I’ve been following the Fast and Furious scandal for a while, but haven’t been blogging about it much since so many other fine bloggers were on the case. I didn’t want to just post a chunk of text only to add “what Dwight said” or “what Sebastian said”.
However, since I was able to make my own original contribution, and since, despite a few breakthroughs here and there, the MSM still isn’t covering the story, I thought I would add my voice to the chorus and start doing regular Fast and Furious Updates.
If you check Snowflakes in Hell or Sipsey Street Irregulars (who have been one of the leading blogs on Fast and Furious, and who I just added to the blogroll) daily, you’ll probably see a fair amount of things you’re already familiar with, but I’ll also try to have some original bits from time to time.
So, without further adieu, here’s today’s Fast and Furious Update:
Add Frederick Hill, spokesman for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa that is investigating Fast and Furious, to the list of people deeply skeptical of Holder’s latest denial:
If Attorney General Holder had said these things five months ago when Congress asked him about Operation Fast and Furious, it might have been more believable. At this point, however, it’s hard to take at face value a defense that is factually questionable, entirely self-serving, and a still incomplete account of what senior Justice Department officials knew about gun walking.
Over at Pajamas Media, Bob Owens notes the curious case of the dog that didn’t bark, i.e., how the Brady Bunch and gun-grabbing Democrats have recently fallen strangely silent on Fast and Furious.
Mark Steyn, filling in for Hugh Hewitt, cuts to the heart of the matter: “There were hundreds of dead Mexicans from a gun running program run by the United States.”
If you hadn’t heard, sales to Mexican cartels weren’t just through dealers; sometimes the ATF ordered one of its own agents “to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.”
CBS lets Sharyl Attkisson decloak long enough to print Eric Holder’s “I didn’t lie, I swear, I was just incompetent” defense for the Fast and Furious scandal:
Holder says that his testimony to Congress, stating he first heard of Fast and Furious earlier this year, “was truthful and accurate… I have no recollection of knowing about Fast and Furious prior to the public controversy about it.”
In other words: I’m so out-of-the-loop that I didn’t know my underlings were involved in a massive, illegal, and deadly plot to break the law resulting in over 200 deaths. Way to be on top of things, Mr. AG!
Holder maintains he didn’t know about the controversial gunwalking tactics used in the case.
The Sgt. Schultz defense.
The Attorney General says that while he was sent received memos on Fast and Furious, they are “actually provided to and reviewed by members of my staff and the staff of the Office of the Deputy Attorney General.”
The Richard Nixon “I was out of the loop” defense. Didn’t work so well for him either.
As CBS News has reported, the Deputy Attorney General during Fast and Furious, Gary Grindler is now Holder’s Chief of Staff. Documents provided to Congress indicate Grindler received a detailed briefing on Fast and Furious in March of 2010 and made handwritten notes on briefing materials.
However, in the letter, Holder says Grindler “was not told of the unacceptable tactics employed in the operation in his regular monthly meetings with ATF…”
“I now understand some senior officials within the Department were aware at the time there was an operation called Fast and Furious although they were not advised of the unacceptable operational tactics being used in it,” says Holder’s letter.
There’s a word for this sort of denial: it’s called bullshit. Bureaucracies are good at one thing: Following the rules. Even as stupid as some of the cowboys in ATF are, there’s no way some field-level supervisor got the bright idea: “Hey, let’s directly violate the federal laws we’re supposed to enforce! Plus I won’t tell anyone higher up! What’s the worst that could happen?” Doesn’t pass the smell test. You don’t isolate top officials from this sort of info, you make sure they’re in the loop to cover your own ass. Fast and Furious is so far off the reservation that the order for it had to come from way up high. Not necessarily Holder (though that’s a distinct possibility), but someone far enough up the food chain to make such an outrageous order stick. Like Obama.
Plus this:
In his letter, Holder also criticized the House Committee investigating Fast and Furious, saying he cannot sit idly by “as law enforcement and government employees who devote their lives to protecting our citizens be considered ‘accessories to murder’.”
Well then, maybe you should have, oh, I don’t know, provided enough oversight to make sure they weren’t accessories to murder. Shouldn’t be that hard.
There are two possibilities:
A. If Holder knew about Fast and Furious, he’s an accessory to murder, and shouldn’t be Attorney General.
B. If Holder didn’t know about Fast and Furious, then he’s manifestly incompetent, and shouldn’t be Attorney General.
Lots of reaction to Lt. Governor David Dewhurst’s long-awaited announcement that he was getting in the Senate race yesterday.
