For those of you who have the unenviable task of debating liberals in your family or workplace, let me render some aid. Liberals are jumping all over the falsehood that Fast & Furious was conceived and put into play during the Bush Administration as Project Gunrunner or Operation Gunwalker. And while it is undeniably true that such a federal operation was put into play by the Bush Administration, there is a huge difference between the Bush initiative and Operation Fast & Furious: motive.

To quote the ATF fact sheet at The U.S. Embassy in Mexico website, here was the goal of Project Gunrunner which did indeed come into existence during the Bush presidency:

ATF is deploying its resources strategically on the Southwest Border to deny firearms, the "tools of the trade," to criminal organizations in Mexico and along the border, and to combat firearms-related violence affecting communities on both sides of the border. In partnership with other U.S. agencies and with the Government of Mexico, ATF refined its Southwest Border strategy. ATF developed Project Gunrunner to stem the flow of firearms into Mexico and thereby deprive the narcotics cartels of weapons. The initiative seeks to focus ATF's investigative, intelligence and training resources to suppress the firearms trafficking to Mexico and stem the firearms-related violence on both sides of the border.

Note those terms deny, stem the flow, deprive and suppress.

Project Gunrunner was a multinational effort involving the use of eTrace, a Web-based program, "that provides for the electronic exchange of traced firearm data in a secure internet-based environment."

Contrarily, as the whole world now knows, Operation Fast & Furious increased cross-border firearms trafficking to the extent that 2,000 dangerous, lethal weapons went missing entirely as no method for tracking them was employed. And why was that? Considering Obama's remarks to the Brady Bunch that his administration was working on the issue of gun control under the radar, it requires no great intuitive leap to understand that the incoming Obama Administration saw an existing opportunity to advance their campaign of disarming the citizenry through altering and expanding an existing program and leaped on it.

A commenter on one of my previous posts raised a possibility I had not previously considered. As soon as Obama was elected, gun owners across America, fearing just this kind of undermining of their constitutional rights by an administration incubated in Chicago, one of the most anti-gun metropolitan areas in America, began a furious buying of guns and ammunition. Ask anyone in the firearms industry, the Obama presidency has been the best sales stimulator they have ever experienced. Fearing that some form of federal ban or punitive excise tax might be forthcoming from this Chicago mob, I, like many millions of others, enhanced my personal arsenal and bought up large quantities of ammunition.

And that phenomenon raises the question postulated by the commenter: Was Fast & Furious a knee-jerk liberal reaction by an anti-gun administration that feared a quickly re-arming America? Plant guns in Mexico that could be eTraced back to the U.S. and then use that evidence to anger the American public into going along with stricter, federal gun control legislation? The obviously too-orchestrated claims by too many federal officials that ninety percent of the weapons confiscated following violent crimes in Mexico were simply too pat and too obvious to those of us who know something about the procurement of weapons. It simply made no sense whatsoever for the rich and powerful cartels to engage in nickel and dime purchases of semi-automatic* weapons in dribs and drabs across one of the most heavily-defended borders in the world when they could buy fully-automatic** weapons by the shipload from multiple sources around the world and at far lower prices. For that reason, folks in the know all around the world hoo-hawed at the Obama administrations blatantly phony attempts to link gun violence in Mexico to American-purchased arms. On the other hand, the lefties of the world ate it up.

We are faced with a clear reality: an armed citizenry represents a clear and present danger to those leftists and Marxists who would seek to render them a harmless and complacent herd. These same leftists and Marxists are joined in this belief with despots all across the political spectrum, and all around the world. Regardless of whether you are a left-wing dictator or a right-wing tyrant, you have to be keenly aware that an unarmed populace isn't likely to storm the palace and inflict fatal wounds upon those who have subjugated them.

Getting back to the foolishness and fatality of Operation Fast & Furious, I'm not certain at this point about its motivation. But, because our Attorney General and his justice department are furiously stonewalling the congressional investigation, the American public can only conclude that there is something very harmful to the continuance of the Obama Administration that must not be revealed. For a cover-up at this level and of this intensity, that something has to be either politically terminal or criminally indictable.

And that folks, is the difference between the Bush project, designed to interdict weapons transfers into Mexico for the perfectly legitimate government goal of reducing criminal activity, and the Obama operation, designed to mislead and misinform the American public into quiescently giving up their constitutional rights to gun ownership and possession. And never forget that Obama and his gun-hating administration had what they believed was a clever, fail-safe, fall- back position: if they were exposed they could always point to Project Gunrunner and blame everything on Bush.

When you're talking to those liberal co-workers and family members who buy into this garbage and try to blame Bush, ask them this: how many people, American or Mexican, died as a result of the Bush program?

And then ask how many have died because of Fast & Furious?

*A semi-automatic weapon fires only one projectile per each separate trigger pull.

**A fully-automatic weapon fires continuously as long as the trigger is depressed-a machine gun to the civilian mind.