Most media organs talk about Operation Fast and Furious only in passing, if at all. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, and William LaJeunesse of Fox News, are the only two reporters to cover Fast and Furious in any depth. But everyone forgets that Sharyl Attkisson, half a year ago, did something no other reporter dared do. She broke through the shallow talk about subpoenas and hearings in Congress and got to the heart of the matter.

The heart of the Fast and Furious matter is not whether the orders for it came down from Washington, or started with a rogue agent-in-charge of the Phoenix ATF office. Once one does get to the heart of the matter, one knows exactly where Fast and Furious came from, who ordered it, and why.

The issue is, and always has been, the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And Sharyl Attkisson showed, and the media forgot, that ATF sought to persuade people to abrogate that Amendment.

Fast and Furious: The Real Goal

The Second Amendment reads:

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Bill Whittle at Pajamas TV reminds us (see below) of something that Eric Holder said in 1995,fourteen years before he became Attorney General. He sought to

change the way…people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, …not acceptable, …not hip to carry a gun anymore,…the way…we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.

Later he said straight-out that he wanted to brainwash people to make them hate guns.

“Gun Rights Examiner” David Codrea, in April of 2011, quoted Sarah Brady, who in turn quoted none other than the putative President, Barack H. Obama. He told Ms. Brady that he would work “under the radar” to make the American people accept gun control.

How Fast and Furious worked

Eric Holder, Attorney General. Photo: US Department of Justice

Now consider how Operation Fast and Furious worked. Straw buyers, all of them gangsters, bought thousands of guns from gun dealers in Arizona and other States in the ATF-Phoenix territory. At least two of those guns were illegal Kalashnikov rifles. We know this because police recovered these from the scene of the murder of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December of 2010.

And unlike Operation Wide Receiver, very few of the Fast and Furious guns had the tracking devices that all 250 of the Wide Receiver guns carried. Furthermore, the Mexican authorities knew nothing of Operation Fast and Furious while it ran. The first they heard about it was probably reading about Brian Terry’s death in the newspapers.

Whose fault was it?

The best way to figure out whose fault it was is to apply two proverbs that mean the same thing:

1. Cui bono? (“Who benefits?”)
2. Seek whom the crime will profit.

The usual profit is money; hence another proverb:

Follow the money.

But as Ayn Rand once observed, profit depends on what you’re after. So sometimes one follows something else. Bill Whittle made an excellent suggestion:

Follow the ideology.

The ideology is Progressivism. And key to Progressivism is: disarming the citizens. Unarmed citizens cannot resist an overarching, over-reaching government.

But Eric Holder, and for that matter Barack Obama, have a problem. Barack Obama is the country’s best gun salesman, and always has been. They have tried to “un-sell” guns since Barack Obama took office. First they said that 90 percent of all the guns that the Mexican drug gangsters used to kill people, they bought in America. That turned out to be a bald-faced lie. So why shouldn’t Obama and Holder decide to make that statistic real?

According to Sharyl Attkisson, they did. Whistleblowers brought the evidence to Attkisson, and she ran with it. That happened on December 7, 2011.

That’s why Obama claimed executive privilege on Wednesday of last week. (Of course, if he thought Darrell Issa and his colleagues wouldn’t cite Holder for contempt of Congress anyway, he had another think coming.)

John Hinderaker at The Power Line lays out the case himself:

1. Obama’s claim of executive privilege is legally specious. In fact, Hinderaker used the word frivolous.
2. Obama is acting the way Richard M. Nixon acted, forty years ago.
3. Finally, Hinderaker sees the same thing Bill Whittle saw: when a lawyer makes a bad claim of privilege to try to quash a subpoena, he has something really big to hide.

Paul Mirengoff, Hinderaker’s colleague, is not so sure. But his alternative doesn’t flatter Holder anyway. As Mirengoff sees it, ATF-Phoenix wanted to nail the kingpins in Mexico, and ran the worst operation they could have run. Holder now wants to escape blame for a mistake that cost two American lives and hundreds of Mexican lives.

Mirengoff forgot Sharyl Attkisson’s December 2011 report. If he hadn’t, he would have seen Fast and Furious as Hinderaker and Whittle see it. This is no well-meaning operation gone wrong. This is a classic false-flag operation. What does it matter if hundreds of Mexicans died? And those two Americans? Forget them; those kinds of men wouldn’t vote for Obama anyway.

But Obama and Holder forgot three things (or two people and one thing):

1. Brian Terry’s father.
2. Brian Terry’s mother.
3. The Internet.

The Internet is a vast open-stack library without a librarian. And this library, once it puts something into its catalog, never loses it.

Related Fast and Furious articles:

• A Journalist’s Guide to Project Gunwalker, Part Ten. Has links to nine earlier sets of updates.
• Whom Are They Kidding?
• 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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