A Fast President and a Furious Public

As a House committee was about to vote on condemning Attorney General Eric Holder for withholding information on the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal, in which at least one individual – a border patrol agent – was killed, Obama invoked executive privilege, barring Congress from reading any documents pertaining to the case.

The Democrats and their propaganda media wriggled and dodged, and tried to throw it back on the Bush administration.  However, Committee Chairman Issa noted that the Bush administration’s role was in 2004 and this was 2011.  They were talking about now.

The Media is accusing the Republican-held Congress of partisanship, failing to note that the Democrats also voted along partisan lines.  Echoes of the Watergate Era, when Pres. Richard Nixon was forced to resign after invoking executive privilege.  Although it was a spurious excuse for violating the rule of law, we’ve quickly forgotten that all Nixon was trying to do was discover whether the Democratic National Committee was accepting foreign donations, particularly from Communist countries.

No one died – except perhaps respect for the law – during the Watergate scandal.  Nixon’s actions were incredibly foolish, to say the least.  He paid for it with his office.  Giving guns to Mexican drug cartels (ostensibly in the hopes of the straw man being led to the “Big Guns”) was dangerous and counterproductive, and cost at least one person his life, and considering the numbers of guns (rumored to be in the hundreds and thousands), probably more.

The Democrats complain that the Bush Administration began the operation, on a more limited scale.  We can depend upon the Obama administration to turn this event to account and push for the legalization of drugs.  Think of all the lives saved, he’ll say.

The Media is quick to note that this is the first time Obama has invoked executive privilege.  He hasn’t needed to up until now because he’s done everything by fiat.  He’s invoked executive privilege in preventing the investigation of the Fast and Furious scandal.  His counterpart in Congress at the time, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, released the Obamacare legislation only a few days before the vote, making it impossible for anyone to read what the legislation involved before it was signed into law.  Today, we find out the Supreme Court’s decision on that piece of legislation. 

This scandal is similar to Watergate, only we have more information now than we did then.  We have better means of communication, and we no longer hear only one side of the story.  Nixon said, famously, that the cover-up is worse than the crime.  Nixon risked his presidency on a gamble; Obama is risking thousands of lives and our freedom on an arrogant presumption:  that he is an emperor, not a president.