At least with Watergate nobody died

At least he didn't kill anyone.

For almost forty years, Watergate has been the standard by which all scandals are judged, even lending its name to a seemingly endless number of incidents. Monicagate, Rathergate, Weinergate...the list goes on and on.

They told us Barack Obama would be a history-making President. Unfortunately for America, it seems that his promised legacy of being the "post-racial" president who would unite our country is going to be overshadows by the record levels of debt and now a new scandal that I predict will put Watergate to shame: Operation Fast and Furious.

"Fast and Furious" is the idiotic name given to an even-more idiotic program, a weapons- sting operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona. ATF falls under the supervision of the Department of Justice (yes, the same DOJ that flopped on the Black Panther voter intimidation case).

I guess I'm not smart enough to understand the grand strategy of Fast and Furious, but apparently the idea was to sell weapons to Mexican drug cartels and then track the weapons, which would...well, I'm not sure exactly what that would do. Prove that violent drug gangs like stockpiling weapons? Again, you don't have to qualify for membership in Mensa to reach that conclusion.

The alleged goal of the program was to give ATF cause to arrest the leaders of the cartels, but considering the Mexican sovereignty issues that arise when U.S. agents seek to arrest Mexican citizens in Mexico, this seems highly questionable. Also, taking out the leaders of a cartel on their own turf would be a highly dangerous proposition under the best circumstances; where is the logic in providing the cartel with more powerful weapons before you attempt to arrest them?

And of course, this being the federal government, and a program supervised by an aggressively negligent DOJ, whatever plans they had or didn't have went awry. Whatever procedures they had for tracking these weapons weren't followed, they quickly lost track of them, and then a Border Patrol agent named Brian Terry ended up dead. After Agent Terry was killed, ATF suddenly figured out how to track weapons and traced the guns that the killers dropped at the scene...back to themselves.

What we know so far is that thousands of high-tech assault weapons are still completely unaccounted for, and hundreds have shown up at widely scattered locations along the U.S. Mexico border, many at crime scenes. How much more bloodshed will be connected to these weapons?

A lot of information is coming out this week about Fast and Furious. Whether that is by intentional design, in the hopes that the debt ceiling debate will overshadow any embarrassing disclosures, I cannot say for sure. But what I can say is that we already have proof that the outrageous arrogance of this administration and its disregard for the law has taken lives. 

Watergate didn't kill anyone. But it does have one key similarity with Fast and Furious: the central question to both scandals is, how high does the corruption reach?

 

For further reading, here are a few well-researched articles I've found that address this breaking scandal: 

RedState | MoeLane | The Great Fast & Furious...Fast & Furious Data Dump

The Heritage Network | The Foundry | Operation Fast and Furious Has Harmed U.S. - Mexican Relations

Yid With Lid | White House Knew About ATF's Fast and Furious (You Didn't Get This From Me)