Posted on 10/07/2011 8:02:54 AM PDT by marktwain
Senator Charles Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa have ramped up their criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder, releasing the documents that have this week put Holder and his staff, and the White House, on the defensive, to the point of shouting at a CBS reporter for her probing coverage of Operation Fast and Furious.
Those documents may be viewed here and here.
Yesterdays shuffling of deck chairs by Acting ATF Director B. Todd Jones, while seen as a positive step by Grassley, also did not blunt criticism from the senator, who last night issued this statement:
The reassignments are positive, especially in the case of Tom Brandon who I hope can help lead this agency out of its troubles. But, I caution that rearranging the chairs on the deck wont make Fast and Furious go away. I also question the timing of this announcement. There is a lot of effort at the Justice Department to spin the fact that the Attorney General was less than candid before the House Judiciary Committee, and what better way to make that go away than a bureaucratic shuffle. There are a lot of questions that remain to be answered and actions that need to be explained.
This column discussed the troubles that CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson encountered this week from a Justice Department spokeswoman and a White House staffer. Attkisson has broken some major stories about Operation Fast and Furious over the past nine months.
Likewise, so has Fox News William Lajeunesse, though he apparently has not encountered the rage that Attkisson discussed the other day with radio talk host Laura Ingraham.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Gunwalker ping.
I’d rather they unseal indictments instead of “ramp up the criticism”.
FYI
The Watergate burglary seemed to be unimportant at first, too.
But it went all the way to the top. And there weren’t even any reported deaths as a result of the action.
There are already a number of deaths, both in the US and in Mexico, as a result of these weapons scattered with seeming indiscrimination among some very violent and evil druglords.
No doubt there will be more, and it may be years before all these weapons, supposedly being tracked, are ever all located and taken from the perps involved in these and future murders.
Turn this over to the office of the special prosecutors as quickly as practical. But make sure it is not a tame pet of the Osama, er, Obama regime.
http://grassley.senate.gov/judiciary/upload/ATF-10-04-11-Holder-memo-docs.pdf
and
http://oversight.house.gov/images/stories/Other_Documents/ATF_10-04-11_Holder_memo_docs.pdf
There is a tendency for us to want to simplify things and believe that a small number of people are "in control". I have come to the conclusion that there are a number of centers of power, many of which have intersecting interests at any time. Particularily important are their basic assumptions and world view. Over the last 75 years, the world view of the "Progressives" has been dominant, with their centers of power in the MSM, the universities, and the unions. Those centers of power have been losing effusiveness as the "Progressive" or Socialist, Communist, Fascist or other variations of the efficacy of centralized planning have been called, have been discredited. Certainly, there are elites that are influential in pushing the centers of power toward implementation of any given policy, and in influencing general and specific strategy. But, I do not believe that there is a elite group that "controls almost everything". It is simply not possible. Our problem and our opportunity is that the basic assumptions of the Progressive central planning world view are false. They do not work anywhere near as well as the capitalism and freedom that they have been successfully supplanting over the last 75 years. The core of the Progressive power has been their ability to lie and to get away with it. That is why it was so important for them to take control of the MSM and the Universities. Now that ability has been profoundly reduced. Remember that even Rush Limbaugh signed onto the cover-up lies about Waco. He and talk radio, which has gained considerable power since the Clinton administration, are fully on board with exposing this scandal. The Internet is much more developed. The MSM are much diminished. The question is: Does the MSM have the power to protect the Obama administration from this scandal, as they have so many other Democrat administrations from Democrat scandals in the past? It appears that they may not.
There is a tendency for us to want to simplfy things and believe that a small number of people are "in control". I have come to the conclusion that there are a number of centers of power, many of which have intersecting interests at any time. Particularily important are their basic assumptions and world view. Over the last 75 years, the world view of the "Progressives" has been dominant, with their centers of power in the MSM, the universities, and the unions. Those centers of power have been losing effeciveness as the "Progressive" or Socialist, Communist, Fascist or other variations of the efficacy of centralized planning have been called, have been discredited. Certainly, there are elites that are influential in pusing the centers of power toward implementation of any given policy, and in influencing general and specific strategy. But, I do not believe that there is a elite group that "controls almost everything". It is simply not possible.
Our problem and our opportunity is that the basic assumptions of the Progressive central planning world view are false. They do not work anywhere near as well as the capitalism and freedom that they have been successfully supplanting over the last 75 years. The core of the Progressive power has been their ability to lie and to get away with it. That is why it was so important for them to take control of the MSM and the Universities. Now that ability has been profoundly reduced. Remember that even Rush Limbaugh signed onto the coverup lies about Waco. He and talk radio, which has gained considerable power since the Clinton administration, are fully on board with exposing this scandal. The Internet is much more developed. The MSM are much diminished. The question is: Does the MSM have the power to protect the Obama administration from this scandal, as they have so many other Democrat administrations from Democrat scandals in the past? It appears that they may not.
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