Post a Comment On: Sipsey Street Irregulars

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Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer reads his morning Washington Post with satisfaction. "Now THAT'S the kind of slanted half-truth propaganda we're paying for."

The Christian Science Monitor worries "How much damage did ATF's ill-fated gun-running sting do to war on drugs?"

Fast and Furious – not the movie franchise, but the US government’s ill-fated undercover gun-running operation targeting Mexican drug cartels – ended up putting more guns in the hands of criminals on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

It deepened a rift between the US and Mexico over weapons flowing south, caused a major scandal in the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which hatched the operation in 2009, and appears to have played a role in the murder of a US Border Patrol agent in 2010.

Now Fast and Furious is about to claim another victim. As the Obama administration seeks to stanch the embarrassment and controversy flowing from investigations into the operation, speculation is growing in Washington that the ATF’s acting director will be fired in the coming days.

With evidence mounting – particularly in recent congressional hearings – that ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson was deeply involved in managing a sting operation gone seriously bad, the administration has little choice but to remove him, many government-operations experts say.

But beyond the fate of a government official, the saga of Fast and Furious has underscored a number of troubling trends on the US-Mexico border:

• The role US borderland gun shops play in feeding the region’s drug-related violence.

• How Mexico’s ruthless crime gangs use the weakly regulated US market to arm themselves.

• How the American gun lobby’s opposition to regulation has stifled government efforts to plug the flow of arms into Mexico.

Oh, of course, we need more restrictions on honest American gun owners and gun shops. Forget that there was NO sting, that the entire point of the exercise was to increase the number of American civilian market firearms used by the cartels to boost the Mexican body count and provide a pretext for more gun control. Forget that the "statistics" are outright lies. The bias toward the meme is everything for the lapdog press, I get that. But calling Melson a "victim" of this conspiracy is like saying Charles Manson was a "victim" of the Helter Skelter murders.

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Charles Manson. by the logic of the CSM, one of the victims of the Helter Skelter murders.

This meme of "Gunwalker proves we need more gun control" is being parroted elsewhere as well.

However, Pravda on the Potomac has an even better Imperial press release: "Critic of ATF gun-trafficking program raised no objection when briefed last year."

A chief Republican critic of a controversial U.S. anti-gun-trafficking operation was briefed on ATF’s “Fast and Furious” program last year and did not express any opposition, sources familiar with the classified briefing said Tuesday.

Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), who has repeatedly called for top Justice Department officials to be held accountable for the now-defunct operation, was given highly specific information about it at an April 2010 briefing, the sources said. Members of his staff also attended the session, which Issa and two other Republican congressmen had requested.

Fast and Furious targeted Mexican gun traffickers but was linked to the killing of a U.S. law enforcement officer. Republicans in Congress have criticized the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives over its handling of the operation, with Issa calling it “felony-stupid bad judgment” during a hearing last week in which he grilled a Justice Department official.

At the briefing last year, bureau officials laid out for Issa and other members of Congress from both parties details of several ATF investigations, including Fast and Furious, the sources said. For that program, the briefing covered how many guns had been bought by “straw purchasers,’’ the types of guns and how much money had been spent, said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the briefing was not public.

“All of the things [Issa] has been screaming about, he was briefed on,’’ said one source familiar with the session.

Frederick R. Hill, a spokesman for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Issa chairs, acknowledged on Tuesday that an ATF briefing on “weapons smuggling by criminal cartels” took place in April 2010 but declined to specify what Issa or his staff were told.

He accused “opponents” of the committee’s investigation of the gun-trafficking operation of “incredulously trying to assert that Obama administration political appointees at the Justice Department were ignorant — yet Congress was in the know on the details of Operation Fast and Furious.’’

“This irresponsible and false accusation is indicative of a Justice Department bereft of leadership and rattled by the revelations of its own misconduct,’’ Hill added.

You know, somewhere in the tiny minds of the conspirators, with their backs to the wall and more hearings under oath coming, they actually think of this is as effective push-back. The willing whores of the WaPo have once again proven their ability to be used as smegma-stained kleenex of this administration, but what has been accomplished? It is "he said-she said" with Issa and his people having, I am sure, a different recollection of what was, and was not briefed. I'm sure that the rest of Pharaoh's scribes in the megaphone press will parrot this, but so what? If the conspirators were trying to get Issa to back off, I'd be willing to bet that they just further motivated him. None of this exculpates the conspirators, nor changes the facts of the conspiracy. All of which will surely be examined under oath.

They HAVE proven that Sari Horwitz, an anti-firearm rights "reporter" who has already discredited herself as a liar who plagiarized stories about the Arizona mass shooting and who is just back from a three-month suspension for that little faux pas, remains the most consistently politically-reliable scribe Pravda and the administration have. She consistently ignored the Gunwalker Scandal until she could find some way to help the Obamanoids out with the story.

Sari Horwitz defines the term "lapdog journalist." If her picture isn't in the dictionary next to that term, it ought to be.

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Sari Horwitz, the most politically-reliable Pravda plagiarist the anti-firearm rights crowd has in DC.