Fast and Furious: Whom Are They Kidding?

Those trying to defend the putative
President and his Attorney General get more ridiculous every day. In
defending Obama’s claim of executive privilege on Operation Fast
and Furious, they trot out the wildest theories that anyone has ever
heard. And these same people accuse their opponents
of wild fantasies! But they do more than make people laugh at them.
They tip their hand, and show that they have plans that Niccolo
Macchiavelli would envy.

Nancy
Pelosi (D-San Francisco) takes the booby prize. Yesterday she held a
news conference to talk about Fast and Furious, and defend Attorney
General Eric Holder. She should have stayed home. Instead she accused
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista, CA) and his Oversight Committee
colleagues of trying to blacken Holder’s name. And why? Because
Holder, she said, was getting in the way of Republican plans to
suppress the vote in
Florida and other States. (What Holder actually was doing was
stopping those State Elections Divisions from purging the dead and
the ineligible from their voter rolls, and telling voters to identify
themselves properly when they come to vote.) And, talking and holding
herself like an actress in a lurid horror/sci-fi movie, she said:

I’m telling you,
this is connected. It is no accident. It is a decision and it is as
clear as can be. It’s not only to monopolize his time, it’s to
undermine his name. To undermine his name, undermine his name, as he
goes forward to protect and defend the Constitution of the United
States.

Cue
Actor Kevin McCarthy shouting
out:

They’re
here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!

As my contributor
Nick Purpura might have asked yesterday:

Who writes her
material?

Rep.
Trey Gowdy (R-SC) called
her remarks “mind-numbingly stupid.” That was kind. (As an aside:
she also said
that she hopes the Supreme Court will love the Constitution more than
they like broccoli. Say what?)

Trey
Gowdy was more than kind. He showed great courage two days ago,
saying many things that others were afraid to say. (Some things you
cannot say politely.)
But even he did not connect the dots completely. He did not say, for
instance, that Operation Fast and Furious had a far different goal
than merely rounding up drug gangsters.

Pelosi, White House
Press Secretary Jay Carney, and putative President Barack H. Obama
have connected those dots for him.

Carney
repeated the same canard that Holder threw at Issa’s committee.
Namely, that Fast and Furious was the same as Operation Wide
Receiver, during the George W. Bush administration. Of course, Holder
had to walk that back, so Carney tried to say that the tactics
were the same.

By
some stretch of imagination, the tactics might have been, but the
strategy was not. In
Wide Receiver, some 250 guns moved across the Mexican border. Each
one had a homing device. Furthermore, the Americans told the Mexican
police about those guns and how to track them.

Wide Receiver was
an abject failure. Officials closed it out, and wrote “Never
again!” in their notes about it. Which means that Fast and Furious
was something new.

Gowdy
called it “fundamentally flawed.” And it would have been, had it
had the same goal as Wide Receiver had. Very few of the guns had any
homing devices. Worse, the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) did not
tell the Mexican police anything about this.

CNAV
knew last year what Fast and Furious really was: a classic police
“throw-down” scheme. Overzealous cops sometimes “throw down”
a gun after they have shot someone. They want the courts and their
own Internal Affairs Divisions to think that the people they shot
tried to shoot them. (Rumors persist that some cops carry throw-down
guns on patrol, “just in case”!) In this case, the idea was:
“throw down” lots of guns in Mexico, guns that came from America.
Then go to Congress, and the American people, and shout,

There! You see?
Your love of guns gets people killed in Mexico! Give them up, for
____’s sake!

I use
the underscore deliberately. Don’t ever
expect them to take the Name of the Lord and Savior of mankind even
in vain. They don’t believe in Him. But I digress.

On
December 10, 2010, a good man died in the line of duty. Police
recovered two guns at the scene, guns that straw buyers had bought in
this country, and the dealers had let go under orders.
The orders came from ATF-Phoenix, per Operation Fast and Furious.

Knowing
a thing like that is one thing; proving it is another. Barack Obama
swore that he never heard of Fast and Furious until he read about it
in the newspapers. As long as he stuck to that story, no one could
prove anything, except that maybe he had an overzealous AG who wanted
to take people’s guns away from them, and set this up to do it. But
Obama didn’t stick, as he should have. He claimed executive
privilege to try to stop Issa’s
committee from citing Holder for contempt of Congress. (That worse
than didn’t work.) When he did that, he connected himself
to Fast and Furious.

As
foolish a thing as Obama did, Pelosi’s remarks really are
“mind-numbingly stupid.” But they are not stupid only
for the reason Trey Gowdy called them stupid. They’re stupid
because Pelosi connected Fast and Furious to the rest
of Holder’s agenda.

Eric
Holder has no good reason to stop election officials in Florida, or
any other State, from striking from their voter rolls the names of
the dead and of non-citizens. When a county clerk invites
a dead dog to register
to vote, something is wrong. So why should Eric Holder or anyone else
want that name to stay on the voter rolls? Maybe he wants Obama’s
ACORN and SEIU friends to vote in the dog’s name, and in the names
of other dead people. (And maybe some of those people wouldn’t be
caught dead voting for Obama, anyway.)
And maybe he wants Obama’s new-found friends (however many he still
has) in La Raza to
cast their non-citizen votes, too.

Hey!
CNAV did not connect
these dots! Nancy Pelosi, Jay Carney, and Barack Obama did!

Mark
Twain once said,

It is better to
keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to
open it and remove all doubt.

That goes double
when you’re trying to keep a secret.

What say you? Have the Democrats talked too much? Or not?