Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, discusses the latest developments in the Department of Justice's handling of ’running’ guns and explosives across the U.S. - Mexico border with Brett Baier on Fox News "Special Report."
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Gunwalker: Issa Says Fast & Furious Goes All The Way To The White House; 3 More Murders Linked To Gunwalker Weapons ↓
People are wondering why Solyndra is getting attention, while the media continues to basically ignore Gunwalker, except for these obligatory "here's what happened, but we're also signalling by our lack of interest that it's no big deal" minor, middle-of-the-newspaper stories.
I don't know, of course. But here's my guess.
Solyndra looks like the sort of scandal they're used to calling a scandal. You have here money flowing to corporations and political allies and donors, and political pressure to push this money through, and then the money being completely lost.
They have a template in their minds for that sort of thing.
The problem with Gunwalker, from a media point of view, is that they don't know what pre-existing box it should be neatly packed into.
I have talked about Gunwalker and the theory of the crime. I've said that I don't think the "Turned Up To 11" theory is very helpful. This is the theory, popular on the right and especially with Second Amendment watchers, that the program was created deliberately to cause a spate of gun murders in Mexico and along the US border, which could subsequently be used, Reichstag Fire like, as a pretext for cracking down on the gun rights of American citizens.
To me, this seems a bit unlikely. Not completely unlikely, but a bit unlikely, and a bit too big and conspiratorial to buy without a lot of evidence.
The more likely theory, to me (and the one the media would buy, if it bothers to buy any theory at all), is that this is a crime of incompetence and gross negligence.
However, if that's what it is, the media is obviously pre-disposed to letting off Obama. After all, it's just a case of "mistakes being made." They meant well, didn't they? Okay, so Obama and his senior people apparently graduated with their Masters of SCOAMF degrees (with honors), but all this is (in this view) is an intelligence operation gone badly wrong.
For the media, I guess they'd say: Well, the CIA has goofed up on a lot of covert operations we don't like, that is, operations we never wanted them to try in the first place (Iran-Contra); so here at least the goof was on an operation we could at least all support.
So I think that is part of the issue here. The theory I think is more likely to be true, and also more likely to be considered by the media at all, is a story of gross incompetence and negligent homicide in a badly conceived and completely mismanaged intelligence sting. The media might buy into that, a little, but that also gives them an excuse to say "Mistakes were made, no big deal."
On the other hand, a theory which does have actual malice and corrupt motive attached to it -- the Deliberate Gun Murder As Pretext For Gun Law theory -- is so big that it's very hard to bite into. You can't sort of nibble around it -- you have to take the whole thing in in one bite, and even for someone like me, who's on the right and very opposed to Obama, it's a lot to cram in your mouth all at once.
So I think that's the difference. Solyndra is big, but not too big; they can wrap their heads around it. Money, politics, favors, boondoggles -- they get that.
Gunwalker is either some kind of gross incompetence -- which they'll just excuse Obama for -- or a very large, very serious conspiracy against the American people, which is certainly inexcusable but also difficult to prove (and even hard to conceive).
None of this is really meant to be prescriptive. I'm not offering any advice as to what to do about this. It's just descriptive.
For Gunwalker to be something the press can actually digest, it has to involve more deliberate malice than the "criminal negligence" theory, as they're currently pretty chill about that level of deadly incompetence, but not so much malice as in the Reichstag theory, which they won't even consider as a possibility.
I don't know what that theory would be.
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