Bloodthirsty Liberal

The Daily Caller makes the point that he is willing to apologize to the Afghans but not the Mexicans. What gives?

President Barack Obama has never apologized to Mexican President Felipe Calderon for the 300 civilians murdered with weapons the United States provided to Mexico’s drug cartels, but on Sunday he found time to place a call to Afghan president Hamid Karzai apologizing for deaths caused by an American soldier this weekend in Afghanistan.

The Daily Caller asked the White House why Obama hasn’t similarly apologized to Calderon for the murders that resulted from the U.S. policy of providing weapons to the Mexican cartels. Obama spokesman Eric Schultz did not answer.

The Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” program — organized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and overseen by the Department of Justice — sent thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels via straw purchasers, or people who legally purchase guns in the United States with the intention of illegally trafficking them somewhere else. This tactic is known as “gunwalking.”

At least 300 people in Mexico were killed with weapons provided by Fast and Furious, including U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The identities of the Mexican victims are unknown. Allegations are now surfacing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata was also murdered with weapons the Obama administration allowed to “walk” into the hands of drug cartel members.

…

Schultz didn’t answer when TheDC asked him if Obama supports the same goals with regard to Fast and Furious.

The Obama administration has instead stonewalled Congress on the issue, refusing to reply to subpoenas from Issa. Out of 80,000 pages worth of documents Issa has lawfully subpoenaed, the DOJ has only provided about 6,000 or 7,000 pages to Congress. The DOJ has, however, given all of those documents to its internal investigator, the Inspector General.

Holder has not provided any legal reason as to why he’s withholding these documents from Congress and the American people, but the attorney general has claimed that he’s not covering anything up.

Classy. Just pretend it didn’t happen, right?

- 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.

Drunk drivers, welcome.

Rapists, mi casa es su casa.

Forgers and identity thieves, set a spell.

A son of a Libyan strongmen? Somebody call the cops!

The Mexican authorities say they have stopped a plot by a criminal gang organisation to smuggle one of the sons of Libya’s ex-leader Col Muammar Gaddafi into the country.

Saadi Gaddafi has been under house arrest in the West African state of Niger since he fled Libya in September.

His lawyer, Nick Kaufman, denied Mr Gaddafi had ever tried to flout a UN travel ban and escape.

Mexican officials say the plot came to light through intelligence reports.

It involved buying a number of properties in Mexico, including one near the resort of Puerto Vallarta, using false names and documents, they said.

Now, it would appear this particular son of Muammar (who had more offspring than Obama, Sr.) was not intimately involved in the family business. But I find it surprising that he’s the one guy who can’t get his toes wet in the Rio Grande. (To be fair to Mexico, they are way, way more serious about their southern border than their northern one.)

WTF??? [NY Times article]

Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.

The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.

They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.

The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.

Agency officials declined to publicly discuss details of their work, citing concerns about compromising their investigations. But Michael S. Vigil, a former senior agency official who is currently working for a private contracting company called Mission Essential Personnel, said, “We tried to make sure there was always close supervision of these operations so that we were accomplishing our objectives, and agents weren’t laundering money for the sake of laundering money.”

Another former agency official, who asked not to be identified speaking publicly about delicate operations, said, “My rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the D.E.A. could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.”

Just as “we had to destroy the village to save it” became the catch phrase for the absurdity of the Vietnam War, “we had to arm the cartels and launder their money in order to destroy them” summarizes the Obama policy in the war on drugs.

Messers Issa and Grassley will be busy for the foreseeable future.

I don’t want to say that President Obama is a lying, cheating, cold, dead beating, two-timing, double dealing, mean, mistreating president—but I don’t have to.

He says it so well himself (clean and articulate man that he is):

Yesterday during testimony on Capitol Hill, we heard Former ATF Special Agent in Charge William Newell admit he was in contact with White House National Security staffer Kevin O’Reilly about Operation Fast and Furious as early as September 2010. Newell also admitted that the DHS, IRS, DEA, ATF, ICE and the Obama Justice Department were all heavily involved and were full partners in coming up with the concept and execution of Operation Fast and Furious.

Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama still deny authorizing the lethal program, despite President Obama specifically asking Holder to conduct a complete review of current gun enforcement policies during a joint press conference in Mexico City with Mexico President Felipe Calderon in April 2009. The quote below starts at 1:16 in the video.

“Our focus is to work with Secretary Napolitano, Attorney General Holder, our entire Homeland Security team, ATF, border security, everybody who is involved with this to coordinate with our counterparts in Mexico to significantly ramp up our enforcement of existing laws. In fact, I’ve asked Eric Holder to do a complete review of how our current enforcement operations our working and make sure we are cutting down on the loop holes that are causing some of these drug trafficking problems. Last point I would make, is that there are going to be some opportunities where I think we can build some strong consensus I’ll give you one example and that is the issue of gun tracing, the tracing of bullets and ballistics and gun information that had been used in major crimes.”

So let me get this straight, President Obama specifically asked Eric Holder to do a “complete review” of “current gun enforcement operations,” in April 2009, yet Eric Holder and President Obama deny they authorized or knew anything specific about Operation Fast and Furious until 2011? It seems too “coincidental” that the President of the United States was talking about “ballistics and gun tracing” in April 2009, when Operation Fast and Furious started in Fall 2009, especially when the agencies he listed in the 2009 press conference, DHS, DOJ, ATF, “everybody involved,” match up with Newell’s admission about which agencies came up with the idea for Fast and Furious in the first place, which included, as stated above, DEA, IRS, ATF, DHS, and the Obama DOJ.

Not only was he aware of it, he told us he was aware of it! What a dope! If he wasn’t in love with the sound of his own voice he would have shut the [bleep] up and had his cover story. But he knows the mainstream media have his back, and their attitude is what’s a dead border policeman or two compared to the Messiah? To anyone not under his spell, the sheer arrogance and gall of his lying is appalling. To those under it, those traits are part of his charm.

Lost in my nativist screed against illegal immigration yesterday was one relevant detail: most Mexicans agree with me.

The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.

A growing body of evidence suggests that a mix of developments — expanding economic and educational opportunities, rising border crime and shrinking families — are suppressing illegal traffic as much as economic slowdowns or immigrant crackdowns in the United States.

Or, along the lines I would have written: breaking a succession of laws to gain entry to a nation that purports to enforce laws, only to live underground as a second-class citizen, for the benefit of a few bucks, is a mug’s game. Better to make one’s way as best one can, improving your native country as much as possible, and wait for a visa and possible green card.

For a typical rural family like the Orozcos, heading to El Norte without papers is no longer an inevitable rite of passage. Instead, their homes are filling up with returning relatives; older brothers who once crossed illegally are awaiting visas; and the youngest Orozcos are staying put.

“I’m not going to go to the States because I’m more concerned with my studies,” said Angel Orozco, 18. Indeed, at the new technological institute where he is earning a degree in industrial engineering, all the students in a recent class said they were better educated than their parents — and that they planned to stay in Mexico rather than go to the United States.

I believe I just said that.

If Republicans were smart (a debatable proposition), they would celebrate every new citizen from another country with a ceremony along the lines of what Boston did on July 4th (aboard the USS Constitution). How about ceremonies throughout the year (Lincoln’s birthday, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, etc.) held at the Statue of Liberty, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Old North Church, Promontory Summit (Utah), Gettysburg, etc.? Dates and places significant in American history and in which immigrants played a large part?

Not only would they reap the electoral benefit the Democrats are trying to steal in their cynical appeal to illegal immigrants, but the benefit to America would be even greater. Naturalized citizens are American by choice, not by birth. They don’t take for granted the rights and freedoms we do; they would cherish them, defend them, in a way that we can rarely muster. They have proven it not only by their taking citizenship, but by the orderly way they have done so.

They have respected the law; the least the law could do is to respect them in return. Celebrate their choice and their achievement—and not those of people whose opposite approach pays disrespect.

Mark Steyn makes a great point, comparing the closing of the British newspaper to the non-closing of the Atlanta School System and the FBI

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, The Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering The News Of The World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of Royals and celebrities – Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set either to 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday, it emerged that The News Of The World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voice mails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.
Article Tab: Protesters cry out as they demonstrate against the News of the World newspaper outside News International’s headquarters in London, Friday, July 8, 2011. News of the World is accused of hacking into the mobile phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians. News International announced Thursday that the papers is to cease publication with this Sunday’s issue to be the last.
Protesters cry out as they demonstrate against the News of the World newspaper outside News International’s headquarters in London, Friday, July 8, 2011. News of the World is accused of hacking into the mobile phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians. News International announced Thursday that the papers is to cease publication with this Sunday’s issue to be the last.

