Contempt Vote Tomorrow

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Last week the Congressional Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 23 to 17 (down party lines) to hold to hold US Attorney General Eric Holder in Contempt of Congress for attempting to Obstruct thier ivestigation into the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry who was killed by a rifle registered to the US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (BATFE).

It has since been revealed that BATFE Agents along the Arizona/Mexico Border had been providing weapons to the Signolla Drug Cartel. I posted about the story when initially broke here.

Holder initially denied any knowledge of of the policy, and later defended it as simply the continuation of a Bush-era program called "Operation Wide Reciever". He has since withdrawn those statements. Holder has not yet been formally held in contempt of Congress. The full House still needs to approve the resolution in order for that to happen. But President Obama has elected to support Holder by asserting executive privilege over the documents subpoenaed by the Oversight Committee.

This raises some interesting questions...

Actual lawyers feel free to corrct me, but as I understand it executive privilege allows the president to withhold documents and other materials that would reveal advisory opinions and recommendations by which governmental policies are formulated. By invoking executive privilege Obama and Holder are essentially admitting that "allowing" guns into Mexico was a policy descision.

Cynics have theorized that this was an effort to justify increased Gun-Control and Federal intervention in southern states. Others see it as simply stupidity and negligence. But what the question I find truly fascinating is "Why has the Obama adminisration chosen to make a stand here?"

I've been expecting Holder to get the boot for a couple of years now but it still hasn't happened. Historically Obama has been willing to sever ties with people who's association has become a liability. Holder is becoming a massive target for the Right and seems to rate an indifferent shrug from the left, so why protect him?

I have a few theories which (in order of increasing cynicism) are...

1: Holder and Obama are friends and Obama is genuinely prepared to risk his own reputation to protect him.

2: Obama doesn't think the charges will stick and sees this as an opprotunity to fuck over a Republican-lead investigation.

3: In relation to #3 Obama and Holder have bought into thier own hype and actually believe that nobody cares about violence in Mexico, they just hate black people.

4: The subpoenaed documents include information that could implicate Obama in wrong doing.

5: Holder has dirt on Obama and is blackmailing him.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

He's regularly treated as a conservative hero in the 21st Century by modern conservatives. This isn't an old schtick. *That* would be bringing up the GOP's fetish for McCarthy and rehabilitating the Internments, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1944.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of narcs who sell drugs. Not unusual when infiltrating criminal organizations.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Did you post this to someone else's comment by accident? Because it's pretty clear you weren't in fact responding to anything I said.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

and if the Dems manage to get one of thier own off the hook in the process then good on 'em right?

[foreverbeach.livejournal.com]

You: "The bigger truth is that the GOP, which treats Oliver North as a real hero, has no room to target Holder for the same actions they hold North as a hero for."

Me: "OK, so that's it, then. Because the Republicans are corrupt, the Democrats can't be prosecuted."

[404.livejournal.com]

Having a crappy show on Fox News and the occasional guest spot on some radio shows =/= sainthood. Your schtick is old.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

The FBI took a few pounds of heroin smuggled from Vietnam (probably in us soldier body bags) and sold it to the Black Panthers to de-stabilize their organization.

That was even before the war on drugs.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I never said anything of the sort. The problem you have is that you assumed my noting that Iran-Contra kills any degree to which the real issue is Americans selling guns to bad people who proceed to use them for bad things means that this is somehow not an issue in its own right. At the very least it displays an inability to process nuance, at the very most it really *does* validate my point that the real issue is a purely partisan one and the life of the people killed by this is a pure abstraction.

One bad act does not justify another, but one bad act being heralded as heroism and the other as the deepest pits of evil does tend to call into question the degree to which the actual act is the problem as opposed to how the act can be spun.

[foreverbeach.livejournal.com]

I thought he was tried and convicted. (Initially)

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

One can be on the right side for the wrong reason, to be sure.

[404.livejournal.com]

It's the easy way out when the blue team is in danger of losing some political points. Fan boys have to always blame the other team for sins of the past to exonerate theirs.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Even when FOX is run by Roger Ailes, who's five fingers of the GOP's right hand and three of the left? Do go on. It's like if say, Air America gave John Edwards a show. I predict the GOP would suddenly find cheating on cancer-stricken wives to be an unspeakable evil unless your name is Gingrich.

[404.livejournal.com]

What does all this have to do with F&F? Keep spinning and deflecting.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And here's why I'm using this icon. The issue is not the act, but who perpetrates it. Obviously they do not in fact hold selling guns to people who hate us who will use them against us as evil. Thus the real issue isn't the people who died, it's using their deaths as a tool to bash Barack Obama. This has no relevance to the reprehensible acts themselves, because those acts precisely *are* totally irrelevant.

I realize, however, that using nuance in certain categories of political discussions is trying to get the people who strain out a a gnat and swallow a camel to accept a consistent basis of political decisions.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Honestly, every time I see some pundit write about "Dead Mexicans", I read it as if they're rubbing they're hands in glee, cackling "Dead Mexicans! Let's see Obama get out of THIS one! Nyahahahaha!"

Gives new meaning to that whole "never let a crisis go to waste" thing.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Or maybe the issue has nothing to do with the act, given the degree to which the exact same behavior is treated in completely incompatible fashions?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and looking for the partisan rationale behind a statement just shows that human life matters only on an ideological basis.

[404.livejournal.com]

Keep spinning and deflecting.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

How's sunny Italy?

[foreverbeach.livejournal.com]

Right, and that's my point. Because the Republicans are evil and corrupt, they cannot be allowed to prosecute Democrats who are responsible for murder, because the evil, corrupt Republicans are have sinister motivations for doing so. I GET IT.

Therefore, all Democrats must be able to murder with impunity except in instances where other Democrats are interested in holding them accountable.

That's why I am using THIS icon: because you're all the bad guys.

[terminator44.livejournal.com]

Holder certainly isn't helping his case by trying to cover the whole thing up. Remember, at first he tried to deny to operation even existed.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

With the not-so-minor problem that the person who said this was in fact a Democrat, and we have the classic example of blatant lies and inventing crises in JFK's use of the Missile Gap. Or for that matter in Ted Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick Bridge, or for that matter the people who were surprised when Obama fulfilled a promise he'd been making since 2007 to prolong and widen the Afghanistan War?

[foreverbeach.livejournal.com]

Our recent trip to Giardini-Naxos on the other side of the island:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.753657158055.2143011.20406041&type=3&l=e226d496a7

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It has everything to do with the degree to which F & F and the dead people are really the issue or simply bashing Barack Obama is. I'm being perfectly consistent in all this, you've already run out of anything to talk about as the copypasta responses show.

[404.livejournal.com]

There's no point to do anything but copy and paste, because you are unapologetic in your willingness to back the blue team when they are dead wrong because the red team has some bad guys associated with them because it might score some points for the red team in the process.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I want to see Rome and the Saint Mary Major basilica. Palestrina got his start there, and the acoustics are just astonishing for singers. I'd like to hear that in person.