Bloodthirsty Liberal

Now I know why Eric Holder has been slow and reluctant to respond to repeated Congressional inquiries into Fast and Furious: he’s had a lot on his mind!

[BTW, am I the only one struck by the similarity between Lou Sheikh Mohammed and Khalid Jacobi?]

The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four accused co-conspirators will appear in public for the first time in more than three years Saturday, when U.S. officials start a second attempt at what is likely to be a drawn out legal battle that could lead to the men’s executions.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants are to be arraigned at a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on charges that include that include 2,976 counts of murder, one for each person killed in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

In the past, during the failed first effort to prosecute them at the U.S. base in Cuba, Mohammed has mocked the tribunal and said he and his co-defendants would plead guilty and welcome execution. But there were signs that at least some of the defense teams were preparing for lengthy fight, planning challenges of the military tribunals and the secrecy that shrouds the case.

The arraignment is “only the beginning of a trial that will take years to complete, followed by years of appellate review,” attorney James Connell, who represents defendant Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, told reporters gathered at the base to observe the hearing.

“I can’t imagine any scenario where this thing gets wrapped up in six months,” Connell said.

Doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that our youthful, dewy-eyed crusader against crime (I mean international terrorism), Barack Obama, and his youthful ward (and chief law enforcement officer) Eric (The Red) Holder were promising a swift and decisive conviction of KSM in a civilian show trial? In New York City, no less? I feel old just remembering. I guess we’ve all grown up a lot since then.

PS: My apologies to any members of the Jacobi family offended by the above comparison.

This is what America has become

…A quarter-century ago, Sharpton burst onto the national scene as the mouthpiece for Tawana Brawley, a black teenager from Upstate New York who falsely claimed that she had been raped by white men. His image worsened a few years later when Jewish leaders in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, accused him of inflaming anti-Semitism. Then came the 1995 Harlem protest at which he called a Jewish landlord a “white interloper” — followed by an attack on the landlord’s store that left eight people dead.

Now Sharpton is arguably the most prominent civil rights figure in the country. Without question, he is a kingmaker in Democratic politics. Gone are the polyester sweatsuit and gold medallion of yore, replaced by gray business suits on a Sharpton who has shed dozens of pounds. These days he carries both a BlackBerry and an iPhone as he hustles about midtown Manhattan. His three-hour daily radio show, ending at 4 p.m., gives him only two hours to prepare for television at 6.

After Brawley and Crown Heights and a 67-count indictment over financial problems, Sharpton ran twice for the U.S. Senate, and once for mayor of New York; he tried for president in 2004. He latched on to some of the most visible racial cases of the era and went on a 40-day hunger strike in 2001 after being arrested for protesting U.S. military bombing exercises on Vieques, Puerto Rico.

But he established himself as a team player with his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and by 2008 the Democratic presidential candidates were flocking to his annual convention.

On Thursday, the day after his most visible career triumph, Sharpton worked the ballroom at Washington’s convention center, grinning for photographs. Opening up for his breakfast speaker, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Sharpton regaled the crowd with a story of how Obama invited him and Newt Gingrich to the Oval Office and asked them to launch a five-city tour promoting education reform. When Duncan took the microphone, he requested “a huge round of applause for our leader, Reverend Al Sharpton.”

This is from the beginning of the article:

“Check out this,” the flamboyant civil rights leader told me during breakfast at his organization’s annual meeting this week. He flipped through the program until he found a full-page ad with the logos of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. “News Corporation Proudly Supports National Action Network’s 2012 Convention,” it said.

Sharpton grinned. “They bash me on Fox News,” he said. “But they sponsor my conference.”

Everybody wants to be on Sharpton’s good side these days. No fewer than five Cabinet officers and a senior White House official went to this year’s convention to kiss his ring. President Obama spoke at last year’s conference and has sought Sharpton’s advice on policy. Sharpton has a show on MSNBC five nights a week, and he doles out airtime to a procession of politicians and journalists (including me).

Wednesday night brought the sweetest moment yet in Sharpton’s long and controversial career: the announcement that Florida authorities would charge Trayvon Martin’s shooter. Sharpton, at the request of the boy’s parents, had done more than anyone else to bring the case national attention.

Just hours before the announcement that George Zimmerman would be charged with second-degree murder, Martin’s parents held a joint news conference with Sharpton — and a few hours before that, Attorney General Eric Holder, also at the convention, praised Sharpton for his “tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless.”

