What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (43 page)

Predictably, however, the leftists went berserk. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, among other far-left groups, called it unconstitutional; others screamed that it was “bigoted,” “racist,” and “un-American”; and Alinskyites organized protests and handed out Mexican flags. Isn’t it interesting how if your state decides to pass a law legalizing same-sex marriage, the Left loves it, but if that same state wants to crack down on illegal alien lawbreakers, then it’s evil? To the Left, states should have some rights but not others. To the Left, states such as New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts are all considered forward-looking gay paradises … but Arizona is run by a modern-day Eva Braun named Jan Brewer who’s turning it into a fascist superstate. Funny, I thought they liked fascism. Just remember, if you’re a state pushing for Harry and Dick to get married, that’s okay. But passing a law to deport an illegal alien drunk driver? You’ve got issues.

The president—whose job it is to protect the border and defend the sovereignty of the nation—then weighed in on the law, calling it “misguided.” He ordered the Justice Department to examine it to determine its constitutionality. Attorney General Eric Holder took a look, all right—at his boss’s agenda and his own leftist politics—and decided to sue Arizona over the law, which Holder later admitted he hadn’t read before filing suit, despite the fact that the law itself was just a few pages long. (Does anyone in this administration ever read
any
legislation before they either criticize it or sign it into law?)

The law was supported by Arizona’s police associations, 70 percent of Arizonans, and over 60 percent of all Americans. But Obama, Holder, and the kooks whined that it would create a police state that would violate the “civil liberties” of illegal aliens. Obama and Holder cited the problem of having a “patchwork of immigration laws” across the nation. And yet, none of the state laws ran afoul of the federal laws, and there wouldn’t be a need for the state laws if Obama, Holder, and crew did their jobs in enforcing the federal laws in the first place.

But Team Obama was more concerned about protecting the “rights” of illegal aliens—potential Democratic voters—than it was about protecting the American citizens in Arizona, which is why Holder sued it as well as Utah, Alabama, and South Carolina, which passed similar laws. (A lower court blocked key parts of the Arizona law, leading the state to ask the Supreme Court to consider the case. In its brief to the Court, Arizona warned of “extraordinary confrontations between the federal government and other states” over illegal immigration.) The president of the United States believes that American states—
American citizens
—are greater lawbreakers than the illegal aliens subjecting them to invasion and threat every day. This is what law enforcement means to the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

In a
Clockwork Orange
display of perverse absurdity, Obama cheered on Mexican president Felipe Calderón as they stood together in the Rose Garden and Calderón ripped Arizona for wanting to protect itself from his country’s murderers, drug dealers, and thugs. One week before Calderón arrived in Washington, he blasted the Arizona law as “criminalizing immigration,” which he said “opens the door to intolerance, hate and discrimination.” With Calderón standing next to him, Obama chimed in, “In the United States of America, no law-abiding person—be they an American citizen, a legal immigrant, or a visitor or tourist from Mexico—should ever be subject to suspicion simply because of what they look like.” The spectacle of the president of the United States joining a foreign head of state to bash one of our own states put Obama’s anti-Americanism in bold relief. He wasn’t defending the United States in the face of foreign criticism. There was no “evil empire” moment. He didn’t rally to our sides. He rallied to the sides of the lawbreakers. Afterward, Obama told Calderón that he had recently seen the film
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, and that if the Mexican president and his group of bandits needed any more help ripping off America, he would definitely assist them.

Obama has pushed “comprehensive immigration reform,” which is code for amnesty, and a few other new laws he won’t enforce. He’s actually pushing for a massive new voter base, which is why he’s always pandering to such radical open-borders, pro-amnesty groups as the National Council of La Raza. In fact, in early 2012, Obama chose a former senior vice president of La Raza, Cecilia Muñoz, to head his Domestic Policy Council. Nothing says “kissing Latino butt” like putting a La Raza honcho in charge of U.S. domestic policy.

Early on, the Obama administration had increased some deportations of violent criminal aliens, but by late 2011 it had put the brakes on deportations. It also couldn’t find the time to deport Barry’s uncle Onyango Obama and aunt Zeituni Onyango, both in the United States illegally and, in Aunt Zeituni’s case, on the taxpayer dole. She claimed that the “system” took advantage of her and proclaimed, “If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen.” I see where Obama gets his kookocity. Uncle Onyango was arrested for driving under the influence in Massachusetts, but was released and went back to work in a liquor store. Obama’s idea of family values.

Obama has invited in more illegals by reducing the National Guard troop presence on the southern border from 1,200 to fewer than 300. And he has enacted backdoor amnesty by end-running Congress on the DREAM Act, issuing new ICE memoranda that radically changed deportation policies, creating a shadowy new interagency working group to dismiss pending deportation cases, and moving to grant work authorization to some illegals. He has also refused to stop sanctuary cities from impeding federal law enforcement and looked the other way as states such as New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois have stopped participating in the Department of Homeland Security illegal immigrant information program, Secure Communities. He has essentially ended worksite enforcement operation except for auditing I-9 employment eligibility forms and has not included E-Verify in any of his “jobs” plans.

Because Obama and the kooks require chaos, they’re always looking for ways to create more tumult. What better way to capitalize on the violent bedlam on the southern border than by introducing
more
chaos by running guns across it?

When Team Obama came into office in early 2009, they came upon a legitimate program already in place called Project Gunrunner, which was designed to track the flow of guns. Project Gunrunner took place in Arizona, when Janet Napolitano, now the Department of Homeland Security secretary, was governor. Project Gunrunner spawned another operation called Operation Wide Receiver, which was designed to trace illegal firearms in Mexico. Wide Receiver was tightly managed, with all illegal firearms transactions done under close monitoring, and it was limited, involving only about 500 guns, most of which had fail-safe radio tracking devices. Most important, Wide Receiver was conducted with the full knowledge and buy-in of the Mexican government.

Team Obama saw Operation Gunrunner and the smaller Operation Wide Receiver begging to be used for leftist purposes. Obama often expressed the view that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our border.” That’s a two-for-one kookism: it’s anti-gun
and
anti-American! Too bad for the kooks that it’s not true. Only about 17 percent of the guns in Mexico come from the United States. But if Team Obama were going to design their own gunrunning operation, they’d do it with one goal in mind: to ramp up the flow of guns, and when the guns were linked to murder and mayhem, they’d have an urgent excuse to crack down on law-abiding gun owners in the United States.

This wasn’t incompetence. It was intentional. As CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson reported in December 2011, documents showed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed
creating and using
Fast and Furious to press for
new and stricter rules on gun sales
. “ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons,” Attkisson reported, “but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation.” We know the true kook purpose of Fast and Furious thanks to intrepid reporting by Attkisson, Fox News’ William LaJuenesse and some others, who pursued the story despite gangsta threats from White House crisis manager Eric Schultz, who even “screamed at” Attkisson for being “unfair and biased by pursuing” the story. Obama and his acolytes were so used to having the media protect, defend, and advance them that when a reporter actually did his or her job, they lashed out in a torrent of intimidation.

In mid-2009, the administration midwifed a gunwalking program so out of control that hundreds of people now lay dead, including border agent Brian Terry and customs enforcement agent Jaime Zapata. Fast and Furious was a sinister operation that blended antigun politics with willful negligence to arm brutal Mexican drug lords and their henchmen. The plan was to get arms dealers to make illegal gun sales to “straw buyers,” who were tasked to transfer the weapons to illegals, drug runners, and other criminals. In theory, the “straw buyers” were supposed to lead them to the drug cartels against whom they could move legally. In practice, it led to murder and mayhem, as expected.

Thousands of guns were permitted to walk, ATF lost track of most of them, and they disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle of Mexico’s violent gangs. The dramatic prosecutions of major drug kingpins of which Holder dreamed never materialized; charges were brought against about twenty people, none of them significant cartel players. Meanwhile, the guns began showing up at savage crime scenes on both sides of the border, including in Arizona at the murder scenes of Agents Terry and Zapata. Of course, the most basic ATF mission is to
not lose track of guns
.

When the story blew wide open, Team Obama tried to point to Operation Wide Receiver in order to once again blame Bush and suggest that both programs were the same. In fact, unlike Team Bush, Team Obama never bothered to inform the Mexican government of the gunwalking, approved the transfer of thousands—not hundreds—of guns, lied to lower-level ATF agents about the policy, and let the entire operation spin out of control.

Predictably, no one among Team Obama knew nothin’ about no stinkin’ guns. The president claimed
he
didn’t know that thousands of guns were walking across the Mexican border, even though he is commander in chief. Despite the fact that some of his top deputies knew about Fast and Furious, including Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and former deputy attorney general David Ogden, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed
he
didn’t know, even though his department oversaw the program. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed
she
didn’t know, even though the operation occurred over an international border. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano claimed
she
didn’t know, even though the matter involved international criminal activity and came out of the program she oversaw as governor. Moe, Larry, and Curly in Obama’s cabinet have zero idea about the guns that killed border agent Brian Terry. Yet Eric, Hillary, and Janet all frequently get behind policies that affect every aspect of our personal liberties. I guess everything is sophisticated and nuanced until an American hero is killed by an American gun in the hands of a Mexican outlaw.

Congressional investigations unearthed memoranda that indicated that, contrary to Holder’s previous testimony that he had first learned of Fast and Furious in early 2011, he’d actually been briefed on it far earlier. He testified that he didn’t see the relevant memos because, after all, he had his hands full with suing U.S. states over immigration and letting the 2008 Black Panthers voter intimidation scandal slide. The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa, was so infuriated with his continuous stonewalling and refusal to release requested documents that Issa had to issue a slew of subpoenas to get them. And in the ultimate insult, when asked if he had spoken with or apologized to the family of slain agent Terry, Holder replied, “No.” Then he released to the media a copy of the letter he had sent to the family—before they had received it. He then abruptly ordered sealed court records containing the grim details of how Mexican drug smugglers killed Terry with a Fast and Furious firearm. So much for the “most transparent” administration in history.

As the scandal grew, Team Obama attempted damage control. It moved key players around as if they were deck chairs on the
Titanic
. The acting head of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, was transferred into a made-up position at DOJ with the fanciful title, “Senior Adviser on Forensic Science in the Office of Legal Policy.” Others deeply involved with Fast and Furious were moved out of their positions or promoted. The only resignation was by U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke in Phoenix, who attempted to smear an ATF whistle-blower and then denied Agent Terry’s family crime victim status in a court case brought against the lowlife who bought the guns used in Terry’s murder.

A government-run program to illegally transfer thousands of guns to violent Mexican drug gangs? What could go wrong? It was the epitome of leftist thinking: if they could get the program to go awry just enough, not only would they have a ready-made reason to crack down on legal U.S. guns but they could also jump to blame the United States for its appetite for drugs and guns. It’s our fault, you see, that we’re a nation of druggies that creates so much demand for the Mexican drug lords. It’s our fault that we’ve got this stupid Second Amendment with the right to bear arms. It’s our fault that so many illegals want to come here to work and live, and therefore the burden is on us to make them feel at home. And if you disagree, you’re a heartless jerk.