You all heard my opinion a few days ago. Here is Afterburner with Bill Whittle. It is great. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFIpoL3jrfo
You all heard my opinion a few days ago. Here is Afterburner with Bill Whittle. It is great. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFIpoL3jrfo
I like his and your thoughts please keep them comming.
I love Bill Whittle! His take-down of Jon Stewart after the “Truman was a war criminal” idiocy was brilliant. I’m making my daughter watch it when they start their WWII study in middle school. He’s amazing.
I think the “Truman was a war criminal” response video is excellent and should be required material in every WWII history lesson. Bill Whittle is a genius.
I find that hard to believe there’s a gun control agenda involved.
I find it hard to be leave there is not a gun control agenda involved. Anything any government dose is because of an agenda, why is it hard to be leave that this government is any different.
The reason why I said that because the only evidence that I see of a gun control is the President’s claim of 90% of the weapons claimed by the Mexican cartel (which is false from what I’ve seen). Otherwise, I remain skeptical of the agenda. I don’t mean to be inflammatory in any way. If you think I do, then I apologize.
Also, there are a few people involved in the scandal, not the whole government. Why do you think so?
PS: I wished I would’ve thought of this before. Anyway, I restate my question: why do you think the whole government is involved rather than just a few people?
@ Connor
Multiple departments (Justice, State) in at least 3 different cities. Too widespread for it to be just a couple of people.
I’m also skeptical that gun control was the primary reason for this. I just don’t think it’s that high on anyone’s agenda. It’s more of a useful side effect.
Personally I’m pretty sure that arming the Sinoloas was the real goal of this, and that was accomplished in spades.
I think arming the Sinaloas was icing. What really makes the gun control angle is how they were pushing the line that American guns were driving the violence in Mexico. They knew they were the ones providing the guns to the criminals and they came out with that false propaganda. When you look at it in that context, it’s pretty damning.
It was a two-fer.
Let’s pretend that private citizen John Doe arranged for a couple thousand guns to get to the Shinola cartel. Hundreds of Mexicans and two Federal agents’ deaths were tied to the guns.
Wouldn’t John Doe be facing federal capital murder for premeditated death of Federal agents?
Wouldn’t John doe be facing Mexican charges of premeditated murder?
Wouldn’t anyone who participated be also facing the federal capital murder charge under RICO?
Bill nails it pretty well, now if we could just get an indictment… sigh…
His (reasonable) assertion as to the mind set that casts these deaths off as “just Mexicans” holds a great deal of water, I’m afraid. There is no one who is not viewed as a pawn by this administration, including other nations and their citizens.
And if you don’t believe that this was motivated by a desire to limit gun ownership in America, you sound extremely foolish to my ears. Governments, especially ones as big as ours, fear free men and women. An unarmed populace is easier to subjugate than an armed one. Follow the ideology, indeed. Our president has had a “fuck you, I’ll do what I want” spoiled child attitude from the get go, and this is where that mindset takes you. Now he’s in trouble and he’s going to use every dirty trick and stunt to avoid paying for his choices. At least Nixon had the balls to resign, even if he never really admitted any wrongdoing.
Bill Whittle’s thoughts on this expand on my original impression. There is no way this wasn’t on purpose on some level. I also find it very hard to believe that a POTUS who is involved in the day to day running’s of everything including which terrorists to kill and when knew nothing of F&F. I hope when a Judge reviews the files, if there are documents concerning the POTUS that the Judge strikes down executive privilege on the grounds that the actions were illegal. How is it legal to distribute guns to criminals with no goal other than to make a mess of things and get people killed to make guns look bad.
Oh mannn, thanks for tuning me in on afterburner! Never heard of it previous.
Please.
OMG those guns killed 300 Mexicans! I thought people killed people and not guns? That was bullshit? Nice to know.
Now, please list every anti-gun agenda item endorsed by the Obama administration. I guess you can count his vague non-promise pre-election to get “assault weapons” banned. He do anything about that in office?
Was F&F a truly bad idea? Yes.
Should those responsible be fired and investigated for criminal charges? Yes
Did the Obama administration back it to raise an outcry that could be used to push a gun control agenda? I call bullshit. You don’t think, if he was inclined to push for anti gun measures he couldn’t drum up some support with the numerous shootings that happen in our own country? Has he done that?
The NRA has spurred gun sales with all this nonsense, which I guess is very good for the manufacturer arm of the NRA. Kinda like how gun and ammo sales went through the roof when Obama got elected. I guess that did lead to ammo being hard to buy because the paranoids bought so much they created a mini shortage. Is ammo still in short supply?
Don’t like this administration? That’s fine. They still aren’t trying to take your guns away and they aren’t going to.
PS Bill Whittle is a loon.
Yeah… You guys are sooooooo paranoid. Sure, if I’d used F&F as the plot to a novel 5 years ago, it would’ve been laughed at as being too outlandish.
Rather than repeat myself, go back a few days before this post and read my post on F&F. Basically, Rebus, you’re smoking crack. Come up with another logical explanation for this gigantic law enforcement investigation operation that was impossible to have any actual investigation, by design, from the beginning.
Your two possible explanations are they had another reason, or they were simply that incompetant. Incompetance would be simple, but then why the executive privilege last week?
I hate to disagree with you, sir, but the sad history of the ATF makes it seem likely to me that the complete lack of any attempt to trace the guns stems from idiocy rather than malice. The ATF have always been a collection of thumb-fingered loons, with their ‘high drama’ dial turrned up way too far and a persistant inability to follow through.
