Charlie Pierce Asking the Right(er) Question

The Republicans have grown giddy over this Fast And Furious business, a truly terrible initiative by which firearms were loosed upon the streets in the hope that they would find their way to drug dealers we would very much like to arrest, and a tactic pioneered, you will not be surprised to learn, by various brainiacs in the employ of the Bush Administration.

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Republicans led by Rep. Darrell (Everyone's As Dirty As Me) Issa uncrated his outrage and has been hauling Attorney General Eric Holder up before his investigating committee fairly regularly over the past two years, hoping to find something (anything!) that would tie Holder to the killing of a border agent, and seeking to hang the entire responsibility for this truly idiotic strategy around Holder's neck.

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Now, Issa's threatening to hold Holder in contempt of Congress on June 20, and Holder's warning darkly of a "constitutional crisis," as though we haven't been living in the midst of one of those since the resolution of the 2000 election.

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The "gun-walking" strategies that began under the last administration have been buried in the Crawford underbrush, which must be quite thick these days now that nobody's around to clear it any more. (And, coincidentally, it comes just as Holder's Justice Department is moving on voter-suppression in places like Florida, about which more later today.) The way you know that is that nobody — except, as always, Charlie Savage in the New York Times — is asking the real question anymore. Which is, basically, who dealt this mess? Somebody should have recognized this as being a bad idea right from jump. And, riddle me this: How does this differ in its basic law-enforcement philosophy from all the scams the spooks are running wherein they find some guy in a bar who wants to bring down the Great Satan personally, and our gumshoes feed him a line about RPG's and Semtex, and the guy shouts "Huzzah!" and starts making plans, and then winds up in Pelican Bay doing life plus 20 years? How long will it be before one of those clever plots goes badly wrong and the guy the spooks find isn't as stupid and hopeless as the guys they've found so far have been? How long before we have a "gun-walking" plot that winds up with a bomb? And what will happen if it does?

  Charlie Pierce