Here’s Dewhurst’s official announcement:
Ted Cruz offers a video response:
That video offers a URL for another Cruz website, https://www.provenconservative.com/, but it’s just a fundraising splash page with a link that leads to the main Cruz website.
In response to the Dewhurst announcement, the Tom Leppert campaign sent me a press release (which doesn’t appear to be online) stating:
“It comes as little surprise to me that David Dewhurst has thrown his hat into the ring. Like other career politicians, he has long expressed his interest in a host of higher offices, and I’m glad he has finally settled on the job he wants next.
“As my Twitter followers know, I have been asking David where he stands on a number of important issues. Now that he’s a candidate he should be ready to tell us whether he will support Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget, fight the NLRB’s attacks on Right to Work, call for an end to Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium and sign the Cut Cap Balance Pledge.
“This election is about which candidate knows how to spur job growth and restore fiscal responsibility to Washington. The career politicians and lawyers have had their chance, and they’ve failed. It’s time to send a real-life job creator to the U.S. Senate. I’ve signed both sides of a paycheck, and I’ve made the tough choices in both the private sector and as Mayor of Dallas to cut spending and balance budgets.
“At a time when families are struggling and Washington continues down the wrong path and ignores the tough calls, Texans will choose a new Senator to represent them. They will have three clear choices – a career politician, a lawyer, or a businessman who brings a unique conservative approach to government. Someone who’s signed both sides of a paycheck, grown a business, and cut wasteful spending in both the public and private sector. Who understands firsthand how decisions made in Washington affect the economy. Only one candidate in the race for Senate has created thousands of jobs and made the hard calls that are so lacking in Washington right now.”
More about the Leppert “lawyer” attack line against Cruz anon (I don’t think it will be successful), but it’s interesting how the Leppert campaign plays up his businessman credentials and never mentions (at least here) that he was Mayor of Dallas for four years.
I can find no online reaction from Elizabeth Ames Jones to Dewhurst entering the race, but she just went from a distant third to an even-more-distant fourth.
Paul Burka is not impressed with Dewhurst’s announcement. Laid-off teachers, yadda yadda, but what’s interesting to me is that Burka says he received a Dewhurst robocall for his announcement. This does not strike me as the optimal strategy for disseminating information in the internet age…
Dewhurst is a billionaire and has proven that he can run and win statewide contests in Texas, which can be a challenging state to run in due to its size, its five or six (depending on how you count) major media markets and slew of mid-sized markets, and its diversity. He’ll be formidable, and may even jump to the favorite slot due to his high name recognition alone. And, he speaks Spanish fluently. I’ve seen him handle interviews with Spanish-speaking media on the fly; he’s a pro.
The Spanish-speaking bit is interesting, but I’m not sure the billionaire part is accurate. Dewhurst is rich, certainly, but I didn’t get the impression that he was that rich.
The Daily Kossacks still seem to regard Cruz as the real conservative in the race: “While Dewhurst has been dithering on the parapets, his chief rival for the GOP nomination, Ted Cruz, continues to cement his position as the movement conservative standard-bearer.”
At least one blogger was underwhelmed by the Dewhurst announcement: “With all the fanfare and enthusiasm of a Baptist funeral, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst announced Tuesday that he’d like to be among the number of people Ted Cruz will pwn next March.”
Other Senate race news:
The Washington Post says that Ricardo Sanchez’s fundraising efforts are off to a poor start.
Over at the Houston Chronicle, Patricia Kilday Hart displays her poor research skills by declaring that “Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez is the only announced candidate in the Democratic Primary U.S. Senate race.” Perhaps Sean Hubbard should take up robbing banks, since he seems to be invisible to vast swathes of the MSM.
You might have noticed that I have not been overly kind in my assessments of Paul Burka’s political observations. He comes across as a world-weary, old school, middle-of-the-road liberal reporter who can’t come to grips with the changing political landscape, yearning for the days when the two wings of the Democratic Party controlled Texas politics, Republicans were an exotic novelty, and big-government policies could safely be forged in smoky backrooms over rounds of whiskey without input from those butinski outsiders known as “taxpayers.” He doesn’t understand why the Tea Party won’t just go away and let him go back to a time when the people in power returned his phone calls. (More on Burka’s textbook liberalness in this Kevin D. Williamson piece over at NRO.)