The News Of The World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid-20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, selling nine million copies a week. Even in today’s emaciated market, every week more than 2.6 million Britons bought “The News Of The Screws” (as it was affectionately known). Last Sunday, it was the biggest-selling newspaper in the United Kingdom and Europe. This Sunday, it’s history. To put it in American terms, consider those George Soros-funded websites claiming they pressured Fox into “firing” Glenn Beck. This is the equivalent of pressuring Mr. Murdoch into closing down the entire Fox News network.

As readers know, I applaud the Murdoch decision to close this rag and only wish that the NY Times would have been as honorable regarding its non-coverage of the holocaust and the famine in Russia. The world would be a much better place if there were actual professional journalistic standards and if they were enforced.

But I digress. What happens when governments lie, cheat and steal?

But you can’t help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News Of The World revelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers – whoops, pardon me, “educators,” and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?

The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few had an early report into test-tampering illegally destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children.

And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.

In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students to improve its employees’ cozy sinecures.

The whole rotten stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?

Absent a Great Flood (like in New Orleans or even earlier if you read the bible), the chances of closing the Atlanta School system are approximately zero. Zed if you’re Canadian.

But Aggie, that’s only one example. Does Steyn have anything else?

Or consider “Operation Fast and Furious,” about which nothing is happening terribly fast and over which Americans should be furious.

The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that’s the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we’ll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords’ weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies – FBI, DEA and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you’re wondering why Obama’s second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.

Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn’t bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians.

If, by this stage, you’re wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners – that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We’re not talking about hacking a schoolgirl’s cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody’s going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn’t yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he’s not planning on going anywhere soon.

He goes on to talk about pitchforks, but in America today, only liberals such as our very cool President are allowed to use metaphors like “guns to our heads” or “mob with pitchforks”, so I’ll leave it to your imagination. Or you can just click on the link.

- Aggie

Really, are borders necessary?

Drug traffickers in Mexico have been abducting bus passengers and forcing them to fight each other like gladiators with the winners being ordered to become assassins, a drug trafficker tells the Houston Chronicle.

The fights, initiated by members of the Zetas cartel, are called “Who’s going to be the next hitman?” said the trafficker, who agreed to talk to the Chronicle on condition of anonymity.

The gladiators use machetes, hammers and sticks. “They cut guys to pieces,” the paper quotes the trafficker as saying.

The winners are sent by the Zetas on suicide missions to shoot up the territory of rivals, the trafficker told the Chronicle. The losers end up in mass graves.

This is anecdotal savagery, but believable from available evidence.

It is a conceit of our writers and filmmakers that middle class America is a sterile vacuum of repressed emotions, manicured lawns, and chlorinated swimming pools.

I say thank God for those chlorinated swimming pools and repressed emotions. Beyond the Rio Grande is a Mad Max theme park.

This is a measure of how quickly Obama messed up the Middle East

QUEBEC — U.S. President Barack Obama should “stay quiet” rather than try to impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Sunday in Quebec City.

Fox lashed out at the Obama government’s foreign policy upon his arrival in Quebec City for the 29th annual meeting of the InterAction Council.

We forget that it wasn’t long ago when we had a stable, prosperous US economy and when Israel did have a friend in the US.

- Aggie

Obama administration is ignoring Congressional subpoena.

House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican is threatening to begin contempt proceedings if the Justice Department doesn’t start providing documents about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious. But what’s the controversy about? And what could the documents show?

In Project Gunrunner, ATF allowed American guns – including AK-47 assault rifles and military-grade, .50 caliber sniper rifles – to be smuggled into Mexico and sold to drug cartels, with the goal of tracking the weapons after they’ve been used.

The project began during the Bush administration in Laredo, Texas, in 2005 as a trial, morphing into a national program in 2006. The guns were sold and tracked electronically, giving law enforcement agents valuable intelligence on where the weapons went and who had them.

