![]() ![]() Two years ago, Mexican President Calderon told a Joint Session of Congress that the drug cartels in his country were exploiting weak American gun laws to amass their arsenals indeed, he said the escalation of Mexican drug violence "coincides with the lifting of the assault weapons ban in 2004." President Calderon told the Congress of his understanding that the purpose of the Second Amendment "is to guarantee good American citizens the ability to defend themselves and their Nation." "But believe me," he added, "many of these guns are not going to honest American hands." The center's Denis Henigan wants House Republicans, the ones chasing Eric Holder, to focus instead upon the other 97 percent of those guns. gun shops to Mexico in the last four years. The Brady Campaign contends that the "Fast and Furious" program involved about 2,000 firearms crossing the border into Mexico, about 3 percent of the guns moving from U.S. But the gun-control advocates counsel a little bit of perspective. The Brady Campaign is smart to denounce the program - it was, indeed, indefensible. ![]() A Republican-dominated Congress that has done nothing to stop gun trafficking on the Mexican border all of sudden is concerned enough about gun trafficking on the Mexican border to quickly hold contempt hearings and a floor vote? The folks there are, unsurprisingly, apoplectic at the week's events. "If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor's cow, I can go to jail," Walter Lippmann wrote in 1919:īut if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible.Īs I've followed the story - and so much of it has been told so well by my CBS News colleague Sharyl Attkisson - I keep thinking about the mission and the frustrations of the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence. When Colbert mocks the vast "conspiracy" the right sees in all of this - what's the matter, good old-fashioned bureaucratic incompetence isn't good enough anymore? - it's hilariously funny until you realize that tens of millions of people evidently believe the plot to be true. To the right, the story has been an election-year blessing, a roiling melange of: (1) gun righteousness (2) antipathy toward Holder, and (3) fear and loathing of Mexico and Mexicans. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, deserves no small measure of blame for thinking that such a dangerous, unwieldy sting could be completed, successfully, without a great deal of unintended pain and sorrow. Operation Fast and Furious - hey, let's give guns to bad guys, what could possibly go wrong? - was a bad idea, poorly done, and thus not unlike hundreds or thousands of other poorly conceived and executed government plans of recent memory. The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes, Political Humor & Satire Blog, Video ArchiveĪctually, despite silly headlines like this, it's not a complicated story at all. ![]()
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