If you haven't been paying attention to the Fast & Furious scandal, you haven't been watching FOX News. The latest episode is Darrell Issa's House committee voting to hold Attorney General Holder in Contempt of Congress for not violating the law by providing documents he can't legally provide - such as classified documents identifying informants, and grand jury transcripts. Now they are talking impeachment because president Obama has taken the unprecedented step of invoking executive privilege to stop Congress from demanding documents it is illegal to provide. By 'unprecedented' I mean that this is the first time Obama has invoked executive privilege - his predecessors did so repeatedly without any objections from these very same congressmen.
The Fast & Furious conspiracy, as laid out by Congressman Issa is that a time traveling Obama and Holder, went back in time (presumably using the same time machine Obama used to plant his fake birth documents and newspaper announcements in 1961 Hawaii) to the Bush administration and started a gun tracking program that allowed guns to be sold to gun runners going to Mexican drug cartels, in order to have those guns shock America with a wave of Mexican gun crime in order to gin up support for US gun control laws to take away our guns! The logic of this conspiracy was succinctly summed up by Stephen Colbert:
Yes, very clearly, Obama started this gun tracking program in 2006, when he hypnotized George Bush. Then he secretly ordered Attorney General Holder to order the Justice Department, to order the ATF to order gun shops to sell guns to Mexican drug cartels, and then lose track of them, thereby panicking Americans to gin up support for the draconian gun control measures that Obama has never introduced."
Colbert missed that Holder would have had to have ordered then Attorney General Gonzales to start the program in 2006 - or AG Mukasey who oversaw the direction and development of much of it. Oddly Issa's committee has never sought testimony from Mukasey or Gonzales, or anyone else involved in the creation of the program, instead they have concentrated exclusively on the man who ended it - Holder, to expose his reasons for starting it.
Rachel Maddow's more professorial presentation on the Fast & Furious Foofaraw's intersection with the GOP, NRA and FOX News:
We can expect the House to approve Contempt charges against AG Holder in the next few days on a strict party-line vote.
Clearly the Fast & Furious 'scandal' is a flimsy fantasy ridden incoherent conspiracy theory that can't hold up to even cursory scrutiny - yet the GOP leadership is going full-monty in pinning the blame for it on AG Holder - the man who ended it - not started it. Why? Democratic leader Pelosi thinks they are trying to destroy Holder so that he can't block their voter suppression efforts.
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