Angry over Attorney General Holder’s efforts to preserve voting rights, and furious after the unexpected blow delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, the evil empire hit back late yesterday. Fortunately, unlike the Star Wars namesake, it was a pitiful counter-strike. One based on bullshit and distortions whipped up by conservatives with a grudge, and an ill-conceived Bush era program shut down by the Obama WH is all they have to work with:
Fortune — Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
So what if state prosecutors sympathetic to the gun nuts working under a gun nut governor dragged their feet on arrests? Holder is using the power of his office to allow, nay to enforce, the right of the middle class, the elderly, the young, the handicapped, and of course underprivileged minorities to vote — as he is required to by law. That’s as good as an original sin in the peculiar theology of the religious right. Holder must be punished.
Surprise twist: Dick Cheney is Obama’s father. NOOOOOOooooooooo!!!!
@1: No, that would make him a natural born citizen!
:)
Kevin Drum summarizes the Fortune article nicely, too …
This particular case shows how well these faux investigations can mislead the public. I was not paying very close attention to it at all, and if you had asked me I would have said I thought it was a lame Bush admin operation continued by Obama. Keven Drum says his mouth was agape reading the Fortune piece and, yeah, me, too.
I’m pretty sure the GOP picks their investigation targets based on the name (Whitewater, Fast n’ Furious) , rather the way they pick the NSF projects they want to gut (shrimp treadmills, salmon sex, etc). In other words, they’re just assholes.