Attorney General Eric Holder is in trouble. The documents that strongly suggest he lied to Congress have been released to the public, and they came on the heels of the secret Fast and Furious recordings that had already blown holes in parts of his Congressional testimony.
As a result, the House GOP is calling for a Special Counsel to investigate whether Holder purjured himself before Congress.
And while it would be great to see Holder handcuffed and frog-marched off to the big house for lying to Congress (should he be found guilty), we make a serious mistake if we bypass an inquiry into the benefits that both he and President Obama were likely hoping to gain from the operation.
Consider Obama: In April 2009 he spoke alongside Mexican President Felipe Calderón about how border violence on the U.S./Mexico border was proof that the assault weapons ban needed to be re-instituted. (Ironically, at that very same time, the Obama administration was preparing to undertake Fast and Furious, which we now know increased the number of assault weapons on the border exponentially.)
Thus, with words that we can now recognize as hypocritical in light of Fast and Furious, Obama said:
“I continue to believe that we can respect and honor the Second Amendment right in our Constitution — the rights of sportsmen and hunters and homeowners that want to keep their families safe — to lawfully bear arms, while dealing with assault weapons that, as we know here in Mexico, are used to fuel violence.”
These words came just over two months after Obama has authorized $10 million for Fast and Furious (via the Stimulus package) and just over a week after Holder gave a speech at the Mexico/United States Arms Trafficking Conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he boasted of overseeing the implementation of Gunrunner.
The audacity of both Obama and Holder is stomach turning.
I have not been alone in speculating that the real reason behind Fast and Furious was to cause enough border chaos to incline Americans to clamor for more gun control, thereby opening the door for Obama’s anti-gun agenda to be unleashed. And as you read the words he spoke while with President Calderón, it’s easy to see how he was counting on border chaos to benefit him.
Sadly, Calderón played into Obama’s hand when he stood by him and said: “From the moment the prohibition on the sale of assault weapons [in the U.S.] was lifted a few years ago, we have seen an increase in the power of organized crime in Mexico.”
I wonder what Calderón would say about the increased power of organized crime in Mexico now that Fast and Furious weapons have been passed to the cartel? What would he say about the hundreds upon hundreds of deaths in Mexico that have been tied to those weapons?
Hopefully, he too has seen through Obama’s empty words and understands that lives on both sides of the border were sacrificed in hopes of persuading Americans that more gun control would fix everything.
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