Those trying to defend the putative President and his Attorney General get more ridiculous every day. In defending Obama’s claim of executive privilege on Operation Fast and Furious, they trot out the wildest theories that anyone has ever heard. And these same people accuse their opponents of wild fantasies! But they do more than make people laugh at them. They tip their hand, and show that they have plans that Niccolo Machiavelli would envy.

Fast and Furious Paranoia

Nancy Pelosi, in her days as Speaker of the House. Photo: Office of the Speaker, US House of Representatives.

Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) takes the booby prize. Yesterday she held a news conference to talk about Fast and Furious, and defend Attorney General Eric Holder. She should have stayed home. Instead she accused Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista, CA) and his Oversight Committee colleagues of trying to blacken Holder’s name. And why? Because Holder, she said, was getting in the way of Republican plans to suppress the vote in Florida and other States. (What Holder actually was doing was stopping those State Elections Divisions from purging the dead and the ineligible from their voter rolls, and telling voters to identify themselves properly when they come to vote.) And, talking and holding herself like an actress in a lurid horror/sci-fi movie, she said:

I’m telling you, this is connected. It is no accident. It is a decision and it is as clear as can be. It’s not only to monopolize his time, it’s to undermine his name. To undermine his name, undermine his name, as he goes forward to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Cue Actor Kevin McCarthy shouting out:

They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!

As my contributor Nick Purpura might have asked yesterday:

Who writes her material?

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) called her remarks “mind-numbingly stupid.” That was kind. (As an aside: she also said that she hopes the Supreme Court will love the Constitution more than they like broccoli. Say what?)

Who connected whom to what?

Trey Gowdy was more than kind. He showed great courage two days ago, saying many things that others were afraid to say. (Some things you cannot say politely.) But even he did not connect the dots completely. He did not say, for instance, that Operation Fast and Furious had a far different goal than merely rounding up drug gangsters.

Pelosi, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, and putative President Barack H. Obama have connected those dots for him.

Carney repeated the same canard that Holder threw at Issa’s committee. Namely, that Fast and Furious was the same as Operation Wide Receiver, during the George W. Bush administration. Of course, Holder had to walk that back, so Carney tried to say that the tactics were the same.

By some stretch of imagination, the tactics might have been, but the strategy was not. In Wide Receiver, some 250 guns moved across the Mexican border. Each one had a homing device. Furthermore, the Americans told the Mexican police about those guns and how to track them.

Wide Receiver was an abject failure. Officials closed it out, and wrote “Never again!” in their notes about it. Which means that Fast and Furious was something new.

Gowdy called it “fundamentally flawed.” And it would have been, had it had the same goal as Wide Receiver had. Very few of the guns had any homing devices. Worse, the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) did not tell the Mexican police anything about this.

CNAV knew last year what Fast and Furious really was: a classic police “throw-down” scheme. Overzealous cops sometimes “throw down” a gun after they have shot someone. They want the courts and their own Internal Affairs Divisions to think that the people they shot tried to shoot them. (Rumors persist that some cops carry throw-down guns on patrol, “just in case”!) In this case, the idea was: “throw down” lots of guns in Mexico, guns that came from America. Then go to Congress, and the American people, and shout,

There! You see? Your love of guns gets people killed in Mexico! Give them up, for ____’s sake!

I use the underscore deliberately. Don’t ever expect them to take the Name of the Lord and Savior of mankind even in vain. They don’t believe in Him. But I digress.

On December 10, 2010, a good man died in the line of duty. Police recovered two guns at the scene, guns that straw buyers had bought in this country, and the dealers had let go under orders. The orders came from ATF-Phoenix, per Operation Fast and Furious.

Knowing a thing like that is one thing; proving it is another. Barack Obama swore that he never heard of Fast and Furious until he read about it in the newspapers. As long as he stuck to that story, no one could prove anything, except that maybe he had an overzealous AG who wanted to take people’s guns away from them, and set this up to do it. But Obama didn’t stick, as he should have. He claimed executive privilege to try to stop Issa’s committee from citing Holder for contempt of Congress. (That worse than didn’t work.) When he did that, he connected himself to Fast and Furious.

Pelosi connects even more things

As foolish a thing as Obama did, Pelosi’s remarks really are “mind-numbingly stupid.” But they are not stupid only for the reason Trey Gowdy called them stupid. They’re stupid because Pelosi connected Fast and Furious to the rest of Holder’s agenda.

Eric Holder has no good reason to stop election officials in Florida, or any other State, from striking from their voter rolls the names of the dead and of non-citizens. When a county clerk invites a dead dog to register to vote, something is wrong. So why should Eric Holder or anyone else want that name to stay on the voter rolls? Maybe he wants Obama’s ACORN and SEIU friends to vote in the dog’s name, and in the names of other dead people. (And maybe some of those people wouldn’t be caught dead voting for Obama, anyway.) And maybe he wants Obama’s new-found friends (however many he still has) in La Raza to cast their non-citizen votes, too.

Hey! CNAV did not connect these dots! Nancy Pelosi, Jay Carney, and Barack Obama did!

Mark Twain once said,

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

That goes double when you’re trying to keep a secret.

Related Fast and Furious articles:

• A Journalist’s Guide to Project Gunwalker, Part Ten. Has links to nine earlier sets of updates.
• Law? What law?
• Treason?
• Too little, too late
• Where’s the outrage?
• Impeachment
• Embarrassment
• The next level
• More subpoenas
• Vindication
• Shell game
• Sacrifices
• Promotions
• Incriminations
• Felonies
• Cover-ups continue
• Death threats
• Subpoenas
• Fast and Furious is not Gunrunner
• Cover-up
• The unraveling
• Throw-downs

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