The Phillips Foundation gave me a copy of Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest
Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up by Katie Pavlich, and I later gave
it to a gun aficionado I know, planning to track its location and take him down
if he misuses the book, but then I got distracted by other stuff, so, eh, you
know, whatever. (In fact, I passed it
along at an art show featuring odd works by Max Eisenberg such as the ones seen
in the nearby photo.)
Seriously, though, even
if you thought it was in theory a good idea for the U.S. government to sell
lots of guns to Mexican drug cartels (many that went on to be used in actual
murders) in hopes of tracking them later and busting their users (not a
manifestly impossible thing), and even if
no net increase in deaths occurred as a result of Operation: Fast and Furious
(a possibility I suggested to Pavlich myself, since every good gun rights
defender knows that guns that can’t be bought by Route A will likely just be
bought via Route B anyway), and even if
you’re naive enough to think that Attorney General Eric Holder would never lie,
you should be troubled by the fact that the government does not in fact seem to have made any
serious effort to track the guns later.
As Pavlich recounts, one agent was so alarmed by this
neglect that he stuck a tracking device of his own in one of the guns, though
it later stopped operating. Making matters
worse, it appears that even while the Obama administration was actively
encouraging gun dealers to keep selling to Mexican criminals – even telling the
dealers not to be alarmed when they dutifully reported their concerns to the
government – the administration was seizing the opportunity to publicly condemn
the very same flow of guns to Mexico, implying that gun dealers cannot be
trusted (and your government can).
Given the lapdog press’s eager role in sanitizing all this,
I’m rather pleased to see Fast
and Furious whistleblower John Dodson suing the New York Times for libel. Obviously,
the press has the right to be wrong, and few such suits succeed, but I’m not
against libel laws when the mistakes are sufficiently knowing, vicious, and
damaging. Such suits may be an important
tool of resistance, given the increasingly disturbing and monolithic role
played by the establishment press in aiding the government in its crimes – and
given the press’s ever more brazenly partisan nature.
(There was much joking online, for example, about the
contrast between the press’s immediate post-election freakout over Rubio’s
agnosticism about creationism and their total silence over Obama’s own agnosticism,
worded in almost the same way, on the same topic. Luckily, that’s a mostly-silly issue that
doesn’t tend to get anyone killed. The
government can’t stop evolution, not even with a full-fledged nuclear
war.)
Polls and punditry suggest the left loves it when Obama stops
compromising and “plays hardball,” though they shouldn’t kid themselves that
this just means being hyper-idealistic.
It may also mean things like holding
the threat of releasing scandalous info over Petraeus’s head back in September
to get him to soft-peddle his criticism of the administration over the Benghazi
attacks.
Government is bullying, secrecy, ineptitude, organized
crime, inefficiency, and the public’s misplaced philosophical hopes all at the
same time. We would be better off
without it, whether here or in Latin America.
(Of course, sometimes you can’t blame cops for deviating from protocol a
bit, as in this darkly
amusing 911 call.)
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