What will the media do?
The revelation that the Attorney General apparently lied to Congress about Fast and Furious is a matter more serious than Watergate. No one died in Watergate, but a US border patrol agent did as a direct result of Fast and Furious, and there were many other victims as well. The ATF’s funneling vast numbers of US weapons to Mexican drug cartels, common sense suggests, should have been known not only to Holder, but to the Secretary of State and the head of DHS, given national security implications as well as the US’s treaty obligations to Mexico. What did they know, and when did they know it?
The only benign explanation of what took place is colossal stupidity. That dog won’t hunt, in our opinion. The President himself (falsely) claimed in a 2009 speech in Mexico that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border,” and that the US was going to do something about that. So the focus on this issue was at the highest level of the US government.
The least benign explanation of Fast and Furious is that it was a manufactured crisis in the interest of enacting more stringent gun control legislation. You may recall this statement from the campaign trail in September 2008: “If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it…Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress.” Pause to consider that last sentence, which would never be thought or uttered by a gun rights proponent. It is certainly arguable that a clandestinely executed and politically exploited Fast and Furious could have affected some votes in Congress.
The media utterly failed to perform the most basic tasks of journalism in 2008 and beyond. For the most part, they continue to cheerlead today. (It can’t be a pleasant job, even for the few remaining true believers.) Solyndra, Lightsquared and the billions given to companies friendly to the administration’s policies are one thing. Fast and Furious is now in a different category entirely, and a request for a special prosecutor is on the table. It remains to be seen whether mainstream journalists will choose basic professionalism over their ideological preferences.