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I know nothink! NOTHINK! That’s Sgt. Schultz catchphrase from the Hogan’s Heroes, as the WWII prison guard dodged responsibility for doing his job. The White House might as well have loaded the catchphrase into President Obama’s TelePrompTer during today’s press conference, as the Commander-in-Chief eschewed any prior knowledge of the Solyndra and Fast n’ Furious SNAFUs. What else could he say? Whatever it was, he didn’t say it. And no matter what he said, well, any way you look at this the President loses . . .
If Obama wasn’t aware of a federal program that enabled firearms smuggling to Mexico— as part of his publicly declared crackdown on gun smuggling to Mexico—why not? Operation Fast and Furious was a major ATF effort, funded with extra money allocated to the Bureau at President Obama’s request. And this was it: what the ATF was doing to stop gun smuggling (allegedly). Why didn’t the President know the game plan?
If President Obama was aware of Operation Fast and Furious, and there’s documentation or credible testimony to prove it, stick a fork in him. He’s done. Never mind that the U.S. has been funneling guns into Mexico for decades, thousands of which “seeped” to the bad guys. The idea of arming Mexican narco-terrorists is beyond the pale.
Obama: it wazzunt me. Holder: missed that. And yet U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is dead. Pinning the blame for the program that armed the men who killed Terry (and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata) on incompetence further down the Obama administration food chain is an excuse that will not win the President any friends or admirers.
Nor will his Administration’s sloth and timidity in dealing with the scandal. If people were authorizing gun running to Mexico “behind his back,” shouldn’t the President have fired the people who kept him in the dark? Gunwalker has been drip, drip, dripping for months. From Real Clear Politics, here’s a choice quote from the press conference:
“He’s assigned an Inspector General to look into how exactly this happened and I have complete confidence in him and I have complete confidence in the process to figure out who in fact was responsible for that decision and how it got made,” Obama added.
As TTAG reported previously, the Inspector General’s (IG) office has been sharing information about their “investigation” with the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s office—which is under suspicion in both Gunwalker and Grenadewalker. The “independent” IG investigation is pre-D.O.A.
In terms of speed and rigor, it seems that the DOJ’s internal investigations are based on the dynamic sleuthing done by O.J. Simpson after his acquittal.
So the Chief Executive is shocked—shocked, I tell you!—about a half-billion dollar loan his peeps ram-rodded through the DOE to fund a green energy company that went bankrupt AFTER getting the loan, and completely at a loss on the whole Fast n’ Furious Guns for Gangstaz thing.
So is he clueless, a terrible executive or lying through his teeth? There is but one obvious answer: yes.