This is going around as a smoking gun on Operation Fast & Furious…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L54gOgJxIRQ&feature=player_embedded
…only, it’s not really one. It’s a press conference about Project Gunrunner, which was/is our general program for stopping illegal weapons traffic to Mexico. If you watch the video, you’ll see that they’re talking about tracing the guns (Operation Fast & Furious did not), coordinating with the Mexican authorities (Operation Fast & Furious did not), and generally maintaining government oversight over the entire operation (if you believe the administration, Operation Fast & Furious did not). Not really the same thing, in other words.
It is, however, not devoid of interest: this video handily shows the difference between OF&F and the previous administration’s Operation Wide Receiver, which did attempt to trace the guns, did keep the Mexican authorities in the loop, and did maintain government oversight (which is why the operation was closed down by the previous administration, once it was clear that OWR would not succeed). This is of note because Barack Obama and Eric Holder want the American people to believe that the two operations are identical, which is of course absurd; if the two operations had been identical then there would be a lot less Mexican murder sites featuring guns that had been effectively supplied by the Department of Justice.
Hey, I remember Robert Gibbs! Good times. Good times.
Since when has this administration told the truth about their real intentions? Of course they say they are going to ‘trace guns’ and ‘work with the Mexican government’. What do you expect them to announce, that they are just going to arm the Mexican drug cartels to create a crisis by which they will argue for more gun control regs?
This is the beginning of Fast and Furious.
TRS: I am on the ‘incompetence’ end of the malice/incompetence spectrum on this one; the feel that I’ve gotten from this disaster from the beginning is that we had a bunch of idiots come in who thought that they were in the movies, and who let another set of idiots go nuts.
@Moe, I waffle on this one. The main reason to suspect incompetence is, well, the folks involved. But you do have to admit that the inference chain from ‘everyone in the administration starts pushing bogus statistics on guns in Mexico’ and ‘Obama intimates that he’s doing something behind the scenes for gun control’, both right at the same time as this was getting going is suspicious. Plus, for that matter, both incompetent and evil is very much a possibility.
Yeah Moe, I’m with Skip – it looks like both.