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Contempt Vote Tomorrow

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 He has since withdrawn those statements.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?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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."

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.

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.

Keep spinning and deflecting.

What spinning or deflecting? I'm not disagreeing that F & F is evil or even that Holder should be prosecuted. I think if it is a prosecution we should string up the people who originally came up with the idea, not just those who implemented it. But evidently this amounts to excusing murder on the part of some who if this was President McCain and this happened would see the Democrats inventing a non-issue and hey, it was only Mexicans anyhow. It would be the people who are here saying it's a non-issue claiming it's an egregious act of war against Mexico, and the people who see this as the worst act of Attorney General Malfeasance since Watergate claiming that it's really nothing at all, only a bunch of thugs who sold drugs died, and who gives a fuck about them? Sure, an ATF agent died, but it's the risk they take.

I guarantee you that this is what will happen if something like this happens under Romney.

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.

Sigh, wow. This icon really is appropriate. What I'm saying is perfectly elementary, and has nothing to do with Dems or GOP. And (here's where it starts): only those inclined to see people out to get them who don't exist, arguing things never said, making points never made, in a discussion that never happened think otherwise. I have repeatedly stated I think F & F is a bad thing, but that it's another transparent example of selective morality. It's a very simple concept, but to some people it's like doing the oral version of the Illiad scenes where Achilles drags Hector around in the original Classical Greek wearing cheap Hoplite armor replicas.

That you see "it's not the evil that led to people dying, but that this is merely a tool" as meaning "Democrats shouldn't be prosecuted" is at the very *least* a strawman, at the worst it's a pattern of either illiteracy or deliberate lies based on something never said invented for the purpose of pure self-congratulation.

What I see is excuse-making. Let's cut to the chase:

Do you support the prosecution of Holder, and if implicated, Obama, for the F&F program and subsequent coverup or not? Yes or no?

Quoting myself above; The problem with this is that when the concept begins under Bush but blows up under Obama, the problem is that the concept was flawed from the get-go. If Holder is held accountable, so should Bush's last attorney general and the Bush Administration morons that came up with this idea to start with also be strung up by their Buster Browns, unless a government operation going bad in a lethal way is somehow worse under a Democrat than a Republican.

So the answer is yes, with the caveat that the prosecution be motivated by justice, not by politics. Precisely what I don't expect from the BJ in the Oval Office is the pits of evil crowd.

I accept your deal!

To be clear, I want Holder and the Dems to get away with this. I want the Drug Cartels to get weapons from the US government and I want them to kill US Agents with them. Anything which helps collapse the evil empire sooner rather than later is a good thing.

That's a lot of histrionics over one dead agent.

Meanwhile, the previous administration was responsible for some 200,000+ Iraqi civilian deaths and an A-G who defended torture, rendition and permanent imprisonment without trial for hundreds.

Perspective, man.

The fact that Ob-ma hasn't gone after Bush/Cheney and Co. for that is yet another failure on his part. Bush should be in jail right now. In Iraq.

No President wants to set that precedent - it means they'll be up for that at some future point.

We also could have handled Iraq with assassination teams instead of wiping out a country's infrastructure and killing a few hundred thousand civilians but we don't want our enemies to conclude they should do the same to us.

how many of those civilian deaths was al qaeda responsible for?

You mean the al queda that wasn't in Iraq before we invaded?

so because al qaeda chose to go to iraq to blow up a bunch of civilians, they are exempt from all responsibility for their killings. that is some tremendous logic there.

i assume you also blame the al qaeda bombings in syria on the popular uprising?

Defensive much? All I pointed out was that al queda wasn't in Iraq until we started fucking the place up. So yes, we have some responsibility for what comes after. The Pentagon doesn't track civilian casualties, so the 200,000 number is a low-end estimate of "collateral damage" deaths from bombing campaigns, etc.

Defensive much?

just pointing out the facts. and no, the 200,000 number is not a low end estimate of "collareral damage" (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/).

The methodologies used guarantee low estimates because of verification requirements. But let's say the civilian death toll is ONLY 114,000 - what's your point?

my point is that blaming bush for massacres carried out by al qaeda in iraq is intellectually dishonest.

(no subject)

fizzyland.livejournal.com - 2012-06-30 03:50 (UTC) - Expand

No, al qaeda is not exempted and neither are we. They followed our cue's, so to speak.

i have no problem taking responsibility for the people we actually killed. just not those killed in al qaeda's war on everyone.

I agree. But then again, we were responsible for security.

which would have been a lot easier without the suicide brigade.