It was confirmation that Sharpton has pulled off one of the rarest second acts in American public life: from pariah to power player.

“It was a huge moment, because it was the coming together of everything,” Sharpton said, with his trademark vainglory. “We had the attorney general here and one of the biggest civil rights cases of the 21st century, and having to do TV and radio shows at the same time, it was all combined for everybody to see.”

- Aggie

I was just getting used to a race-baiter as a major personality on a minor network—shame on me for my indifference—when the same race-baiter was promoted to government consultant, or close enough.

Shame on them:

On Wednesday U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urged activists with the National Action Network — a protest organization founded and run by MSNBC host Rev. Al Sharpton – to help President Barack Obama’s administration promote its agenda.

The pillars of advocacy Holder pushed for during the speech, he said, “cannot be the work of government alone.”

“We will continue to need your help, your expertise, your dedication and your partnership,” Holder told Sharpton’s activists. “While I’m optimistic about the path that we’re on and the place that we’ll arrive, I cannot pretend that the road ahead will be an easy one. Many obstacles lie before us.”

“This — this — is our moment,” Holder added as the crowd cheered. “So let us seize the chance before us. Let us rise to the challenges of our time.”

It’s unclear if Obama agrees with Holder using his government position to rally members of Sharpton’s organization, but Holder did open his speech with a presidential hello. “I’m honored to be included in this annual gathering once again and bring greetings from a friend of mine, President Obama,” Holder said.

Tawana Brawley, Freddie’s Fashion Mart, Crown Heights—Al Sharpton has never met a racially charged situation he couldn’t exploit, even leading to blood and death.

Speaking of…

“In recent weeks, in the wake of a tragedy [the Trayvon Martin case] that we’re struggling to understand, [Americans] have called not just for answers and for justice, but also for civility and unity and for a national discourse that is productive, respectful and worthy of both our forbearers and our children,” Holder said.

…

DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler did not respond when The Daily Caller asked her if Holder’s logic on potential civil rights crimes applies equally to the New Black Panther Party. George Zimmerman’s family has alleged that Holder is not pursuing the New Black Panthers for potential hate crimes because, like them, he is black.

The NBPs put a bounty on Zimmerman’s head. But last time they engaged in intimidation, the 2008 election, Holder dropped the open and shut case. If Holder was standing any closer to Al Sharpton, he’d be on the other side of him.

PS: Maybe the National Action Network does good work, maybe not. But so does Hezbollah, or so I hear. Doesn’t mean I want them promoting the government’s agenda.

Very, very funny

- Aggie

Eric “The Red” Holder is now Eric “The Red-Faced” Holder:

Top Department of Justice officials had extensive knowledge of and involvement in Operation Fast and Furious, claims a new report released Thursday, hours before Attorney General Eric Holder’s scheduled testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The report released by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, top lawmakers investigating the botched gunrunning operation, claims Justice Department officials in Washington and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were involved in the coordination in the early stages of the operation.

Republican lawmakers Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) released a new report suggesting top Department of Justice officials had extensive knowledge of and involvement in Operation Fast and Furious.

Justice headquarters “had much greater knowledge of, and involvement in, Fast and Furious than it has previously acknowledged,” the memo reads.

The memo, which contradicts claims by the Justice Department, is based upon interviews, documents and emails involving key players of the operation run by the ATF. The operation allowed some 2,000 weapons cross the border into Mexico and into the hands of cartel members.

Two of the weapons linked to the program were found at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010 as well as other crime scenes in Mexico.

Agent Terry’s family has filed a $25 million wrongful death lawsuit on the basis of such evidence.

Oh, and when you’re through testifying on that, Mr. Attorney General, do you think you can answer a few questions about this?

A U.S. Justice Department source has told The Daily Caller that at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted.

The sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes, the source said, adding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable.

The bribed officials, an attorney with knowledge of the investigation told TheDC, remain on the taxpayers’ payroll at the Justice Department without any accountability. The DOJ source said Holder does not want to admit public officials accepted bribes while under his leadership.

I wonder if The Red stares up a the ceiling fan at nights asking himself why he ever took this job for President Doofus when he could be pulling in seven figures at Covington & Burling. He may be in need of their services before this is over.

Most of us cannot remember it at all, but Barack Obama is showing up the re-make

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president’s re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president’s surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president’s party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president’s re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president’s or anyone else’s office.

