OF&F, the BATFE informed several AZ dealers that they *would* make the sales over the dealer’s objections, on pain of losing their licenses. The BATFE was requested multiple times to provide a letter or other documentary evidence that the dealers were making sales that the dealers were opposed to under direct orders from BATFE. To date BATFE has refused
    BATFE has claimed that this was the result of problems in the Phoenix office and that no other states or dealers were involved. However as of last week there was at least one dealer in TX who had the same experiences with forced sales to straw buyers in the time frame.
    OF&F weapons were found at the murder scenes for Brian Terry and ICE agent Jamie Zapata. Oh and about 300 other murders of Mexican nationals.

    FWIW – By my reading, OF&F as it was allowed to run, also places the US government in violation of our existing ITAR (International Treaty on Arms Reductions) treaty obligations. Joint law enforcement operations are specifically exempt, but government involvement in any operation that deliberately allowed weapons to cross international borders without the knowledge/cooperation of the *other* government is, so far as I can tell, aiding & abetting international arms smuggling, at least by the treaty terms.

    Also one other “little detail”: Many of the documents that were turned over were very heavily redacted – to the point of being unintelligible…

    A thorough reading of gunrightsexaminer.com on this subject will give most of what references are available.

  13. Executive Privilege is reserved, per the SCOTUS rulings related to Watergate, to maters of Military, Diplomatic or National Security where the POTUS is directly involved.

    Here we have Obama claiming EP for something that is none of the above and also, by his own statements, something he knew nothing about. The lies are starting to smack into each other with frightening regularity…

    1. Maybe Obama really is justified in invoking EP. No, really, hear me out: as mentioned, EP is only acceptable when the POTUS is directly involved in Military, Diplomatic, or National Security matters. So, for this to be a legit use of EP, that would mean he thinks he is directly involved.

      If it turns out the plan really was to basically stage the murder of a bunch of Mexicans and hope that spurs the kind of restrictive gun control legislation Obama wanted, and it sounds more and more like that really was their plan, then this would have to proceed at Obama’s direction, at least generally. This is already a Diplomatic disaster; that federal agents have effectively been killed by the program could put it under the National Security heading as well. Using EP to cover it is only legitimate if Obama were personally involved at some level.

      Him invoking Executive Privilege at this stage to cover himself seems like someone showing up at a police station to plead the Fifth before the relevant crime has been investigated. So, we’re left with two options: either he’s abusing power to protect incompetence, or he is a knowing accessory to the mass murder of foreign citizens (and multiple US federal agents) by international crime syndicates.

      The main question in my mind is how soon it will be before the Iran-Contra “parallels” start showing up as defensive talking points. Yes, you and I both know the two situations are completely different, but I suspect the people defending F&F and EP are banking on us having the memory span of a goldfish.

      1. EP doesn’t cover criminal acts. If the president was running a dope smuggling ring out of the WH and using military flights to transport drugs then there is no way he should be allowed to invoke EP to protect himself. (Not saying he is but using an example).

        If (and the evidence is really looking like) this was actually an attempt to enable the administration to enact stronger gun controls by knowingly allowing civilians to be killed with weapons the government ordered to be sold then it is indeed a criminal case.

        Been following this for quite a while and the more that comes to light the worse it is.

        Hell, I still think he needs to be up on murder charges for ordering drone strikes on american citizens. Since they were acting with the terrorists I think taking them out was good but the way that he did it is wrong. There should have been a trial and if possible they should have been captured and then executed. I’m not comfortable with any president having the power to execute citizens via drone strikes.

  14. I’ll bet I heard “witch hunt” from the mouths of liberal apologists being interviewed yesterday about a thousand times.

    Marching orders? What marching orders?

    1. Actually, there are no marching orders. It’s a swarm. Like any social insect, they react indentically to the same stimulus, and thus appear to be coordinated by a group mind. But there is no mind.

      1. I actually do think they got their talking points. The “swarm” aspect comes from the thralls out there in Democrat voter land who pick it up without even bothering to find out what the heck anyone’s talking about.

        Just looking at the #witchhunt thread on Twitter that Larry’s been posting on is more than disheartening. What a bunch of puppets.

