Republicans have alleged, if not from the first, then at least for a long time, that operation Fast and Furious was a callous attempt by progressives in the plutocracy that we now call America at creating an artificial gun crisis so that the plutocracy could abridge citizens' 2nd Amendment rights.
I mean further than they’ve already abridged them.
Now even liberals are getting the memo- or at least email evidence- that it’s true.
CBSNews has reported that new documents show that officials in the ATF discussed using the fallout from Fast and Furious as means of introducing “controversial new rules about gun sales” even as they forced gun dealers to let illegal transactions occur.
“ATF officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons,” says CBS, “but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called ‘Demand Letter 3’. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or ‘long guns.’ Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.”
Wonder what “botched” operation the Department of Justice ran on voters and citizens to get Demand Letters 1 & 2 regulations in place.
"There is really no responsibility within the Justice Department," Wisconsin’s Jim Sensenbrenner said according to CNN during a House hearing on Fast and Furious yesterday.
Attorney General Eric Holder responded to the committee by comparing the hearings on Fast and Furious to the hearings conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s on communists in government.
No responsibility is a massive understatement for Holder now. No responsibility would imply neutrality on responsibility. Negative responsibility can only go by one word: crime.
But Sensenbrenner should have included the executive branch of the federal government, the SEC, the IMF, SCOTUS, Congress and just about everyone from the rank of bird-Colonel on up in his indictment. Because government has seemed strangely reticent about getting to the bottom of any of many missteps that government has produced for years.
"The thing is, if we don't get to the bottom of this -- and that requires your assistance on that,” he said to Eric Holder, “there is only one alternative that Congress has and it is called impeachment."
Can the rest of us get the power to impeach too just like Congress has? Maybe a kind of citizen’s impeachment?
We could really use it right now.
Because impeachment or trial has to happen and it has to be Holder – or as high up as it goes- who walks the plank- at least for Fast and Furious.
Because here’s our thing: Some of us hicks out here in the countryside, in flyover country clinging to our guns and our religion, are starting to get the idea that mistakes aren’t just being made by the administration, but rather that mistakes are being manufactured- and then ignored by Congress.
At MF Golbal, at ATF, at Justice, at the Federal Reserve Bank, at Solyndra, the answer’s always the same: “Oops. We made a mistake.”
And they don’t just make one mistake; they make a series of mistakes… and then it’s time to cue up a two-week Obama vacation.
They are mistaken in their reaction when evidence first comes forward of wrongdoing; they are mistaken in their statements they make under oath; they are mistaken when they mistakenly answer a question that they mistakenly answered mistakenly in the first place in front of Congress.
They are so mistaken in what they mean and what they say they mean that everything is suddenly dependent on the legal definition of the word “is.”
Call it the Clinton defense, the best legal novelty invented since the insanity plea. But of course the Clinton defense only works for government workers. The rest of us have to face the plain, ordinary law.
And make no mistake: You know those paranoid people who think that Obama and his cronies are purposefully crashing the system from within to serve a political agenda where no crisis goes to waste?
They have a pretty darn good point now at the Department of Justice.
And the longer these “mistakes” are allowed to happen with no remission, no trial, no perp walk, the clearer the picture becomes even without the most transparent administration in the history of the Nobel Prize.
See?
When you’re a liberal and you lose CBSNew folks, it’s over.
FOR-ever.
Think of Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War.
You can’t “fake award” yourself a prize out of that one, whether the award is for peace or for transparency.
Fast and Furious goes way beyond anything Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson ever dreamed of.
And those weren’t just congressmen demanding justice from Holder.
That’s you and me who Holder is comparing to drunken Joe McCarthy.
It’s not We, the People who are drunk on the power to deceive right now.
We still have some of our rights unabridged.
And that’s a good first start.
Provided we make good use of them.
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