All that said, he offers some very useful advice to his Yankee cohorts (i.e., fellow liberal journalists) on mistakes to avoid in covering Rick Perry. I doubt they’ll take that advice (Burka is, after all, a native Texan, and didn’t graduate from an Ivy League college (I’m sure the idea that Rice might be as good or better than many Ivy league schools is not the sort of thought likely to penetrate their mind) and is therefore automatically suspect), but it’s good advice none the less. The short essays next to Points 1 (Perry is not George Bush) and 5 (Perry is not a male hair model) are particularly good.
It is true that Perry has a much-remarked-upon coif, but don’t let this lead you to assume that he’s soft, or feckless, like that other recent walking shampoo ad, John Edwards. Perry is a hard man. He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved—or respected. And he has gotten his wish.
Washington Post writer Aaron Blake pays serious attention to Ted Cruz, and his role as Tea Party favorite. It’s a decent write-up for an out-of-state MSM outlet playing catch-up, but there are several statements about which I have at least some minor quibbles.
For example, take this sentence
That’s because he’s emerging as a potential top-tier candidate in the Lone Star state race, posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates in what should be one of the most expensive primary races in the country.
Saying that he’s “posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates” suggests that there are, in fact, better-funded candidates. Leppert only has more money on hand thanks to a $1.6 million loan (discounting loans, in Q1 Leppert pulled in slightly over $1 million, and Cruz pulled in slightly under $1 million), and even then the rest of Leppert’s fundraising relied heavily on max contributions from a limited number of Dallas-area donors. So Cruz is about as well-funded as anyone in the race right now. (Would Lt. Governor David Dewhurst change that if he jumped into the race? If he really wanted to commit a substantial portion of his personal fortune (consistently rumored, without verifiable attribution, to be around $200 million), yes it would.)
Likewise his suggestion that Leppert is one of the “big boys” (outside of Dallas, his profile is no bigger than Cruz’s) seems misguided.
Then there’s this:
Dewhurst is the prohibitive favorite if he gets in, and Leppert has made a big splash early with his fundraising. But many conservatives aren’t waiting for Dewhurst—choosing instead to rally around Cruz.
I think “prohibitive favorite” overstates the case a bit (I would use “formidable”), but the idea that conservatives have ever “waited” on Dewhurst is off-base.
As so many other Republican politicians do, Dewhurst occupies that vast gray area between a RINO (think Arlen Specter before he went The Full Benedict) and a real movement conservative. The phrase “a self-described ‘George Bush Republican'” appears, unsourced, in his Wikipedia entry (and thus is automatically suspect), and sums up the feelings of many conservatives towards Dewhurst. He ran as a conservative, and mostly governed as a conservative, but every now and then he would go off on Big Government tangents that would infuriate proponents of limited government. Despite this, outside the state, Dewhurst is regarded as something of an “arch-conservative” for shepherding through the (constitutionally-required) 2003 redistricting.
I wouldn’t go so far as to compare him to Charlie Crist (as some have), but there’s been real dissatisfaction with Dewhurst among movement conservatives, and it came to the fore with this year’s legislative sessions, where, despite having controlling majorities in both House and Senate, conservative Republicans found their agenda being thwarted in many ways great and small by Dewhurst in the Senate and Speaker Joe Straus in the House. Hence state senator (and possible U.S. Senate candidate) Dan Patrick’s lashing out at Dewhurst for thwarting his anti-TSA goping bill. Dewhurst managed to get the big things done (i.e., getting a budget passed without a tax hike), but there’s a sense among conservatives that he could have gotten a lot more conservative bills passed if he really wanted to, and that he “left money on the table” in the game of legislative poker by compromising when he didn’t have to
So it’s not at all surprising that Dewhurst is viewed as a stanch conservative when viewed from inside the Beltway; by Washington, D.C. standards he is. But there’s a widespread sense among Texas conservatives that they should be able to elect a full-bore movement conservative to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison, and that David Dewhurst isn’t that guy. There was a good deal of debate over whether Ted Cruz or Michael Williams was the preferred choice; with Williams getting out of the race to run for a House seat, the issue has been resolved in Cruz’s favor, as indicated by his impressive array of endorsements.
Still, those quibbles aside, the WaPo piece is a pretty solid look at Cruz, and is well worth reading for those following the Texas Senate Race.
(In the future, Brooks might want to run this sort of piece by Jennifer Rubin, who has a lot better grasp of the nuances of conservative politics than most MSM observers.)
I stopped doing This Week in Jihad because it was eating up too much of my time. But this week there were enough big Jihad-related stories to justify putting one up:
Michael Totten has an interesting interview with Claire Berlinski on the situation in Turkey. If Turkey put up a status update, it would read “Mood: Delusional.” Also, is it just me, or does Berlinski look an awful lot like Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House?
