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Friday, July 26, 2013

Mr. Holder's Gun Policy and Other Scandals

Attorney General Eric Holder still refuses to return George Zimmerman's weapon even though Zimmerman has been found innocent of all charges. There seems to be no legal justification for not returning the gun, but the Obama administration has never let details like legal justification deter them. This is the same AG, mind you, whose department funneled thousands of weapons to drug cartels in Mexico which have been used in hundreds, perhaps thousands of murders.

The good folks at DOJ see no contradiction in illegally providing high-powered weaponry to known killers, but refusing to legally return a single handgun to a man judged innocent by the evidence and by a jury of his peers.

It'd be entertaining to listen to Mr. Holder's explanation of how he reconciles these two policies.

Meanwhile in his speech the other day, President Obama blamed our dismal economy in part on the GOP's preoccupation with "phony scandals." He never explained which scandals in his administration are phony, of course, so we're left to wonder on our own. Is it the Fast and Furious operation, in which the Department of Justice illegally sent the above-mentioned weapons to murderers and thugs in Mexico only to have those weapons repeatedly used in the commission of hundreds of murders? Is it the Benghazi debacle in which four Americans died because the State Department refused to grant them the security they requested and while the attack on the consulate was taking place the President was nowhere to be found?

Maybe the President considers the IRS business "phony." Perhaps he thinks it's all faux outrage on the part of American citizens upset that the IRS was used by political partisans, taking orders from a political appointee in the White House, to harass and stifle groups and individuals based on political or religious affiliation. Perhaps he thinks it's "phony" of people to be angry that IRS officials paid millions of our dollars to disport themselves in Las Vegas. Or perhaps the phony scandal the President had in mind was the matter of the NSA illegally snooping on reporters deemed hostile to the administration, and even some who aren't, and which is collecting information on every citizen in the U.S.

I don't know which of these scandals the President thinks are "phony," but I'm pretty sure that were he back in the Senate and any of these events had happened in the Bush years he wouldn't be calling them "phony." He'd be calling for impeachment. There is indeed a lot that's phony in Washington, if I may say it, but it's not the scandals.

UPDATE: A couple of victims of Mr. Obama's "phony" scandals speak out: