‘Fast and Furious’ Does Not Mean 'Fast and Furious'......

[Heartland Patriot]

Sheila Jackson Lee blames Bush for Fast and Furious

That hag is crazy.

Hag! Kind of says it all...

[The Annoyed Man]

Sheila Jackson Lee blames Bush for Fast and Furious

That hag is crazy.

Why is she calling him "General Holder"?

Because under certain circumstances, protocol actually does call for the title of "General" (yes, I know, it surprised the heck out of me too the first time I heard it). BUT, normal protocol calls for the title "Attorney General." Usually, the title "General" is used in limited circumstances, like when the AG is involved in discussions with SCOTUS.

http://www.formsofaddress.info/attorney ... l.html#247

Dear R. F.:

My first reaction is that you are right -- I am not familiar with General being used as an honorific for an Attorney General. The Attorney General of the United States is addressed most formally as Mr. Attorney General.

I mentioned the question to a room full of trainees at The Protocol School of Washington's Protocol Officer Training and they thought the use was bizarre. But most of them were from the government and military where they have plenty of generals in uniform wearing stars.

But I do see on the National Association of Attorneys General website they use General (Surname) in the bios of some of their member attorneys general.

Still not quite believing it I spoke to Chris Young, Chief of Protocol, State of Georgia and an attorney. He says attorneys general and solicitors general are addressed and referred to as General (Surname) in courtroom settings. He says in federal and state supreme and appellate court proceedings you will see references to attorney generals as General (Surname).

A law librarian at the Library of Congress did some research on this at my request and confirms in oral arguments, court documents record the Attorney General and Solicitor General as "Gen. (full name), Esq."

UPDATE: I've heard from a the offices of three state attorneys general, and to quote the Executive Assistant of the Attorney General of Montana: "Your e-mail asks a number of questions regarding the preferred form of address for the current Montana Attorney General. “Dear Mr. Bullock” is the commonly-used and accepted form of address for the current attorney general, in any situation. “General” is rarely used, and then by those who are not aware of our customary practice."

UPDATE: Got an e-mail from BF who said "Spoke with an acquaintance who is a retired Judge Advocate General Corps brigadier general and now a law professor. He indicated the use of “general” started with US Attorney General Janet Reno, when some in the media hung the title on her as a result of her role in “the defeat of Branch Davidian forces at the 1993 Battle of Waco.” Over the years there have been increasing cases of misuse of the title by those who don’t realize that “general” in attorney general is not a title but an adjective used to modify/describe the noun attorney. If true, I’m sure most AGs would want to distance themselves from the title “general." I took a look at the site you listed. I suspect the bio was submitted by someone on Cuccinelli’s campaign staff as its style (and multiple use of “general”) doesn’t parallel most of the other bios on the site." Thank you BF.

UPDATE: Got an e-mail from WD noting that the plural of attorney general in the dictionary is not attorney generals but is attorneys general ... emphasizing that the office is that of an attorney, and general is an adjective describing the attorney with a broad range of duties for the state. Thus there is no way they would be generals. He also noted I'd been careless in those spellings in my posting (he was right) so I corrected the spellings. Thank you WD.

-- Robert Hickey

So her use of the title "General" in this circumstance was as inappropriate as the rest of her ravings.

[tomneal]

The NRA is going to score the contempt vote

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... -on-holder

I don't know that any of the democrats in the committee have a NRA rating that will go down because of their contempt vote but there are plenty in the full House of Reps.

[74novaman]

The NRA is going to score the contempt vote

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... -on-holder

I don't know that any of the democrats in the committee have a NRA rating that will go down because of their contempt vote but there are plenty in the full House of Reps.

Excellent news! Good on them.

[smoothoperator]

Based on behavior, Generalissimo sounds like a more fitting title.

[Bullwhip]

First time I heard the AG called "general" was Janet Reno in the Waco hearings.

Sounded wrong then, still does.

[chasfm11]

In an interesting juxtaposition, here is Steny Hoyer saying that guns don't kill people.
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/234881 ... minals-did

So, when people want to buy and carry guns in MD (Hoyer's home State), guns are the problem.

What type of state is Maryland?

Maryland is a restrictive May Issue state. Very few permits are issued or renewed on a yearly basis and less than 2% of those are for self defense.

from http://marylandshallissue.org/faqs/conc ... issue-faq/

When the Federal government sponsors selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, the criminals are the problem.

Hoyer pushed back Tuesday, wondering why – if people, not guns, kill people – Republicans are so focused on the guns surrounding Terry's murder and not the criminals who used them.

I guess Hoyer is from the John Kerry school of politics. No,wait.........

[57Coastie]

Here is an investigative report by Fortune, that well-known ultra liberal left wing member of the media.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2 ... ous-truth/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jim

[Heartland Patriot]

Here is an investigative report by Fortune, that well-known ultra liberal left wing member of the media.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2 ... ous-truth/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jim

Part of CNN...not impressed.

[Rex B]

This is a very long, detailed look at F&F from a somewhat sympathetic, but I think objective point of view.
It offers a lot of insight into the way that ATF team in Phoenix operated. Interesting read and well worth the time.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2 ... SF_F_River" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[57Coastie]

Here is an investigative report by Fortune, that well-known ultra liberal left wing member of the media.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2 ... ous-truth/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jim

Part of CNN...not impressed.

Once again, when rational discourse fails, shoot the messenger.

Jim

[The Annoyed Man]

Here is an investigative report by Fortune, that well-known ultra liberal left wing member of the media.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2 ... ous-truth/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jim

Part of CNN...not impressed.

Once again, when rational discourse fails, shoot the messenger.

Jim

OK Jim, I read this very sparse reporting of the facts. It completely omits any mention of the on-scene Justice Department oversight by the U.S. Attorney in Phoenix.........you know......they guy they transferred back to DC and promoted to keep him from being charged with violations of federal firearms laws in Phoenix? The guy who eventually resigned under pressure because the JD threw him under the bus? That guy? The entire article is an attack on the NRA. Quoting from paragraph two:

Some call it the "parade of ants"; others the "river of iron." The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.

Jim, a "comprehensive electronic database of gun sales" IS registration, which is against current federal law because it has been successfully argued as being unconstitutional. Get that? The NRA has (very successfully) lobbied to force the federal agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws to actually uphold them based on the Constitution! But the NRA are the bad guys?

Three paragraphs later:

Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they're 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns. "In Arizona," says Voth, "someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich."

NICS still applies in Arizona. There's no mention of that in the above paragraph. Is that a deliberate omission, or simply lazy reporting? Either way, it doesn't reflect well on CNN's vaunted (but undeserved) reputation for impartiality and quality. Every single legal gun buyer through an FFL in Arizona had to fill out a 4473 which was submitted by the gun store, and the go/no-go on that sale was issued by the federal government itself. 

Now, how is it that illegal aliens were able to buy guns as if they were legal residents? Ask the administration which refused to enforce immigration law, or share immigration violation databases with Arizona (because Arizona had the temerity to enforce federal law itself when the feds wouldn't do it). That gets left out of the article also.

Let's quote some more from your article:

By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers or straw purchasers. Voth and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were plunking down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others.

Again, the article leaves out important relevant information, to whit that A) the FFL holders concerned still had to process a 4473 for each of those sales which the federal government OK'ed; and B) in many of those transactions the FFL holder notified NICS of their concerns about the legitimacy of the sale and NICS (under the direction of the Justice Department) told them to process the transactions and complete the sale!!!

I could go on if you want me to, but here is something as plain as day: that article was written for two purposes....to preach to the anti-gun pro-Obama/Holder choir, and to misinform those who have not made their minds up yet by withholding VERY key facts.

Let's look a little further:

The agents faced numerous obstacles in what they dubbed the Fast and Furious case. (They named it after the street-racing movie because the suspects drag raced cars together.) Their greatest difficulty by far, however, was convincing prosecutors that they had sufficient grounds to seize guns and arrest straw purchasers. By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. Attorney's office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect.

Who's at fault here? The FFLs? No, they did what they were told by the agencies which control their livelihood. The BATF? Not really, they were actually trying to enforce the law. This leads straight to the U.S. Attorney's office in Phoenix, and through him to the top of the Justice Department.....which is Eric Holder.

This entire article is one big piece of misdirection. Who was AG in 2009? Eric Holder. Who were Voth and his agents answering to? The article makes no mention of George Gillette, the BATF supervisor in Fast & Furious who is now cooperating with the Congressional investigation. Why is that? The answer is simple: Gillette's insider testimony is very inconvenient to Katherine Eban's conclusions.

The underlying premise of this entire article is that "good, honest, not politicially-motivated" officers (and some of them may well have been exactly that) at JD and BATF were hamstrung by insufficient and lax federal firearms laws. That is the subtext—that we don't have enough gun laws, we need more of them, and the NRA is the boogeyman. If you can't see it, then you haven't read the article word for word. But NOWHERE does it address in any detail other than a couple of sentences speaking in the most general terms exactly who were these people buying these guns; what were they doing illegally in the U.S. in the first place; how did they get into the country if this administration is allegedly enforcing immigration law; and a whole host of other questions really having more to do with A) Mexico's corrupt government, B) Mexico's internal problems (caused in large part by that government's refusal to allow its citizens to arm themselves against criminals both within and outside of the government itself), C) a repressive and socialist American president determined to open the border to an unrestricted flow of future democrats eager to suckle at the federal teat, and D) that same president's general disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law whenever it conflicts with his anti-American agenda. One has only to look at the administration's reactions to the SCOTUS ruling in Arizona's immigration case to see what is going on here.

Not one word of that in Katherine Eban's piece. OK, so I took up your challenge to read this piece of dreck. Now, will you take up my challenge to you to read the following one?

http://www.examiner.com/article/is-kath ... us?cid=rss

Before fisking her hit piece, however, the facts of Fast & Furious must be reviewed:

• Fact: ATF Agent John Dodson testified in June 2011 that “allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals was the plan, this was the mandate.”
• Fact: Also in June 2011, assistant attorney general Ronald Weich testified that he didn’t know who authorized the suicidal Fast & Furious plan.
• Fact: Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson watched straw buyers purchase guns for Mexican drug cartels on live video.
• Fact: The “highest levels” of the Justice Department knew about Fast & Furious, including a [url=http://blog.heritage.org/2011/08/11/mem ... -pitfalls/]top official.
• Fact: Eric Holder lied about what he knew about Fast & Furious, and for months he tried to cover up the wrongdoings connected to his Department.
• Fact: Holder’s DOJ by-passed the law in sending guns to Mexico during the Fast & Furious operation.
• Fact: There is strong evidence to suggest that the entire operation was a deliberate attempt by the Obama Administration to implement its totalitarian, anti-American gun control agenda.

And, if you'll recall, there was a great furor against the appointment of AG Holder—from Blue Dog democrats as well as republicans—in the first place because of his anti-gun stance. Liberals keep touting his "impeccable personal integrity." And by DC standards, not yet having been caught in an extra-marital affair with a minor or some other sordid affair, he must indeed stand out. But even mafia bosses are often faithful to their wives.

[VMI77]

Here is an investigative report by Fortune, that well-known ultra liberal left wing member of the media.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2 ... ous-truth/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jim

Part of CNN...not impressed.

Once again, when rational discourse fails, shoot the messenger.

