Rachel compares the Fast and Furious flap to an experience of being on a long bus ride and realizing the person sitting nearby and having a loud phone conversation is talking into a wad of aluminum foil shaped like a cell phone.
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Priceless: Her encounter with people protesting Eric Holder because he is “anti-gun” but who could not name a single anti-gun thing he has ever done.
Here, Bob Herbert says that to immerse oneself in this issue is like being on acid.
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By all accounts the sting operation was a mess, both badly planned and badly executed. This was the ATF’s baby, and it’s not clear to me if Holder was even aware of it before the Right started kicking up a fuss. Holder pulled the plug on the operation last year and ordered his inspector general to conduct an internal investigation, which of course doesn’t satisfy the Right, because they assume Holder is guilty of something more than not keeping the ATF on a tighter leash. The head of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, resigned last year, probably not voluntarily.
Holder has turned over something like 7,000 documents to Congress, but says the rest of the subpoenaed documents contain information that would compromise ongoing criminal investigations if revealed. Naturally, in the fevered imagination of righties, those documents contain information of a vast conspiracy to gut the Second Amendment.
The Right wants to be allowed to go on a no-holds-barred fishing expedition in the ATF and Justice Department, and if in doing so they set criminal investigations back several years, or get more agents or civilians killed, I doubt they care.
See also Five Things To Know About The Republican Witchhunt Against Attorney General Holder
Apparently, the Office of the President has just invoked executive privilege over at least some documents requested by Issa.
First – yes, Obama and Holder gave Issa over 7,000 documnets, but, like Obama’s birth certificate, it didn’t show what they wanted to see. And the fault can’t possibly in themselves.
NO!
It’s that KenyanSocialistFascistCommunistHeathenAtheistMuslim Nigrah, and his Nigrah AG, who are conspiring to keep critical information from ‘we the (white) people,’ and our servants in Congress!
Issa is a demagocic, feckin’ idjiotic, HACK!!!
Second – now this, THIS, is one conspiracy theory the Conservatives have, that I wish had some truth behind it.
Whoreporatist Congressional D’s decided a long time ago, get whatever they can get from the NRA, to leave the issue of gun control to “urban” mayors and police chiefs, and let the hicks in the sticks stock arsenals – rocket launchers, bazooka’s, and tanks, for all anyone cared.
Gun control is now much less likely to happen, than that SS, Medicare, and Medicaid are either being downsized, or legislated and/or bankrupted out of existence.
SS used to be the “3rd Rail” of politics.
Not anymore.
Now it’s guns.
So, now, ‘Johnny, got his gun.’
And Janie.
And the kids.
But don’t let Leroy, Latwanza, Ahmed, or Ahdia, get anywhere near one.
“But don’t let Leroy, Latwanza, Ahmed, or Ahdia, get anywhere near one.”
Ain’t that the truth.
I was amazed at the out pouring of approval of approval from the right just after 9/11 regarding young men in uniform carrying automatic weapons in our country’s airports (regardless of color). Pre 9-11, guards with full auto weapons were found mainly in 3rd world nations.
Guns in America is just part of “the white man’s burden”, I guess it goes back to the days of Kipling and the decline of the British Empire.
Years ago, I happened upon the cabin of an old placer miner in the backwoods of Montana. Nice old guy. Invited me to lunch and told me where to find the best fishing spots. He’d nailed a “Liberal Hunting License” to his door, along with various dire hand-scribbled warnings to law offenders, liberals, commies and such. The inside of his cabin contained more guns than furniture and he wore so many pistols and knives strapped onto himself, I feared that if he ever fell in the creek he’d drown.
It was clear the old boy operated in a strange universe that only made sense to him. Thanks to the religious right, Fox News and the NRA, there is now a whole crop of folks getting all paranoid and bristly about threats manufactured from whole cloth and completely oblivious to the fact that they’re being played like a fine violin.
I’m starting to get really, really fed up with that crap.
That was an amazing segment — but there’s even more on this Vanderboegh creep here.
“Only in America” used to be a positive phrase. Hallucinogens, anyone?
New research is suggesting that exposure to chemicals can affect gene expression in subsequent generations. I sometimes wonder if there was something in the water a few decades ago that has led to people with an increased genetic tendency to paranoia and irrational thought. It seems like it used to be that suggesting this President, who has an F from the Brady Foundation on gun control, was hiding his secret plan to promote new gun regulation by means of fomenting such awful gun violence in Mexico that all Americans would recoil in revulsion was the sort of thing that would get you prompt psychiatric attention.
(As if most Americans cared about what happens in Mexico. There’s been an open drug war there for years now, and are we even really talking about our drug laws or gun control? Nope.)
I’d feel better if I felt like they were all cynical schemers out to get Obama, but I think there are quite a few on that committee that actually believe these conspiracy theories.
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/06/can-exposure-toxins-change-your-dna
Rachel Maddow almost makes me wish I had satellite TV again.
This is very interesting, but unfortunately a new high water mark in “how crazy are we?”
Thanks for posting this, unfortunately, we’re on a health binge and won’t be drinking for a few months. Otherwise this would call for a few double bourbons, some sonorous chatter and the occasional stroking of beards. Stone cold sober things like this prompt the question, “How can things be so completely whacked and yet so ‘business as usual’ at the same time?”
So the basic idea is that the federal government was smuggling guns into Mexico? And not one of these idiots has stopped to consider if that makes any sense? Why would the government have to make any effort at all to get guns into Mexico? The United States is the easiest place in the world to get guns, and the Border Patrol is a lot more focused on who’s coming into the country than who’s leaving. It was my wife who first pointed this out to me. Due to our screwed up laws regarding both drugs and guns, the cartels have set up a very lucrative trade along our border. They send us drugs, and we send them money and guns.
Of course, these are the same people who thought it made sense that Saddam Hussein, when faced with invasion and certain defeat by the most powerful military force in the history of the planet, would take all of his most lethal and massively destructive weapons and hide them in the country next door. Saving them for a real emergency.
Good point, Stephen Stralka.
I happened to catch a bit of the Neil Bortz show on the radio while on the road to day.I don’t know if I spelled his name right, and I’m too tired to “Google” him.
The topic was “Fast and Furious”, and of course, the whole point is to attack and weaken the 2nd amendment. Even Newt Gingritch got in on the funfest.
I’m about flat tired of these loonies too, I’d be off to New Zealand or farther, if possible.
Sadly, I’m stuck here near “The happiest place on earth”.
Proof that the Overton Window works… I remember back in the 1990s, this ‘Fast and Furious’ BS would still have been on airwaves, yes, but on AM radio at 3 am. Now such “news” is mainstream, because of FOX’s poison.
Perfect. Who better to head the House Oversight Committee than Issa – a career criminal.