You know that “unarmed peace flotilla”? Yeah, not so much.
Female Kuwaiti “activist” calls for the return of sexual slavery to keep rich Muslim men from committing adultery. Sisters are doing it to themselves. And somewhere, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is kicking himself.
Strafor analyzes the latest al Qaeda video and sees a message of defeat. “The very call to leaderless resistance is an admission of defeat and an indication that the jihadists might not be receiving the divine blessing they claim.” The also show how al Qaeda ignorance of American gun control laws (no, you can’t buy automatic weapons at a gun show, since you need to fill out a form, undergo a background check that can take up to 90 days, and have a local law enforcement “chief” authorize your form (among other requirements), and that assumes you live in a state they haven’t been outlawed in) has lead to the arrests of several Jihadests looking to purchase them.
I’m linking to the USA Today story of Catalina Camia because, unlike her journalistic brethren, she actually noted that Sean Hubbard was already running. It’s nice to know that at least one member of the MSM is, in fact, capable of using Google.
As for Hubbard, well, I hope he enjoyed his time as de facto Democratic front-runner, since it ends today…
So the Pentagon has released captured video of Osama Bin Laden watching footage of himself on TV:
Setting aside why he would have had anyone filming him watching TV (maybe he was testing a new camera, or maybe he was looking forward to an “I’m So Meta” Hitler parody video), what this reminded me of most was Norma Desmond watching herself in Sunset Boulevard. That is to say, someone who was once a big international star the world had passed by and was now a has-been, watching faded footage of the glory days, delusional about still being important, unwilling to go outside and largely forgotten.
I’m not going to say that was a fitting end for him, as that was having U.S. soldiers forcibly evict large portions of gray matter from his skull. But it is a fitting prelude to a fitting end.
Over on BurkaBlog I chanced across this framing of the debate over passing the state budget:
Who has more clout: A fictional Texas Ranger and a former major corporate CEO or a cadre of right wing interest groups?
Texas Senate Republicans gave an unabashed nod to the interest groups this week by passing a state budget that balances without tapping the rainy day fund. Instead, the Senate budget relies on accounting tricks and contingent spending. If an economic recovery fails to materialize, even deeper cuts to public education will occur.
The battle was for the senators’ heads and hearts on one side and fear of political retribution on the other. The public school coalition Raise Your Hand Texas ran television commercials featuring Tommy Lee Jones, who starred in the classic mini-series Lonesome Dove, and former GM and AT&T executive Ed Whitacre urging Texans to press against cuts to education. However, when the smoke cleared from the Senate’s budget debate, it was Michael Quinn Sullivan of Empower Texans, Peggy Venable of Americans for Prosperity, and Brooke Rollins of the Texas Public Policy Foundation who had carried the day.
The trio also ran commercials urging Republican senators to stick with state spending cuts proposed by the House. But lobbyists and lawmakers tell me the deciding factor was really the threat that the groups would find Republican primary opponents to run against incumbents and make sure the opponents were well financed. “It’s just intimidation,” said former Lieutenant Governor Bill Ratliff, one of the lobbyists for Raise Your Hand.
Well, that’s one way to spin the story. Here’s another way: Liberal pressure groups defeated by actual Texas taxpayers. And the possibility that an incumbent might actually be challenged in their primary? That’s not intimidation, it’s called democracy.
The underlying attitude of that piece seems to be: How dare elected representatives vote for limited government the way their constituents actually want rather than vote for big government the way liberal interest groups I agree with lobby for?
For years Republicans could get away with breaking their pledges to control government spending, knowing that the MSM would fall all over themselves to praise them for their “courage.” What’s changed has been the Tea Party and similar groups actually paying attention and challenging Republicans who break their promises. That’s what’s changed, and that’s what’s helping hold down spending.
No wonder liberals hate it.
Taxpayers can see the end results of the blue state model of big government, higher taxes, and caving in to unions and other liberal interest groups in California. Given the statements of some of the commentators here, California should be doing much better than Texas.
It isn’t. California businesses and taxpayers are leaving in droves to settle in Texas, because our red state economy is weathering the current recession much better than bankrupt, free-spending California.
The red state model is a success and the blue state model is a failure, and making an environment that is friendly to businesses and taxpayers is a far more effective strategy for states than making an environment that is friendly to big government, bureaucrat unions and liberal interest groups.
This is why Republicans are so firmly entrenched in Texas, and why Democrats haven’t won a statewide race in nearly two decades: The red state model works, the blue state model doesn’t.