Saturday, September 17, 2011

Anyone seen Attorney General Eric Holder?

Via Sipsey Street Irregulars

No. Of course not. The attorney general is off discussing border security - with Canadians. His schedule is filled with photo-op chats with schoolchildren. He is loading up his calendar with anything that will render it just impossible for the AG to find time to answer more questions from congressional probers about the gun-running mess known as Operation Fast and Furious. No time at all.

But here's who will line up dutifully before the congressional inquisitors: everyone Eric Holder doesn't care about, which is beginning to look pretty much like all the little fish outside Washington, D.C.

Operation Fast and Furious is a classic Washington scandal in one important, bipartisan respect: The people truly responsible for what went wrong ultimately will write their self-exonerating biographies, usually after a slew of fundraisers have paid the lawyer bills.

Meanwhile, everyone downhill from them will spend the rest of their working lives writing checks to pay their lawyers and wondering what the hell happened to that once-promising career in service to their country.

As bungled operations go, the Fast and Furious sting cooked up at the Justice Department and in the offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives differs from others only in that it turned truly deadly. Like so many others, it is steeped in arrogance and vacuum-sealed ignorance.

Technically legal straw-man buyers were allowed to purchase thousands of weapons at Arizona guns shops, the theory being that ATF agents would track them to the end users, Mexican drug cartels.

It isn't exactly clear just yet whether the operation went awry, or whether, in fact, it worked out precisely as the geniuses 2,000 miles away planned for it to work.

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