Republicans’ attempt to hold Holder in contempt is uphill battle

From the Washington Post op-ed section:

Terry’s death is indeed a scandal, part of the “Fast and Furious” operation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost track of 2,000 guns it was planning to trace on their way to Mexican drug cartels; two of those firearms were found near Terry’s body. After that, the Justice Department shut down the program (which followed similar “gun-walking” operations during the George W. Bush administration), fired or reassigned several people who ran the program out of ATF’s Phoenix office, requested an inspector-general investigation and handed over about 7,600 pages of records to Issa’s committee.

Republicans want to know whether top officials at Justice or the White House knew about the gun-walking program, which, although they haven’t turned up evidence of this, would be a reasonable line of inquiry. But casting doubt on their motives are the documents they are demanding: only those since February 2011 — two months after Terry was killed and the program was shut down.

Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) accused Issa of setting up a “kangaroo court” to convict Holder. “If this were a genuine attempt to make sure that the Terry family had closure, we’d have an open investigation,” he said, and call witnesses involved in the program over the past six years. But, Democrats complained, Issa never sought public testimony from people in the Phoenix ATF office who ran the operation, or from the former head of the ATF, who told committee investigators that he never informed Justice Department higher-ups of the operation because he didn’t know about it.

More here.

You know, I'd be a lot more inclined to take this thing seriously if we'd already had massive congressional probes into, say, why the entire Bush administration thought Iraq had WMD when everybody who had anything relevant to say about the topic asserted they didn't, or torture programs at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, or the failures with Katrina. You know, really important stuff. I mean, the Fast and Furious failure does, indeed, warrant some kind of investigation or probe or whatever, I guess, but when compared to the stuff that Congress didn't go after, at least, not in the way they're going after Holder, this "scandal" is a joke.

No, this is the same old bullshit highly partisan political theater to which Republicans gravitate when they don't have anything better to do--keep in mind that unemployment remains high and Congress is doing essentially nothing; that is, this Holder contempt thing is not only unjust, but also a complete waste of time, when there are far more pressing issues. And we've been here before. Remember the Whitewater scandal back during the Clinton years? Republicans pushed and pushed and pushed and never found anything. They even insisted that the first special prosecutor, a Republican named Fisk, wasn't good enough, so they managed to throw him out and get Kenneth Starr. Still nothing. But Starr did manage to maneuver Clinton into lying about his completely unrelated affair with Monica Lewinsky, which gave the GOP dominated House an ostensible reason to impeach him. And they were major self-righteous assholes about it.

Here's how it works. Find something that kinda, sorta, maybe has a stink of scandal about it. Hem and haw and freak out and freak out and freak out ad infinitum. And maybe, just maybe, after the multiple fishing expeditions to which they have subjected their Democratic target, they just might find something, anything, to justify some asshole hardball. And that's exactly what's happening here with Holder. They're also trying the same thing with the Solyndra "scandal," but it remains to be seen if it will be successful, and by "successful" I mean find somebody to put the screws to.

As you know, I have very little love for the Democrats. But at least they're serious about governing the nation. The Republicans, as politicians, are out to do nothing but suck blood and destroy the government. We really ought not to put up with such evil. But, for reasons unknown, we do. Again and again.

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