On the rare chance that Members of Congress can be trained the same way you train a puppy, let's try a little positive reinforcement. After the jump, I share stories of two Congressmen who I think deserve a high five.
I had been under the impression that Attorney General Eric Holder was merely incompetent. Sigh...if only that were true. It is starting to appear that Holder is not merely incompetent, he may actually be deliberately destructive. Kudos to California Congressman Darrell Issa for pushing for a full investigation of the "Fast and Furious" scandal:
Rep. Darrell Issa, who is leading a probe into the Fast and Furious Mexican gunrunning scandal, launched a scathing attack on Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, accusing him of being incompetent, untrustworthy and negligent...
“Whether you realize yet or not, you own Fast and Furious. It is your responsibility,” wrote Issa [in a letter to Holder], the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
“You have made numerous statements about Fast and Furious that have eventually been proven to be untrue. Your lack of trustworthiness while speaking about Fast and Furious has called into question your overall credibility as Attorney General.
“The time for deflecting blame and obstructing our investigation is over,” Issa wrote. “The time has come for you to come clean to the American public about what you knew about Fast and Furious, when you knew it, and who is going to be held accountable for failing to shut down a program that has already had deadly consequences, and will likely cause more casualties for years to come.”
Issa was responding to a highly partisan letter Holder sent out on Friday trying to explain his position on the scheme. In that letter, in which Holder insisted that he did not know of Fast and Furious until early this year, he attacked Republicans for trying to politicize the matter.
Issa labeled Holder’s letter “deeply disappointing.” He added, “Instead of pledging all necessary resources to assist the congressional investigation in discovering the truth behind the fundamentally flawed Operation Fast and Furious, your letter instead did little but obfuscate, shift blame, berate, and attempt to change the topic away from the Department’s responsibility in the creation, implementation, and authorization of this reckless program.”
...Issa did not mince words in attacking Holder’s comments. “It appears your latest defense has reached a new low,” he wrote.
“Incredibly, in your letter from Friday you now claim that you were unaware of Fast and Furious because your staff failed to inform you of information contained in memos that were specifically addressed to you.
“At best, this indicates negligence and incompetence in your duties as Attorney General. At worst, it places your credibility into serious doubt.”
And here is a member of Florida's Congressional delegation, Representative Cliff Stearns, who has been taking the lead in the Solyndra investigation in his role as the Chair of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee:
...On Friday, the official overseeing the program that awarded a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra resigned. And e-mails uncovered by the investigation show that a senior Energy Department official, who was a 2008 Obama fundraiser, was more active in the loan than administration officials have acknowledged.
Drip by drip, the situation grows worse for Obama, and Stearns has his hand on the spout...
"It's sobering," he went on, "because it's a lot of money that's being lost and these loan guarantees are not just Solyndra. There are lots of others out there. The responsibility is to show the taxpayer money is being used wisely and we're starting to find that it's not."
...Stearns says the United States should provide incentives for companies to exploit technological advantages, but not subsidize industries, such as solar, when China can use cheap labor, easy access to raw materials and little regulation to win the price war.
"We should not be picking winners and losers, which is a fundamental flaw in his stimulus scheme," Stearns said after Obama's news conference...
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