It's one thing to have a progressive's point of view about the Republican witch hunt over Fast and Furious; it's quite another to check out a conservative's take on it.
To be clear, Darrell Issa has stated publicly that there is no evidence that the White House was involved in a cover up regarding the operation, thus contradicting Speaker of the House John Boehner, who said there appeared to be. So then the sole purpose of Issa's contempt charge against Eric Holder appears to center around a February, 2011 memo that was eventually retracted later that year in which the Department of Justice denied that sales of firearms were going on.
Issa believes that the DOJ lied to Congress and is demanding any and all documents pertaining to the memo and other information that could be useful not in finding out what actually happened, but in embarrassing Holder and the Administration. Hence the witch hunt.
But, there is another angle to why the GOP is pursuing this contempt action with such vigor, and since my opinion is, shall we say, biased, I'd thought I'd let a frequent flyer to this segment try his hand at it.
(It's worth remembering at this point that PJMedia.com was the site that launched the false story that the Environmental Protection Agency was using military drones to spy on farmers.)
Link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/21/fast-and-furious-inside-joke.html
To be clear, Darrell Issa has stated publicly that there is no evidence that the White House was involved in a cover up regarding the operation, thus contradicting Speaker of the House John Boehner, who said there appeared to be. So then the sole purpose of Issa's contempt charge against Eric Holder appears to center around a February, 2011 memo that was eventually retracted later that year in which the Department of Justice denied that sales of firearms were going on.
Issa believes that the DOJ lied to Congress and is demanding any and all documents pertaining to the memo and other information that could be useful not in finding out what actually happened, but in embarrassing Holder and the Administration. Hence the witch hunt.
But, there is another angle to why the GOP is pursuing this contempt action with such vigor, and since my opinion is, shall we say, biased, I'd thought I'd let a frequent flyer to this segment try his hand at it.
Fast and Furious: Inside Joke
Attorney General
Eric Holder speaks to reporters following his meeting on Capitol Hill in
Washington, Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (Susan Walsh / AP Photo)
Karen
Hughes tells the following story in her memoirs:
She had left the
White House and was recuperating with a beachside vacation. She looked up from
the sand and saw a small plane crossing the sky, dragging a big advertising
banner behind it. It said, "Come back, Jill. I am miserable without you.
Love, Jack." She thought: Bad message Jack—too much about you, not enough
about her.
I think of this
passage as Republicans prepare for a constitutional show-down over the Fast
& Furious fiasco.
Yes, the
operation was a terrible and embarrassing failure that led to the violent
deaths of one American and hundreds of Mexicans. Yes, there should be
accountability—and indeed there is an Inspector-General's investigation
underway, and relevant officials have been dismissed or reassigned.
What's driving
the intensity in this story, though, is an unspoken theory among some
conservatives that the true purpose of Fast & Furious was not a
(tragically misconceived) plan to end gun violence in Mexico but a (secret and
sinister) plan to tamper with gun rights in the United States.
Here's an
explicit statement of the conservatives' theory by one of the case's most
passionate observers, Bob Owens, writing at PJMedia.com:
We know for a fact
that Operation Fast and Furious was designed by the Obama administration to put
American weapons in the hands of Mexican cartels to kill Mexican citizens, and
that the guns recovered in those deaths would be used to call for more gun
control.
Hundreds died in a
plot that appears to have been designed to impose gun control. It’s past time
for the appointment of an independent prosecutor, and to press for criminal
charges against those responsible for the carnage that has resulted from the
deadliest scandal in U.S. government history.
(It's worth remembering at this point that PJMedia.com was the site that launched the false story that the Environmental Protection Agency was using military drones to spy on farmers.)
This theory is
self-inflated and unsupported, but it's widely believed. Probably nothing to be
done about that. The question for Republicans is: do they really want to take
this wild-eyed conspiracy to the country as a national voting issue in 2012?
We're not talking to the country. We're talking-to ourselves—or rather, to a
fringe constituency within ourselves.
Link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/21/fast-and-furious-inside-joke.html
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