Friday, June 22, 2012

Just Mexicans

Political Cartoons by Glenn Foden

"It warn't the grounding -- that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head."
"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"
"No's. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt."
 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


That passage written by Mark Twain highlighted the attitude of southern Whites towards Blacks in antebellum America.  One would think we've come a long way since then but the attitude of Democrats toward the Fast and Furious scandal seems to suggest otherwise.  Was anybody hurt by the Justice Department program where guns were sold to drug cartels and allowed to be taken into Mexico?  No, just some Mexicans.  Some 300 of them.  Oh, and a couple of cops.  No big deal, we can't understand why Republicans are so outraged by this, must be politics.  No, it must be racism, that's it, the Republicans are so outraged by the deaths of a couple hundred Mexicans facilitated by our top law enforcement agency because they are racists.  After all, it's just some Mexicans.

 These are not the documents you are looking for, move along...

Blame Bush
The problem of gun walking was a field-driven tactic that dated back to the previous administration, and it was this administration’s attorney general who ended it.
So said White House mouthpiece Jay Carney at a press hearing shortly after Obama invoked executive privilege in a last ditch effort to cover up lord knows what.  Carney should know better than to tell such a blatant lie so soon after Holder had to recant his testimony for pretty much saying the same thing.  Bush stopped Operation Wide Receiver as soon as some guns were lost.  There are many differences between Operation Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious.  The biggest difference is the fact that Wide Receiver tried very hard to keep track of the guns so they could actually get some intel from the operation and arrest the gunrunners.  The guns had tracking devices and the Mexican authorities were included in the operation.  Holder's guns did not and Mexico was kept entirely in the dark about Fast and Furious.  Wide Receiver  failed and guns made it into Mexico because while they were tracked by U.S. officials to the border and Mexican officials were notified as to where and when they would cross the Mexican police didn't manage to capture and arrest the gunrunners, (go figure).  The program was shut down October 6, 2007.


Given the failure of that operation, which was limited to about 650 guns run out of ATF's Phoenix office, one wonders why Holder's ATF would try it again.  One wonders why they would massively expand the operation to include several cities and thousands of guns.  One really has to wonder why no effort at all was made to keep track of the weapons and while it made sense to not include the Mexican police again why weren't American agents working  in Mexico involved?  You can only conclude that they wanted to flood Mexico with weapons that could be traced to the United States after they were used in violent drug crimes.  That way they could prove the meme that had previously proved to be a lie that 90% of guns used in crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

That should outrage everyone.  In order to push a political agenda, greater gun control, the United States was willing to arm violent criminals and sacrifice hundreds of Mexican citizens.  Doesn't that make us sponsors of terrorists?  But hey, they're just Mexicans.

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