This posting from WND is troubling to the extreme. It concerns rumors that John Boehner is trying to bring a close to the Fast and Furious probe.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/boehner-sabotaging-fast-and-furious-probe/
If this is true, and such a deal is made that would limit the prosecution to ATF supervisors, that would be a case of major corruption in the Congress. As I have said before, this operation had to have originated in Washington against the better judgement of ATF agents. Holder and other Justice officials have lied under oath.
Let's compare it to Watergate-and yes, the comparison is valid. Such a deal would be tantimount to the Democrats telling Sam Ervin to shut down his hearings in exchange for the John Mitchell Justice Department prosecuting G. Gordon Liddy.
And such a comparison to Liddy would be unfair to the ATF agents.
If true, Boehner had better think twice. Maybe he is the one who should be canned.
I don't know anyone who believes Boehner is doing a food job. If he caves on this issue, he really should not keep his Speaker job. I dont know who his constituency is or what faction of the party supports him. He really got out maneuvered on this payroll tax reduction extension issue.
ReplyDeleteGary--if I am correct that the WND thing was by Tancredo, be prepared for some flak, particularly probably from Siarlys.
ReplyDeleteThe likelihood that this scheme originated in the field and made its way through several successive levels of bureaucracy to the highest levels of DOJ is so remote as to be essentially impossible.
Accordingly, I must agree with you this operation almost certainly originated with a bunch of amateurs (or even worse) in Washington against the better judgement of experienced ATF field agents/supervisors/managers.
Further, I said "or even worse" since there is at least a strong probability that this program was in fact an ill-fated and misguided, but intentional, effort in opposition to domestic individual gun rights. You don't have to be paranoid to see that.
Finally, I agree with your apology to ATF agents for the Liddy comparison. I have frequently compared the behavior of, say, Det. Mark Fuhrman with Bill Clinton, and I always apologize to Fuhrman out front. As with a cover-up, it was actually Fuhrman's attempt to avoid embarassment rather than admit to unsavory conduct which did him in.
Maybe Boehner has recognized that there is no beef in Rep. Issa's burger bun.
ReplyDelete(elwood, I'm not going to waste ammo on such a fleeting diversion. There is nothing there to hit, just a curious self-serving delusion)
Siarlys--call me delusional if you must, but there is at least one other curious thing about this whole debacle.
ReplyDeleteI refer, of course, to a little while back, when the Obama administration trumpeted to the ends of the earth that 90% of all illegal guns seized in Mexico were traceable to the U.S. The main problem was that the statement was completely inaccurate/false. The actual statistic was/should have been that 90% of the traceable guns seized in Mexico came from the U.S. Not the same thing at all.
Many guns, particularly from some Central/South American banana republics as well as elsewhere, are not traceable as are U.S. weapons. To us delusional paranoids, given today’s political climate and the current administration, it is not a large leap, at least for us, to consider the possibility/probability that either the “90%“claim or F&F (or both, for that matter) were mechanisms to ensure that the maximum possible number of guns used criminally in Mexico be determined to have a U.S. origin. This could at least possibly assist in further U.S. gun control/anti-gun legislation.
As I have posted previously, I am completely unable to understand how officials could expect to furnish the better part of 2000 guns to violent individuals already involved in gun and drug crimes, including many murders, and somehow expect that some of the guns furnished would not be used in further gun and drug crimes, to include the certainty
of gun fatalities in Mexico, and the exceedingly high probability (near certainty) of gun fatalities in the U.S., just to be able to make a few gun cases on a few cartel members, high-ranking or not.
Accordingly, I am therefore constrained to consider that the motivation may have been otherwise. And Gary and I are apparently equally delusional, since we each independently, I promise without collaboration, hit on the same possibility. I must concur with him that based on what we know right now, it is the only reasonable explanation.
Left-wing anti-gun zealots are, in my view, just as bad, if not worse than, right-wing pro-gun ones. However, given the radical nature of some of the members of this administration, I for one can certainly see the possibility for rationalization, especially by doofuses, that the deaths of a relatively few Mexicans, and possibly a small number of Americans, would be a small price to pay for the imagined lives that would be saved by further gun restrictions (even banning of U.S. guns if they thought they could go that far). Gun control DOES NOT WORK to save lives or reduce violent crime (in fact, the opposite is true), but try to convince most libs/Dems of that.
Seems to me like this thinking is fairly analogous to the justification by some for the use of atomic bombs (by a Democrat, incidentally, but admittedly an old one) on Japan during WWII, the argument being that while such use would cause the death of innocent civilians, many more lives would be spared by ending the war earlier, such that there qould be a net gain. Same could be applied to guns here.
Can I prove this yet?? Absolutely not. At this point in time, I do not believe it can be proved or disproved. This is why it is so important to have all the relevant documents (e-mails, memos, etc.), very few of which have yet been furnished. There, as here, some/all of us have to be a little careful that our alligator mouths do not overwork our jaybird posteriors, and there is just simply no telling what could/will surface if this is allowed to continue. Hope it does.
Oh elwood, I completely agree with you about left-wing anti-gun zealots. The short-sighted fools seem determined to let the "vast right-wing conspiracy" have all the guns, a suicidally dangerous position to take. Ditto for the liberals, who are not the same think as the left. Liberals are part of the established regime, albeit they have different tastes about what to coerce and what not to coerce.
ReplyDeleteI see your point about the difference between 90% of the unspecified fraction that can be traced, and 90% of the whole. But still, that's a large component. Mexican officials have complained for some years that they are fighting a war brought on by America: it is our insatiable demand for cocaine that generates the profits that arm the cartels, AND, they buy a good portion of their guns here.
No, you, I and Gary are not personally responsible for cocaine purchases. To the best of my knowledge, none of us use the stuff. But our nation has to get its act together, either to make our own enforcement effective enough that the traffic ceases to be profitable, OR, to drop the price artificially inflated by illegality down to what it really costs to produce (i.e. legalize and let the price go into free fall). Also, since we don't want Mexican troops entering our sovereign territory to root out the sources of the guns, we need to take responsibility for getting a handle on it.
I have no idea why y'all consider Obama anti-gun. He has never proposed legislation to take guns away from citizens in lawful possession. He spoke immediately and unambiguously in support of the Supreme Court decision that a south side Chicago homeowner had a right, protected by the Second Amendment, to keep a gun in his house.
Fast and Furious was obviously not handled with sufficient care and oversight, but Occam's Razor suggests that it was exactly what the Justice Department says it was: an attempt to trace a traffic already booming, and find out what the flow was. If our current president wasn't Barack Obama, it is the kind of measure Gary or his colleagues might well have implemented or applauded.