Actually Going After a Cartel

Washington attorney and AT regular contributor, Clarice Feldman, did a masterful job of chopping Eric Holder and his politicized DoJ into mincemeat this past weekend for its many transgressions, with the Fast & Furious outrage being foremost in her article. What follows is an elaboration not on the details of the scandal but on the political motivation behind it.

When BATF agents first blew the whistle on what is now known as Operation Fast and Furious, the rationale offered by DoJ for such an evidently foolish operation was that it was designed to allow BATF to track and prosecute the leaders of the Mexican drug cartels. As more information surfaced from the Mexican government and the BATF’s Mexican bureau chief that none of them knew anything of this operation, many of us who were paying a bit closer attention to the case immediately smelled the first foul scent of corruption.

The fatal flaw in DoJ’s explanation was this: if the Mexican authorities had not been brought into the operation, nor even the BATF’s own agents authorized to operate in Mexico, then the proffered DoJ justification made utterly no sense, for the simple reason that once those walked guns hit the south side of that border there was absolutely no process in place to track them to their supposed targets. Therefore, DoJ was patently misrepresenting its motive. Why?

To those who keep a constant wary eye on the Left’s never-ending war on our 2d Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the increasingly fishy smell emanating from Washington led us to connect the dots back to the year-earlier revelations in the liberal media that weapons being used in Mexican crimes were traceable back to American sources more than 90% of the time. That false meme had spread quickly through the major liberal media along with calls for stricter gun control laws in this country by guess who? How about our president, our secretary-of-state, our attorney-general and other notable Democrats, for starters?

Here we had an operation mounted by the executive branch of the United States, an operation which had as its stated goal, after being outted that is, the targeting of Mexican drug lords on sovereign Mexican soil. Yet this was done without the knowledge of anyone in the Mexican government. Quite clearly, a secret and subversive operation had been conceived and implemented against our sister nation to the south; subversive because, again, quite clearly, the American government was subverting the sovereign authority of Mexico without that nation’s knowledge. If the goal was, as stated later by DoJ, to track guns into Mexico to the purchasing sources in the cartels, then was there not some diplomatic requirement to notify the Mexican government that we were arming their most violent criminal elements? And what was the need for keeping our own BATF agents in Mexico, the only American agents with Mexican authority to conduct such surveillance and tracking operations on Mexican soil, equally in the dark?

It doesn’t require much in the way of deductive powers to conclude that the fish wrap smell seeping out of Washington probably was due to the fact that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice was being used to tightly wrap something rotting from the head down. And what could that be? Early proponents of the theory suggesting that if the DoJ’s rationale smelled fishy then perhaps the true reason for F&F was to create justification for more gun control legislation here in this country, were looked at as crackpot conspiracists. Even now, most of those Republican members of Congress pursuing this scandal refuse to cite the true purpose of F&F, still referring to it as a bungled federal program. There are exceptions: Florida congressman, John Mica, speaking on one of the Sunday talk shows this weekend made clear his opinion that F&F was a sinister and cynical attempt by the Obama administration to undermine the 2d Amendment. I watched him say it but Google has no link. Imagine that.

For those who don’t really follow the gun ownership battle, here’s a five-step explanation:
1. Allow guns to flow freely to criminal elements in Mexico where they are naturally used in the extremely violent and deadly criminal activities of the drug cartels.
2. When sufficient guns of American origin have been used in such criminal activities, enlist the willing services of the liberal media to announce it to the world.
3. Enlist multiple prominent Democrats to untruthfully proclaim that 90% of the guns used in Mexican crimes originate in the U.S.
4. Use steps one through three to substantiate the liberal fallacy that private gun ownership leads to increased gun violence by gun owners.
5. With the compliance of a thoroughly duped American public, enact increasingly restrictive gun ownership policies through federal agencies, bypassing Congress and the Supreme Court.

When looked at this way, doesn’t Obama’s statement to a group of gun control advocates months earlier that he was taking steps to further gun control restrictions but “under the radar,” now seem less cryptic than it did at the time? For those who still don’t believe Fast & Furious was an end-run on the 2d Amendment by a liberal, gun-averse administration, here are five questions to consider:
1. Could the fact this plan was concocted at the very top of the administration, putting it on par with Watergate, explain Eric Holder’s entrenched refusal to release the tens of thousands of documents being sought by congressional investigators?
2. Is the liberal media’s refusal to investigate this scandal due to the fact they realize the truth of question one, that the acts of this administration may rise to criminal and impeachable offenses?
3. Has the reluctance of the Republican leadership to more aggressively support the House investigation been attributable to the same possibility, that full exposure could lead straight to the oval office and the politically unsavory possibility of impeachment of the nation’s first black president?
4. Does anyone really think an ambitious politician like Holder would risk career-ending contempt of congress charges to protect some incredibly stupid subordinates who supposedly, all by themselves, planned and implemented such a boondoggle?
5. In an administration known for its quickness in throwing friends and associates under the bus in matters of self-preservation, is it not remarkable that rather than being so dispatched by Holder, many of the key players in F&F have been promoted despite denials by their bureau?

If all this sounds a bit too much to swallow, consider the political origins of the key players in the current administration. All are products of the Chicago political machine, a thoroughly liberal/socialist/communist movement particularly hostile to the concept of citizen gun ownership as demonstrated by the some of the nation’s most restrictive gun ownership laws now in place there. And to prove the folly of those laws and the liberal fallacy that disarming the citizenry reduces crime, here’s a quite recent headline from that bastion of conservative thought and opinion, Huffington Post:

“Chicago Homicide Rate Worse Than Kabul, Up To 200 Police Assigned To High-Profile Wedding (Video)”

We are quick to blame the policies and activities of the Mexican drug cartels for their nation’s murder rate being among the highest in the world. Is it not then fair to apply the same blame to those who control a city with some of the most restrictive gun-ownership laws in America which are yielding gun-death fatality stats almost double the total casualty rate for American troops in the Afghan war zone? It is only the total and vice-like hold the Democrat machine has on Chicago that has made this city the riskiest place in America for law-abiding citizens, turning them into helpless, unarmed sheep at the mercy of roving, well-armed, predatory wolves.

Doesn’t Chicago sound a lot like Mexico to you?

Never lose sight of the real reason that liberals want to confiscate your guns. Liberals assert that government is the protector of all our freedoms and therefore we need not be concerned with protecting ourselves and our loved ones. The folly of that assertion can be refuted with one word: Chicago. But the true reason for wanting an unarmed public is that such a citizenry is powerless in the face of armed government and therefore compliant. Liberals and Democrats know full well that the key to unrestrained socialist governing is to first disarm the citizenry.

This administration has insisted that Fast and Furious was implemented solely to go after and bring down the leadership of the Mexican cartels. For those of you still unsure of the motivation of the Fast and Furious congressional investigation, would it make you more comfortable with that investigating committee’s legitimacy if you looked at it as an actual federal attempt to go after and bring down the leadership of a politically criminal cartel?

The Chicago Cartel?

Slightly edited version cross-posted at American Thinker.

Category: 2012 election, Barack Obama/Joe Biden