      2. Yep. Classic Hivemind behavior.

        To the left, we are all just a bunch of bigoted gun-owning cousin-humping red-neck retards … so all responses to criticism of anyone in the Obama regime get shoved through that particular mold.

      3. NKR: the folks on the inside in the beltway throw out all sorts of garbage every day. Whatever resonates best with the leftist hivemind gets repeated continually, until it becomes embarrassing.

      4. No, NKR, that isn’t how it works.

        Whittaker Chambers gave a great illustration of the hive mind in _Witness_. He was still a Party member and spy when he read an anti-communist book about Soviet concentration camps, and it had moved him profoundly, and shaken his faith. But, he noted, what was important was that he’d read it in the first place.

        Previously, he would never have read the book. If he’d had to read it, for some reason, he’d have gone in ‘knowing’ that everything in it was a lie. And if, somehow, someone had forced him to check every allegation, and they had each and all proven true, it still wouldn’t have mattered. Because he’d have ‘known’ that any and every cruelty was a sad necessity in the working out of the glorious Communist future, that all Communists were good people doing their best, that Utopia was coming.

        That’s how the leftist hive-mind works. No matter what is in those documents, Holder is innocent and Obama is innocent. Fast & Furious was a well-intentioned idea, the Rethuglicans are doing this for political reasons, and it’s all the fault of George W. Bush.

        Sure, they’ll read each others posts, and copy each others lines, but the basic reaction was in place before they ever heard of F&F.

  15. As I’ve always maintain, this is the administration’s undeclared war against Mexico and Arizona. (And gun owner, but that goes without saying).

  16. “He is on record having made a few cryptic comments about working on the gun “problem” during the right timeframe”

    The exact quote, as remembered by Sarah Brady herself:

    “I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Brady recalled the president telling them. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

    Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/guns/2011/05/25/obama-were-working-gun-control-under-radar#ixzz1yTbKhikv

  17. When Ben Franklin talked about our Republic he made sure we understood that ‘WE THE PEOPLE’ had to keep it that way by holding accountable those in office who abused power. Unfortunately he was also relying on an honest media (Newspapers and public debate) to reveal the rottenness and cleanse the wounds with truth. He’d be rolling in his grave over having given too much faith in these people.

  18. And BTW … Holder has put himself in a big fucking trap by invoking Executive Privilege.

    The next step if for Issa to demand a date from Holder … the date Obama even knew about this. Anything before that date would not be covered by executive privilege.

  19. Oh, and J&G Sales is fighting to keep their license … because when the BATFE ordered them to go ahead with an F&F sale, they refused, and demanded a Writ of Immunity before proceeding with the sale.

  20. I’m glad you posted on this, Larry. I think I’m almost as livid as you are. What disgusts me is that there are so many people who are buying this bullcrap about the Bush program and the Obama program being the same thing. Or that Holder should be commended for “ending the awful Bush program”. I love that Tapper explained to Carney (not that any of the other WHPC picked it up) that the Bush program ended before Obama was ever elected.

    The other thing that pisses me off: “botched sting operation”. Grrr! It wasn’t botched and it wasn’t a sting. There was no attempt to “sting” anyone except maybe some of the gun store owners who were coerced into selling guns to people they knew they weren’t supposed to sell to. The only “glitch” in the works came when the Obama administration was caught in this atrocity. They didn’t intend that.

    Also, one last thing, I’m glad you recognized CBS’s work on this. SInce most Democrats refuse to read anything by Breitbart or Legal Insurrection or any of the other bloggers doing good work on this story, it’s nice to have a source from the msm to back it all up. Sharyl Atkinson (I spelled it wrong, I’m sure) has done the legwork on it. Deserving of a Pulitzer, will probably get “let go.”

    Whew! This story and the press and Democrat thrall reaction to it has got my blood pressure up. Add to that the fact that I’m rereading MHI and the whole team just “finished up” at Natchy Bottoms and I need a spa day to get over it all. 🙂

    1. I think you’re right that the Obama administration didn’t want to be associated with this. I really think this was an organized effort on the part of this administration to demonize guns and make anti gun regulations more mainstream then they already are. That is the executive privilege they are trying to pull. To cover their asses and hide their anti-gun stance.
      I just hope when a judge reviews the communication as is required to pull executive privilege the judge will say this isn’t protected as it’s goal was to purposely subverted the constitution.

    2. Hahaha, so let me get this straight: Holder is basically saying, “I never heard of F&F. Our plan was to sell guns to Mexican mobsters to see what crimes they could commit with them. Not telling the Mexican government about the program seemed fair at the time, since we didn’t know about it either. Tracking the guns seemed like work, so we just threatened a bunch of US private dealers into making the sales for us by proxy and hoped for the best. We inherited the program from the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration’s program was (identical/completely different/shut down in 2007). I ended the program as soon as I heard about it. I don’t need to produce subpoena’ed documents, so here’s every tenth page about the program I never heard of.”

      I honestly can’t tell if Holder is incompetent, just screwing with us, secretly a minor supervillain, or all three.

  21. Looking at how Obama has dealt with people in the past who make him look bad (by bringing his own actions and beliefs to the fore usually), am I the only one who thinks that Holder has an imending date with the undercarriage of a bus?

    1. I don’t think he’d have pulled “executive privilege” if he were going to do that; Holder would already be under the bus.

      There’s a good chance this goes all the way to the top and Obama has to protect Holder to protect himself.

      1. My take is that Obama is calculating that this will stall things long enough for the MSM to make it all go away. However, if it doesn’t just blow over, Mr. Holder has an appointment with Underbus.

  22. Minor correction: “Gunrunner” is the firearm trafficking investigation run out of the Phoenix ATF office under Holder’s DoJ, of which “Fast & Furious” is a part.

    The Bush-era investigation was called “Wide Receiver.”

    Other than that, Excellent Rant!

  23. To put a little perspective on this with your doubting liberal friends, if Mexico had illegally shipped thousands of firearms into these United States to give to gangs which killed hundreds of Americans you can bet that we would be at war with them!

    After we’re done with impeaching them, Holder and Obama (who must have approved of F&F) should be turned over to Mexican authorities for their prosecution, too.

      1. Like Mexico would actually DO anything. They’re too grateful to Obama for defending their right for us to be their dumping ground for their “unwanted”s to do that. All they’re doing is sitting back and trying to figure out how to wag the dog next.

    1. I’m pretty sure Mexico ships lots of stuff to this country which kills people. Drugs and Mexican criminals come to mind.

  24. Obama’s amnesty for illigal Mexican’s now make a little more sense. He’s trying to build up a positive lining of litter before the shit hits the fan.

  25. When this gets made into an Obama versus Bush question, or a debate about the things Obama has done being significantly worse than those actions taken by Bush, the entire point is occluded. We have administrations that regularly lie to serve their own ends and a voting population that is so concerned with immediate gratification that they allow Congress to mortgage the future indefinitely. This is ultimately our fault, we elect these people.

  26. In the past, the gun control crowd would wait for a gun related tragedy and then go on the media and scream for more gun control. Mayor Dinkins of New York even did so after a *stabbing*!
    They’ve graduated to creating the tragedy themselves.

    It reminds me of the 1970s poster of the two buzzards where one says to the other “Patience my a**, I’m going to go kill something”.

  27. Correia, damn, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, for doing your part to keep shining the light on the rodents and the vermin. I enjoy so very much your fiction *AND* your non-fiction. Keep up the good work, my friend.

  28. Larry, I’d just like to comment on your post about Eric Holder. I was just a kid when Watergate was going on. I thought I was too young to even pay attention to it, much less form an opinion. But the human mind is a funny thing. Some things did penetrate my youthful fog. My parents were both staunch Republicans. I remember them trying to make excuses for Nixon: “He hasn’t done anything that any other president hasn’t done. He just got caught.” “It’s not like they were real crimes.” “But, he’s been such a good president.”

    I had forgotten those comments, until Clinton got caught with Monica Lewinsky. Suddenly, I was hearing very similar things about Clinton come out of the mouths of Democrats.

    Hmmm . . .

    I don’t know if other presidents did similar things before Nixon. On balance, he probably was a “good” president (from a competence point of view anyway). He certainly did a better job than either Humphrey or McGovern would have. But, none of that matters. My parents were fooling themselves. The truth is that Nixon was a crook, and he had to go. The people who ran the Republican Party at the time figured that out after a while, and had a frank discussion with Tricky Dick. Then he resigned.