None of which excuses Jug-ears or Eric ‘bucket of merde’ Holder. If they approved of this off-the-wallery or even just tried to sweep it under the rug, they should be given the bum’s rush.
They probably won’t be, but they should be.
CSP, the reason I steer away from simple incompetence in this is because they had a template of this program if they wanted to use it. The Bush administration did it as textbook as you can get and still found it too difficult to trace the weapons. How could Obama’s Justice dept. have thought they would be more successful if they skipped the tracking devices altogether?
Up thread it’s suggested that arming the Sinaloas was the goal. I don’t dispute that, but I think strict gun control was the greater goal. Just the fact that they were pushing the “American guns in Mexico” talking point while they were fully aware those guns came straight from the ATF says so much about their agenda.
@Larry: I think the executive privilege is more about the cover-up than the crime itself. IIRC the documents the EP covers are all from after the investigation started. I don’t, for a second, believe Obama wasn’t in on F&F, but I think his involvement in the cover-up is what he’s trying to hide right now.
Executive privilege is what they do when they get caught in a big cockup. No doubt what ATF did was a big cockup. I’m quite willing to believe that at the core of that cockup is one or more people that think they are smarter than everybody and that they know best. You mostly can’t go wrong if you suspect dumbassery and inflated egos in cases like this. Throw in inadequate oversight too. You get some self proclaimed experts playing god in a broom closet with no oversight? Shit like this happens.
I don’t believe that Obama was trying to engineer an anti gun program that would resonate with pretty much nobody…just the folks that are already all in for gun control. How much support that gun control didn’t already have would this scheme pick up? I think pretty much zero. Total number of rat asses given: 0.
Still needs to be investigated and people fired and prosecuted.
If it truly leads back to the White House, I’ll come back and admit I called this wrong. I’m not proud.
Also, sorry, no crack smoking here. Maybe a little buzzed on a single malt, but no crack.
If Obama had nothing to hide, Holder would be ‘under the bus’ with everybody else. There is precisely 1 person important to Obama, and it isn’t Holder.
Obama is looking at RICO responisibility for the capital murder of a federal law enforcement agent.
The shredders and demagnetizers are going full tilt right now. The reason for the delay is destruction of that many pages takes a while.
Schofield: Idiocy and malice are not incompatible.
They wanted a Reichstag fire. They locked themselves in the building before they torched it.
http://www.examiner.com/article/truth-about-operation-wide-receiver-important-to-determine
Executive privilege protects communication with the president himself. So this means that Obama is either lying and buying time, trying to put this off until after the elections, or it means he’s been lying this whole time, and that he did know about the program, the whole time.
“Also, sorry, no crack smoking here. Maybe a little buzzed on a single malt, but no crack.”
Sure, they’re just Mexicans, right? They were probably going to get killed by the drug cartels anyway, and it’s not like they are as important as real people like us Americans, right? So what if our government decided to throw a couple logs into an already raging fire, they didn’t start the fire after all, and why not use it to score some points for some pet projects?
That is what you are implying when you say there is no great evil going on here.
Any flippancy on my part about the plight of Mexicans at the hands of the drug cartels is fueled only by my belief that folks that are onboard with this crackpot conspiracy theory don’t have one ounce of compassion for the Mexicans. If you really care, my apologies.
Seriously and all flippancy aside, I see stated and argued all the time that it is never the gun at fault in a shooting death. Why is it different for these guns?
It’s not the guns that are at fault here. It’s the people that allowed these guns to walk unsupervised. Whether it was intentional to stir up anti gun sentiment or merely pure stupidity it’s the fault of those in charge. Yes it’s not the spoon or the guns fault, but it is the fault of the person who gives the stick of Dynamite to a child. That is essentially what happened here, irresponsible adults put weapons in the hands of criminals knowing full well the deification could hit the oscillator. It’s the irresponsible adults people want to see punished that is why the gun community is outraged over this. We are all responsible with our fire arms but it appears the government isn’t and is trying to claim this is all about politics when people lost their lives.
Why is it different? There is a huge murder machine in Mexico, but instead of trying to stop it or distancing us from the machine, your government used your tax dollars and said “Hey I want to play, too!”
The ATF violated many laws, while at the same time, the administration was saying publicly that the violence in Mexico was our fault for having such lax gun laws. They said that we need more laws while they were simultaneously BREAKING THE LAW.
They knew that the only way to get data to justify the law was for the guns to be recovered at crime scenes. Mexico wasn’t notified and the only attempt to track the guns in mexico was murder statistics.
The ATF and Eric Holder himself used these deaths to say that we needed to pass more restrictive gun control laws. A law was presented to Congress, and was DENIED. So ATF did it anyway, just calling it a policy, just a new rule.
What was this law that all those Mexicans were sacrificed for? Was it a ban on armor piercing bullets? A ban on machine guns? Triple the Border Patrol Agents, a fifty foot wall? Nope.
It’s an extra set of forms that you need to fill out if you are buying more than one rifle in a month in the states of Arizona, New Mexico, California or Texas.
That’s it. That’s what all those people died for. A minor inconvenience and discouragement for legal gun purchasers and legal gun selllers.
I hope the families of the people killed feel good knowing that the death of their loved ones occurred so that normal people could be slightly hassled in 4 states of another country.
Yes the cartels likely would have killed those people without our guns, but by involving itself in this way, our justice department has made itself a willing accomplice to all this violence.
If a getaway driver in a liquor store robbery is culpable as an accomplice, then giving guns to known murderers would definitely make the giver an accomplice. This even applies if a government agency is doing the giving.