What the Gobshites Are Saying: Fast & Spurious Edition
By Charles P. Pierce
at 1:35PM
Well, we seem to have a real rage-gasm on our hands now. The president has gone and said the conjuring words, "executive privilege," thereby presuming to do something once that the previous president did four times in a month back in 2007. And, as we know, for some odd reason —Ooh, ooh, I know! Ask me!— whenever this president does something that other presidents have done, it is a constitutional outrage of biblical proportions.
"Until now, everyone believed that the decisions regarding ‘Fast and Furious' were confined to the Department of Justice. The White House decision to invoke executive privilege implies that White House officials were either involved in the 'Fast and Furious' operation or the cover-up that followed. The Administration has always insisted that wasn't the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?"
And that's from the spokesman for the Speaker of The House, who is, theoretically, a part of the national political power elite. What might we expect from out in the hinterlands of enraged wingnut blogistan? Let's stop first at the home office, shall we? RedState.org is an important little bistro because its guiding intellectual meathead is considered by liberal CNN to be worthy of a slot as a "political analyst." Anyway, he seems to be off-duty today, or at least relegated to the magical Twitter machine and the blithering has been outsourced:
"The GOP was a step ahead of them and released a video reminding everyone just how committed then Senator Obama was to transparency related to documents in the now hilariously trivial "AttorneyGate" involving the alleged political firings of attorneys by the Department of Justice under AG Alberto Gonzales.
Expect to hear a lot of this — here's the dumbest man on the Internet playing the same tune — but do not expect to hear much about how horrified they all were when the previous administration invoked the same privilege to monkey-wrench an investigation into how thoroughly they'd politicized the DOJ. (Please, someone explain to me that whatever is in those documents that the Congress so desperately wants could possibly be anything more than how this administration made the mistake of signing onto a policy idea promoted by the previous gang of idiots. Maybe, if I buy this toy book, I'll find out.... The Obama administration's continuing assault on Second Amendment rights. Why Fast and Furious could be a bigger scandal than Watergate. Glorioski!)
I'd like to believe that this is all now just a war of tactics leading toward some sort of resolution — I'll see your contempt citation and raise you executive privilege — just as I'd like to believe that Darrell Issa would awaken tomorrow morning as something more than Lee Atwater with a seat in Congress. I am not optimistic. If this is more evidence that the president has tumbled to the fact that his political enemies are completely unappeasable, well, that penny took god's own time to drop, but I'm glad it did. They want Eric Holder's head on a stick. They should be told, repeatedly, where that stick should be stored.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-fast-furious-executive-privilege-9890597#ixzz1yRuseaem
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