During the Bush years, no guns were allowed to cross the border into Mexico. When President Obama took office in 2009, things changed. Obama’s ATF continued Project Gunrunner, but made a crucial decision to allow guns to be “walked” into Mexico, eventually ending up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

The results, in at least one instance, were tragic. Two AK-47s ATF officials were tracking were found at the scene of U.S. border agent Brian Terry’s murder.

We lost sight of the guns and other weapons that we gave to the drug cartels! Brilliant, boys, just brilliant!! The Obama administration doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe we could agree to let them testify wearing brown paper bags over their heads or something?

I have some ideas for future brilliant defensive moves. Perhaps we could give some plutonium to Hamas, or even better to Hezbollah or Al Qaeda? Then we could see what they do with it! Get it? It is pure genius. We could figure out where they hide things. The best Easter egg hung evah!!!

Seriously, could there be any administration dumber than this one? How would it even be possible?

- Aggie

Have you been following the Project Gunrunner story?

Media reports have raised questions about the handling of operations involving gun trafficking into Mexico – specifically the allegation that ATF has had a policy of permitting – and even encouraging – the movement of guns into Mexico by straw purchasers. This practice may have contributed to the deaths of hundreds on both sides of the border, including federal law enforcement agents. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has also been pursuing the matter, recently stated, “I’m still asking questions and we’re still getting the runaround from the Justice Department, [t]hey’re stonewalling.”

…

“The unwillingness of this Administration – most specifically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – to answer questions about this deadly serious matter is deeply troubling,” said Chairman Issa. “Allegations surrounding this program are serious and the ability of the Justice Department to conduct an impartial investigation is in question. Congressional oversight is necessary to get the truth about what is really happening.”

On March 16, 2011, Chairman Issa wrote a letter to Acting Director Kenneth Melson of the ATF requesting specific documents related to Project Gunrunner, its “Fast and Furious” component, and records related to the death of Border Agent Brian Terry. ATF failed to meet the March 30th deadline for producing these documents and furthermore refused to voluntarily commit to any date for producing them.

…

President Obama recently stated that neither he nor Attorney General Holder authorized this operation. His statement did not specify whether Attorney General Holder was aware of this policy or who did authorize it. The Committee’s investigation seeks answers to these questions and the true nature of Project Gunrunner.

Just be glad the Transparent Worm is as transparent as he is, Congressman, or you’d really get stonewalled.

Bet you’d stonewall too if you had done this:

Two AK-47 assault rifles found near where a U.S. Border Patrol officer was fatally shot were among hundreds of guns federal authorities let pass into the hands of known and suspected gun traffickers in a flawed attempt to track the weapons to Mexican drug cartels, a U.S. senator says.

Under Project Gunrunner, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed known and suspected gun smugglers to purchase hundreds of weapons in the hope that they could be traced to their ultimate destination, believed to be border-region crime syndicates.

…

On the “CBS Evening News” Thursday, an ATF whistle-blower, Agent John Dodson, said the ATF intentionally allowed guns to go into Mexico. “We’ve been doing it every day since I’ve been here,” the Phoenix-based agent said. Dodson said he feels the ATF is partially to blame for the escalating violence in Mexico.

Just minutes before the CBS broadcast Thursday, ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson issued a statement saying the agency is forming a panel to “review the bureau’s current firearms trafficking strategies employed by field division managers and special agents.”

Anyone who watches crime shows on TV knows that cops let contraband through all the time in order to see where it goes. But AK-47s? To Mexican cartels? Shee-it, man.

I mean, credit where it’s due:

In an industry that thrives on innovation, some enterprising Mexican marijuana runners went medieval on the border fence, using a catapult to hurl bricks of weed into Arizona, authorities say.

Grainy video from the Department of Homeland Security shows three men priming the throwing arm of the mechanism. Two of the men step away, and when the remaining man lets go, the catapult chucks its wares over the fence.

Various media reports claim the device was capable of launching about 4 pounds of pot (or, presumably, any substance).

Customs and Border Patrol agents, National Guard troops and Mexican authorities joined forces to disrupt the operation, KOLD-TV and other CNN affiliates reported.

Ready, aim, fire one up!