Monday, June 25, 2012

Have You No Shame?

Bill Whittle's Afterburner video on the Fast and Furious scandal tends to treat what is at this point a surmise a bit too much as though it were established fact yet he does raise most of the essential questions and his assertion that F&F was a deliberate attempt to weaken opposition to gun control in the U.S., though one hopes it's not true, is unfortunately more plausible than the DoJ's explanation that the operation was intended to find out where the bad guys were holed up.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air adds this about the Obama administration's assertion of executive privilege to prevent Congress from reviewing the relevant documents on the matter:
The executive-privilege claim won’t hold up in court, and even the ideologues at the White House have to know that much. Furthermore, in order to make the claim stick, the White House will have to produce a “privilege log” that describes each document they shield through the privilege claim for a court to assess, so we’ll know who was involved in the conversations even before a court rules on the privilege claim itself. [Whittle's] accusation is very strong, but if it proves true, then Holder’s resignation won’t suffice to deal with the aftermath — and this highly suspect claim of privilege shows that the White House very much fears disclosure, for whatever reason.
Whatever happens next the Democrats' attempts to divert attention away from the real issues by calling the hearings a "partisan witch hunt," by alleging racism, and by falsely claiming that the operation started under the Bush administration, are shameful and hypocritical. Were a Republican administration and a Republican run operation similarly implicated in the murders of hundreds of Mexicans and two U.S. agents the Democrats and the media would rightly be in a frenzy of outrage, and anyone associated with the GOP who tried to defend the tactic of stonewalling Congress with the obfuscations that we've been hearing all week from the Democrats and their media surrogates would be made a national laughingstock.

In fact, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has already taken the early lead in the laughingstock department:
See also Stewart's take on the White House's use of executive privilege here.