Jim

OK Jim, I read this very sparse reporting of the facts. It completely omits any mention of the on-scene Justice Department oversight by the U.S. Attorney in Phoenix.........you know......they guy they transferred back to DC and promoted to keep him from being charged with violations of federal firearms laws in Phoenix? The guy who eventually resigned under pressure because the JD threw him under the bus? That guy? The entire article is an attack on the NRA. Quoting from paragraph two:

Some call it the "parade of ants"; others the "river of iron." The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.

Jim, a "comprehensive electronic database of gun sales" IS registration, which is against current federal law because it has been successfully argued as being unconstitutional. Get that? The NRA has (very successfully) lobbied to force the federal agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws to actually uphold them based on the Constitution! But the NRA are the bad guys?

Three paragraphs later:

Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they're 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns. "In Arizona," says Voth, "someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich."

NICS still applies in Arizona. There's no mention of that in the above paragraph. Is that a deliberate omission, or simply lazy reporting? Either way, it doesn't reflect well on CNN's vaunted (but undeserved) reputation for impartiality and quality. Every single legal gun buyer through an FFL in Arizona had to fill out a 4473 which was submitted by the gun store, and the go/no-go on that sale was issued by the federal government itself. 

Now, how is it that illegal aliens were able to buy guns as if they were legal residents? Ask the administration which refused to enforce immigration law, or share immigration violation databases with Arizona (because Arizona had the temerity to enforce federal law itself when the feds wouldn't do it). That gets left out of the article also.

Let's quote some more from your article:

By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers or straw purchasers. Voth and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were plunking down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others.

Again, the article leaves out important relevant information, to whit that A) the FFL holders concerned still had to process a 4473 for each of those sales which the federal government OK'ed; and B) in many of those transactions the FFL holder notified NICS of their concerns about the legitimacy of the sale and NICS (under the direction of the Justice Department) told them to process the transactions and complete the sale!!!

I could go on if you want me to, but here is something as plain as day: that article was written for two purposes....to preach to the anti-gun pro-Obama/Holder choir, and to misinform those who have not made their minds up yet by withholding VERY key facts.

Let's look a little further:

The agents faced numerous obstacles in what they dubbed the Fast and Furious case. (They named it after the street-racing movie because the suspects drag raced cars together.) Their greatest difficulty by far, however, was convincing prosecutors that they had sufficient grounds to seize guns and arrest straw purchasers. By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. Attorney's office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect.

Who's at fault here? The FFLs? No, they did what they were told by the agencies which control their livelihood. The BATF? Not really, they were actually trying to enforce the law. This leads straight to the U.S. Attorney's office in Phoenix, and through him to the top of the Justice Department.....which is Eric Holder.

This entire article is one big piece of misdirection. Who was AG in 2009? Eric Holder. Who were Voth and his agents answering to? The article makes no mention of George Gillette, the BATF supervisor in Fast & Furious who is now cooperating with the Congressional investigation. Why is that? The answer is simple: Gillette's insider testimony is very inconvenient to Katherine Eban's conclusions.

The underlying premise of this entire article is that "good, honest, not politicially-motivated" officers (and some of them may well have been exactly that) at JD and BATF were hamstrung by insufficient and lax federal firearms laws. That is the subtext—that we don't have enough gun laws, we need more of them, and the NRA is the boogeyman. If you can't see it, then you haven't read the article word for word. But NOWHERE does it address in any detail other than a couple of sentences speaking in the most general terms exactly who were these people buying these guns; what were they doing illegally in the U.S. in the first place; how did they get into the country if this administration is allegedly enforcing immigration law; and a whole host of other questions really having more to do with A) Mexico's corrupt government, B) Mexico's internal problems (caused in large part by that government's refusal to allow its citizens to arm themselves against criminals both within and outside of the government itself), C) a repressive and socialist American president determined to open the border to an unrestricted flow of future democrats eager to suckle at the federal teat, and D) that same president's general disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law whenever it conflicts with his anti-American agenda. One has only to look at the administration's reactions to the SCOTUS ruling in Arizona's immigration case to see what is going on here.

Not one word of that in Katherine Eban's piece. OK, so I took up your challenge to read this piece of dreck. Now, will you take up my challenge to you to read the following one?

http://www.examiner.com/article/is-kath ... us?cid=rss

Before fisking her hit piece, however, the facts of Fast & Furious must be reviewed:

• Fact: ATF Agent John Dodson testified in June 2011 that “allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals was the plan, this was the mandate.”
• Fact: Also in June 2011, assistant attorney general Ronald Weich testified that he didn’t know who authorized the suicidal Fast & Furious plan.
• Fact: Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson watched straw buyers purchase guns for Mexican drug cartels on live video.
• Fact: The “highest levels” of the Justice Department knew about Fast & Furious, including a [url=http://blog.heritage.org/2011/08/11/mem ... -pitfalls/]top official.
• Fact: Eric Holder lied about what he knew about Fast & Furious, and for months he tried to cover up the wrongdoings connected to his Department.
• Fact: Holder’s DOJ by-passed the law in sending guns to Mexico during the Fast & Furious operation.
• Fact: There is strong evidence to suggest that the entire operation was a deliberate attempt by the Obama Administration to implement its totalitarian, anti-American gun control agenda.

And, if you'll recall, there was a great furor against the appointment of AG Holder—from Blue Dog democrats as well as republicans—in the first place because of his anti-gun stance. Liberals keep touting his "impeccable personal integrity." And by DC standards, not yet having been caught in an extra-marital affair with a minor or some other sordid affair, he must indeed stand out. But even mafia bosses are often faithful to their wives.

Yours is a great dissection and it illustrates how the media is complicit in killing this country.....very few people reading this CNN propaganda have the intellectual ability to see rhetorical tricks, and most of those who do have the ability don't have enough knowledge of the facts to refute it to those who are inclined to believe it because it's in the "news." It's the lie of omission writ large --the favorite propaganda tactic of the MSM.

[Rex B]

Good analysis TAM, thanks for taking the time to post that.

[74novaman]

Good analysis TAM, thanks for taking the time to post that.

In addition, here is Sen Grassleys statement regarding the piece:

The Fortune magazine piece on Operation Fast and Furious is problematic in several respects. Sen. Chuck Grassley began investigating the circumstances of the death of border patrol agent Brian Terry 18 months ago after whistleblowers came to him with concerns. The following statement is from Grassley’s office. Supporting documents are available here: http://www.grassley.senate.gov/about/up ... n-docs.pdf

“The Fortune piece conspicuously ignores the most important fact in this case: ATF encouraged cooperating dealers to sell guns to known traffickers. That fact is key to understanding how ATF made a strategic choice to track the guns instead of stop them. The central claim of the article, that there was nothing ATF could have done to stop the illegal sales, is simply incompatible with the evidence. If it is true that ATF could not interdict and seize weapons due to legal hurdles beyond its control, then ATF had no business telling gun dealers to go ahead with the sales.

“The Fortune article asks the reader to believe that sworn statements by whistleblowers who put their careers on the line to expose the truth for Brian Terry’s family are merely conspiratorial fabrications for the sole purpose of getting back at their boss. It asks the reader to believe that the ATF Director, the Attorney General, the White House, and Congress all fell victim to the fabrication and completely misinterpreted or misunderstood the thousands of pages of documents that corroborate the whistleblower allegations. The Justice Department retracted its previous denials of those allegations last December 2. If the Fortune article is accurate, the Justice Department’s December 2 retraction would itself be a false capitulation under political pressure aimed at protecting senior DOJ officials at the expense of ATF field office personnel in Arizona.

“The Fortune article inexplicably credits the self-serving statements of the supervisors in Arizona responsible for overseeing Fast and Furious. There is no explanation as to why, given their obvious motive to claim there was no gun-walking to save themselves from criticism and punishment. That’s why the written records, the interviews on the record, and obtaining and weighing all evidence is so important. We can only draw fair, informed conclusions from the facts.”