Now, in polite company, here in Massachusetts, we are encouraged to hate the Koch brothers. It’s part of the elementary school curriculum. (Just kidding). So I guess it is ok to do this to them?

What Messrs. Koch do, in fact, is manage businesses that provide employment to more than 50,000 people in North America in legitimate, productive industries. They also give millions of dollars to medical researchers, hospitals and cultural institutions. Their biggest offense, apparently, is that they also contribute generously to nonprofit organizations that promote personal liberty and free enterprise, and some of those organizations oppose policies advocated by the president.

Richard Nixon maintained an”enemies list” that singled out private citizens for investigation and abuse by agencies of government, including the Internal Revenue Service. When that was revealed, the press and public were outraged. That conduct will forever remain one of the indelible stains on Nixon’s presidency and legacy.

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace.”McCarthyism,” defined by Webster’s as the “use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition,” will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him.

In this country, we regard the use of official power to oppress or intimidate private citizens as a despicable abuse of authority and entirely alien to our system of a government of laws. The architects of our Constitution meticulously erected a system of separated powers, and checks and balances, precisely in order to inhibit the exercise of tyrannical power by governmental officials.

Yadda, yadda, yadda… Will you please shut up – please? The Constitution is just paper and no better than the people that enforce it. Eric Holder enforces it now.

- Aggie

That’s a better description of this scandal:

The head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is threatening to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress if he fails to comply with congressional subpoenas for documents.

Holder has until Feb. 9 to comply.

In a four-page letter to Holder, Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claims the Department of Justice has “misrepresented facts and misled Congress,” which began its investigation of Operation Fast and Furious one year ago.

Issa wrote that Holder’s “actions lead us to conclude that the department is actively engaged in a cover-up” because it refuses to comply with previous subpoenas.

“If the department continues to obstruct the congressional inquiry by not providing documents and information, this committee will have no alternative but to move forward with proceedings to hold you in contempt of Congress,” Issa warned in the letter.

Hey, Fridays only come once a week! There’s only so much incriminating evidence you can dump at one time, you know.

I was just thinking that this story was moving too slow, that the momentum wasn’t there to sustain the outrage. After all, most of the people who were shot to death in this monumental cluster[bleep] were Mexican, so what’s the big deal?

Holder’s got to feel like an outnumbered general, in the grips of a classic pincer movement:

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Issa’s Senate counterpart in the inquiry, said Tuesday that the documents sent to Congress are not even 10 percent of those received at the inspector general’s office but the department has yet to explain why it is “withholding each of those 74,000 pages.”

Grassley, responding to a Democratic minority report out of the committee on Tuesday, suggested that nothing coming from the Justice Department should be taken at face value, especially since Holder initially denied “gunwalking” had occurred but has since admitted to the operation.

“Documents turned over late Friday night indicate (Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer) was still discussing plans to let guns cross the border with Mexican officials on the same day the department denied to me in writing that ATF would ever let guns walk,” Grassley said.

“He stood mute as this administration fought tooth and nail to keep any of this information from coming out for a year. It will take a lot more than a knee-jerk defense from their political allies in Congress to restore public trust in the leadership of the Justice Department. The American people want to see those who failed to act be held accountable,” he said.

Care to say it with me? Raaaaacist!!!

Eric Holder apparently spent the evening dumping Fast and Furious documents.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice dumped documents related to Operation Fast and Furious on congressional officials late Friday night. Central to this document dump is a series of emails showing Holder was informed of slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder on the day it happened – December 15, 2010 – and that he was informed the weapons used to kill Terry were from Fast and Furious on the same day.

An email from one official, whose name has been redacted from the document, to now-former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke reads: “On December 14, 2010, a BORTAC agent working in the Nogales, AZ AOR was shot. The agent was conducting Border Patrol operations 18 miles north of the international boundary when he encountered [redacted word] unidentified subjects. Shots were exchanged resulting in the agent being shot. At this time, the agent is being transported to an area where he can be air lifted to an emergency medical center.”

That email was sent at 2:31 a.m. on the day Terry was shot. One hour later, a follow-up email read: “Our agent has passed away.”

Burke forwarded those two emails to Holder’s then-deputy chief of staff Monty Wilkinson later that morning, adding that the incident was “not good” because it happened “18 miles w/in” the border.