    That was probably THE low point in the history of the Republican Party. Not because Nixon had to resign, but because the Republicans had fallen into the trap of believing that power was the most important thing about politics. Power is simply the tool to be used in the service of principle. The Republicans took the opportunity of Nixon’s disgrace to turn away from power for power’s sake. The years since have been a journey back towards principle, if an exasperatingly slow and erratic one.

    I’m not naïve (at least I like to think I’m not). The people in the Republican Party are not saints. They’re politicians. And, politics draws scoundrels like flies to honey (or flies to crap might be more appropriate). But, these days it’s much tougher to be a Republican scoundrel than it is to be a Democrat scoundrel. You can thank the liberal news media for that. This circumstance has simply allowed the principled Republicans greater influence than the scoundrels. The net result is a slow drift towards honesty in the Republican Party. After 40 years, even a slow drift becomes noticeable, and it’s hard to ignore the massive imbalance in scoundrels between the two parties at this point.

    Back to Clinton. During the Lewinsky affair the Democrats had a similar opportunity to follow the Republicans’ example, and begin the long journey back to principle. They chose to cling to power instead. Power is an addictive drug, especially when your philosophy involves running other people’s lives for them. Perhaps things happen for a reason though. If the Democrats had flushed Clinton the way the Republicans flushed Nixon, then Gore would’ve stood a much better chance of winning in 2000 than he did. I, for one, am thankful that there was a Texan in the White House when the morning of September 11th, 2001 rolled around, instead of a Washington DC insider masquerading as a Tennessean.

    Fast forward to 2012, and we have another bad president in office, surrounded by a covey of squawking scoundrels. The Fast and Furious scandal is just breaking surface. Presently, I expect to hear the familiar excuses from the mouths of the party faithful. Fortunately, we have a chance to flush Obama coming up in November, before he precipitates more than one or two constitutional crises. I, myself, will be reaching for the handle, come November. I fervently hope most voters will do likewise. It will save us all a lot of trouble.

    The Democratic Party is approaching an opportunity as well. They’ll have the chance, in the wake of Obama’s disgrace, to turn away from power for powder’s sake. Thus would begin their long, slow, and painful path back to principle.

    Frankly, I don’t expect them to take the opportunity, or even see the fork in the road.

  29. Look into sales made to gang members in Florida, specifically Tampa and Miami under the same program. Direct government sales to known criminals of FUNCTIONAL weapons….seriously.

    1. That reminds me of just about every Law Enforcement Movie/TV show ever. In gun sale sting operations they alwayse stress that they took the firing pins out and damaged something else internally leaving only the sample gun/s working. Then depending on the show some double agent type person has the firing pins or whatever is needed to fix the guns. Chaos ensues yadda yadda yadda.

      So if Hollywood knows you don’t sell working guns to the bad guys why doesn’t this administration? After all this is the first celebrity POTUS doesn’t that make his entire cabinet pesudo celebs, or celebs by association or whatever.

  30. I grew up a democrat but my party has sold out as has your republican party. The lines are blurred and the partisan crap we think we see is somewhat of a cover. Both parties may have differences but in the end their differences come from who pays them to do their bidding.

    It is disgusting the lack of ethics in our government. The better share of the media is sympathetic to liberal causes and policies but in the end Fox is not really a refreshing counter to that. They are far from a fair and balanced unbiased counter to the ridiculousness that is networks like the basic 3 CBS, NBC and ABC as well as MSNBC and CNN. Actually all the networks try to be the power brokers in the decisions for how we Americans vote. The reality is they succeed in doing just that.

    Anyway this is about Eric Holder and the president and any other liberal ass that is involved in this mess. They should all be hung and we should be witness to it. Only problem is that I do not see a major change in honor and ethics when the right takes over as they most likely will. The reality is that there are few politicians today with ethics and decency. We either wake up or we see ourselves slaves to the master classes. I will die on my feet before they kill me on my knees.

  31. Hey, Larry,

    Over on my FB wall someone, in response to a comment I made about F&F (“What’s the difference between F&F and Watergate? 300 dead bodies”) made an allusion to Iran-Contra. Do you have any comments on that?

Leave a Reply to Jake Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *