Posts tagged Fast and Furious
Mike Billy
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I am afraid that the only lessons that have been truly learned In the whole Watergate business are to avoid such idiocies as tapes and illegal, unwarranted break-ins, and to restrict the operation of the fortuitous and the random to the smallest possible area. I would be astonished if the real lesson of Watergate - the Actonian principle that all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely - were other than forgotten utterly once a crowd-pleasing President with the kind of luster a John F. Kennedy had for academy, press, and the world of intellectuals generally comes back into the White House.
I’ve been reading Robert Nisbet’s Twilight of Authority and this quote really stood out for me.
In this section he was talking about what he called the “transpolitical” or, as he puts it, a political tool that “goes beyond what law or morality authorizes…”
Nisbet was using Watergate as an example because he wrote the book during the Watergate scandal. But, he also cites other examples that go back at least to the 1970s.
If this book were written today I think he might include George Bush’s extrajudicial wiretapping of American citizens and Barack Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal to his list. And these more recent abuses of power, particularly Fast and Furious, are perfect examples of what Nisbet was trying to say and that is that government is not good at policing itself. It is only through accident that these scandals are ever discovered.
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Someone get me this bumper sticker!
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Nick Gillespie owns Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher over Fast and Furious
Calls them out for being the partisan hacks they are:
Even The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart isn’t partisan enough to give the Obama Administration a pass on Fast and Furious. Is he racist, too?
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Attorney General Eric Holder placed in Contempt of Congress over Fast and Furious Subpoena
From The Hill:
A House panel voted Wednesday to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena, defying an assertion of executive privilege from President Obama.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.), approved a resolution along party lines to place Holder in contempt after battling him for months over access to internal agency documents about the gun-tracking operation Fast and Furious.
The vote came after Obama escalated the conflict by sending a letter to the committee claiming executive privilege over the documents that the panel had sought.
All 23 Republicans on the committee voted for the contempt resolution, while all 17 Democrats voted against it. Every member of the panel was present for the vote.