Wilkinson responded to Burke shortly thereafter and said the incident was “tragic.” “I’ve alerted the AG [Holder], the Acting DAG, Lisa, etc.”

This whole thing is Nixonian. When do we find out that Obama knew all along? Will there be a home invasion to try to neutralize enemies? How Hollywood can we get here?

Then, later that day, Burke followed up with Wilkinson after Burke discovered from officials whose names are redacted that the guns used to kill Terry were from Fast and Furious. “The guns found in the desert near the murder BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about – they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store,” Burke wrote to Wilkinson.

“I’ll call tomorrow,” Wilkinson responded.

I can hear them now: Ve Knew Nuhzing! Nuhzing!!!

Hogan’s Heros, the lot of them.

- Aggie

Eric (The Red) Holder plays fast with the truth, making other people furious (most definitely including me):

Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar told The Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder’s race-card play to attack his critics is “absolutely horrendous.” But Gosar said he thinks race may have played a role in the Department of Justice’s execution of Operation Fast and Furious — but in a different way from how Holder is framing it.

“He [Holder] brought up the race card, and while I think it’s absolutely horrendous that he would bring up the race card, in Fast and Furious, we were in fact impugning the Mexican people,” Gosar said in a phone interview. “About 300 people have lost their lives.”

“When the attorney general brings up the race card, he’d better be very, very careful — particularly for the Hispanics and what’s happened to them,” Gosar adds. “He’s been very insensitive, not only to the [U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian] Terry family in making an apology and making it very public, but where’s the apology to the Mexican government and the families of the victims in Mexico?”

Boy, I wish I were smarter. (I know all of you do too.) I’ve written about Holder’s wretched, offensive comments twice before, I believe, and I neglected to make this obvious but critical point. The program’s goal was to put these weapons of medium destruction into the hands of people who knew how to maximize their effect. In that sense, it worked perfectly. Holder’s Justice Department armed the most heinous killers in the American continents (rivaling the Congolese, Somalian, and perhaps one or two others) with the express purpose of seeing people die. Mexican people. And that’s not racist?

In case you forgot:

“This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said, according to the Times. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

And the perverse (and I do mean that word) reason they let hundred of people die of gunshots was that then they could call for gun control. In a just, fair and sensible world, Holder would be gone.

The soft cry raaaaacist! [NB: This is not a satire by Buck.]

Attorney General Eric Holder accused his growing chorus of critics of racist motivations in a Sunday interview published in the New York Times. When reached by The Daily Caller Monday morning, the Department of Justice provided no evidence to support the attorney general’s claims.

Holder said some unspecified faction — what he refers to as the “more extreme segment” — is driven to criticize both him and President Barack Obama due to the color of their skin. Holder did not appear to elaborate on who he considered to make up the “more extreme segment.”

“This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said, according to the Times. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

Well, I suppose it is a fact that he’s an African-American. But he’s also a Fathead-American. And a Scumbag American. Why, I believe he’s even one-eighth A**hole-American (on his father’s side).

What a schmuck. He ran a gun-running operation to Mexican drug lords that led to the deaths of many, many people, including a US agent. And he did so, it turns out, to try to discredit the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. (But then, Senior Lecturer in Law, Barack Obama, always said that the Constitution needed to be interpreted more along the lines of what government “must do on our behalf”.)

And when he gets caught, he give an interview to a friendly news organ that wouldn’t dream of challenging his scurrilous charge of racism.

It’s not the first time the race card has come into play in efforts to protect Holder from criticism.

Most recently, during a December 8 House Judiciary Committee hearing into Fast and Furious where Holder was testifying, Georgia Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson argued that Fast and Furious wasn’t that big of a scandal because “white supremacists,” among others he described, were able to purchase weapons at “gun shows.” Johnson, who was concerned Guam may “tip over and capsize” if more military personnel are sent there, later told TheDC that he thinks the tea party movement and the National Rifle Association “manufactured” Fast and Furious as a scandal to try to attack the president.

The White House hasn’t denounced Johnson’s rhetoric, nor has Holder.

Of course not. Janeane Garofalo likes to talk about “dog whistles” (she would know). Evidently, these are messages that not everyone can hear, but are targeted at specific audiences. I would say accusing the investigators of Fast & Furious as racist, and accusing gun owners of being white supremacist qualifies as dog whistles.

If that’s not raaaacist.