[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. Come, I will conceal nothing from you: it’s been a rotten week (the whole family’s been down with colds, which is precisely as much fun as it sounds when your youngest is two and a half). Retail therapy would be nice: hit the tip jar to the side and I promise to spend it on wargame miniatures.]
This is going to be a very visual post, and, as usual, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney provides little if any actual semantic content, so I will simply summarize each video. First off, we have the standard obfuscation:
Carney: blah blah blah Operation Wide Receiver* blah blah blah
Tapper: That was the previous operation; I’m asking about the current one.
Carney: blah blah blah Operation Wide Receiver blah blah blah
Tapper: THAT WAS THE PREVIOUS OPERATION; I’M ASKING ABOUT THE CURRENT ONE.
Carney: We gave documents all the documents that we needed to give.
Tapper: Given that the Department of Justice is already on the hook for ‘giving false information’ – out there in the real world, they’re going to be saying ‘lying’ instead – to Congress, don’t you think that it’s reasonable that Congress might be inclined to just get the raw data and figure it all out for themselves?
Carney: …We gave documents?
But that’s just regular Washington Beltway obfuscation. What really grates? Jay Carney visibly not remembering the name of US Border Agent Brian Terry. Who, to remind everyone, had Operation Fast & Furious guns show up at the site of his murder:
Jake Tapper had to feed Carney the name. That pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about how seriously Carney is taking this case, how much preparation Carney did before going out to answer questions about the case – and pretty much how seriously you can take Carney’s canned observations about the case, too. Hint: the answer is more or less identical, in all three cases.
I’d call for Carney’s firing, except that he won’t be there next January anyway.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Operation Wide Receiver is the administration’s desperate excuse/distraction from their gunrunning activities; it was a Bush-era program that was supposedly identical to Operation Fast & Furious… except that attempts were made to keep track of the guns being sold (Operation Fast & Furious did not), OWR was conducted with the awareness and cooperation of the Mexican government (OF&F was not), and – contra the earnest attempts of the Obama administration – the program ended two years before Bush left office. So, in other words, it wasn’t particularly identical to Operation Fast & Furious at all.
By the way: my source for the first two points of difference? The sworn testimony of Attorney General Eric Holder, back when Sen. John Cornyn was raking him over the coals in 2011. In the clip below, you can see Holder admitting the differences, and explicitly denying that the two operations were the same.
Unless he was, you know, lying there.
Again.
If I was Mitt Romney and completely unscrupulous, I would hold a press conference to introduce Brian Terry’s family so they can blast Eric Holder and President Obama over Fast and Furious. But then I’m not Mitt Romney.
The NRA should do a political ad with Holders testimony of differences between Wide Receiver and Fast And Furious. End it with President Obama, this is YOUR program that killed Agent Terry. No more cover-up!
Jay Carney finally answered a question that has long bothered me: what’s the next lower stage of reincarnation after intestinal parasite?
These phonies need to be tarred and feathered. So let me know where I am wrong….
1. Obama JD runs a program that likely resulted in the death of a border patrol
2. Obama JD then proceeds to lie to congress about said program.
3. In an attempt to cover themselves Obama then covers up details of said program under executive privilege
4. Immediately after invoking executive privilege and covering up any possible evidence of wrong-doing, Obama now wants to release all info he can about another program run by another president who is no longer around to invoke executive privilege.
No words.
Pulling the “executive privilege” card cost Barry-O eight points overnight in the RDTP. And their three-day rolling average policy means it’s going to get worse.
Pardon me while I giggle.
http://tinyurl.com/5krqjz
Someone should ask them about “Operation Castaway.”
Here is a hint: it was just like fast and furious, only in Florida and the guns went to Guatemala.
See a similar post at The Diplomad 2.0 http://thediplomad.blogspot.com/2012/06/emerging-lie-about-fast-and-furious.html
If I were Mitt Romney, I’d be running Spanish-language ads on Spanish-language stations everywhere in the US that has a significant Mexican population, talking about the scores of Mexicans killed by Fast & Furious weapons, and asking why Obama’s trying to cover up the truth.
I didn’t think anybody could be more weasely that Robert Gibbs. Apparently I was wrong. Still, to be fair to Jay Carney, you can’t blame a guy for being unable to defend the indefensible.
Unless indentured servitude or white slavery was involved, Jay Carney not only took the job voluntarily; he actually sought it out. Since the job of being Obama’s press secretary surely involves a maximum career quota of times that he tells the truth [either accidentally or on purpose] and that quota is surely less than his age; we know he is lying, we know that he is probably a knowing co-conspirator in the cover up and everything behind it, and we have a pretty good idea what kind of person he is.
Tapper pretty much has the right idea. Don’t believe a word he says, and publicly make his look like the paid liar that he is.
Subotai Bahaduf
“Baghdad Bob”
[ “White House Press Secretary Jay Carney provides little if any actual semantic content… we have the standard obfuscation…’ ]
DUH. It’s his job to obfuscate on anything negative about the President.
The WH Press Secretary is there ONLY to make a President look good. Positive news about the President is trumpeted, while negative news about the President is ignored, downplayed, or obfuscated.
The White House Press Corps plays along with the game… phony WH “news” fed to the public pays very well to those dopey stenographers. The WH Press Corps pretends to ask tough questions — and the President’s Press Secretary pretends to answer them. That charade has been going on for at least half a century.
A bumbling, stumbling Press Secretary is a good choice for that job because it helps deflect any real communication of information. Usually the Press Secretary does NOT know anything anyway — the President & his core staff keep him in the dark to avoid any inadvertent truths reaching the public.
The Press Secretary is paid by the American taxpayers and should faithfully serve them if he’s there at all. Presidents can easily speak for themselves… but if they want a hack public-relations guy (“Press Secretary”)– they should hire him with their own personal money.