Presidente: Donde la verdad?
If it was rude for Congressman Joe Wilson to leap to his feet during your State of the Union speech and yell "You Lie!", how many others have bit their tongue?
The list grows.
What is equally rude and repetitively dishonest is the false impressions and inaccurate portrayal of events and conditions that seem to be endemic and intrinsic in the Obama world. These presentations of questionable integrity are systematically presented to large audiences and broadcasted to the under informed without rebuttal or inquiry.
As the song goes, "just cause you say it, don't make it so." Unfortunately about half the country does think it so.
Without knowledgeable interviewers and while playing to adoring audiences, the President continually escapes from scrutiny at the moment, and certainly in the media. Perhaps we need another 'impolite' event. If normal channels of polite inquisition are intentionally and rudely short circuited (i.e. the honest press conference) is that not impolite in itself?
It seems Obama's confusions are either intentional misdirection plays, or he is delusional, possessing only a cursory knowledge of what is really transpiring about him. Maybe if Axelrod and Jarett are your only sources of information, you do believe that Vladamir is a friend of the United States and Bush started Fast and Furious.
Regarding Fast and Furious, he again presents a false impression. Here are parts of the text of Obama's Univision forum, the questions and the Presidential responses. In Italics are the rebuttals that should have been.
"Moderator Question: Mr. President, you told me during an interview that you - Eric Holder or you did not authorize the Fast and Furious operation that allowed 2,000 weapons from the United States to Mexico, and they were in drug-trafficking hands. I think that up to 100 Mexicans might have died, and also American agent, Brian Terry. There's a report that 14 agents were responsible for the operation. But shouldn't Attorney General Eric Holder
have known about that. And if he didn't, should you fire him? "
THE PRESIDENT: "Well, first of all, I think it's important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration. "
We must interrupt the President here. True, Bush did have a gun tracking program and that program was terminated in 2007. Fast and Furious began 9 months into your term as President.
"When Eric Holder found out about it, he discontinued it."
We must again interrupt the President. Holder doesn't have any record as to when he actually learned of Fast and Furious so how can we determine if his learning of it immediately triggered its termination?
"We assigned an inspector general to do a thorough report that was just issued, confirming that, in fact, Eric Holder did not know about this, that he took prompt action and the people who did initiate this were held accountable."
Clarification. You had one of your own people investigate a close confidant who is your personal appointee to office.
"But I will tell you that Eric Holder has my complete confidence because he has shown himself to be willing to hold accountable those who took these actions and is passionate about making sure that we're preventing guns from getting into the wrong hands."
What? The program by design was allowing guns to get into the wrong hands!
And the question remains unanswered. "Who is the highest DOJ official to be aware of Fast and Furious?"
Moderator Question: But if you have nothing to hide then why are you not releasing papers to this?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, actually, the truth is we've released thousands of papers -
Moderator Question: But not all of them.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, we've released almost all of them. The ones that we don't release typically relate to internal communications that were not related to the actual Fast and Furious operation.
There are thousands of requested document still not released. Your use of the word "typical" suggests there were also "atypical" documents which were withheld. Why did you invoke executive privilege?
".....And ultimately, I'm responsible, and my key managers, including the Attorney General, are responsible, for holding those people accountable, for making sure that they are fired if they do dumb things, and then fixing the system to ensure that it doesn't happen again. And I'm very confident that you will not see any kind of actions like this in the future.....
Ultimately responsible? So you are responsible? What is the impact of this responsibility burden you say you carry? Mistakes were made. Operations were bungled. Information has been blocked. What consequence awaits you for taking responsibility for this bad program and the stonewalling from your AG?
Moderator Question: Very briefly, talking about the same question - you know we have just one minute left. Why don't just have an independent investigation? Because at the end of the day, it was just the Justice Department investigating its boss and saying that he's not at fault. Why don't we have - very briefly - independent investigation that is not from the Justice Department?
THE PRESIDENT: Maria Elena, understand that not only have we had multiple hearings in Congress, but the inspector general is put in place specifically to be independent from the Attorney General. And this Attorney General's report was not a whitewash in any way. I mean, it was tough on the Justice Department. And it indicated that potentially more supervision was needed; people should have known in some cases, even if they didn't actually know. So it was, I think, independent, honest. It was a clear assessment of what had gone wrong in that situation.
It was not independent. By your own admission you selected the inspector general. And your opinion if the report was honest or not, matters little.
The facts fly in the face of your scenario.
Per a MSNBC article, "
"Federal law enforcement officials familiar with the matter say Operation Wide Receiver began in 2006 after the agency received information about a suspicious purchase of firearms. The investigation concluded in 2007 without any charges being filed."
As noted in this article by John Hayward of "Human Events"...
"Wide Receiver was less than one-quarter the size of Fast and Furious, involving about 500 guns. About 450 guns made it across the border into Mexico. Not only was Fast and Furious much larger, but it was only one of several gun walking operations launched by the Obama Administration. In fact, intrepid CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says she has "found allegations of gun walking in at least 10 cities in five states.""
"Unlike the Obama Administration programs, there actually was a serious attempt made to track the Wide Receiver weapons. Some of them were fitted with radio tracking devices."
"By contrast, one of the signature features of Obama gun walking is that absolutely no effort to track the guns was ever in place. ATF agents have testified they were expressly ordered to stand down when they tried to follow the cartel straw purchasers."
"There was no massive cover-up of Wide Receiver. No senior Administration officials committed perjury to distance themselves from it. The ATF was not exactly advertising the existence of the operation, or its unhappy conclusion, but that's very different from the thick stone wall Obama and his people tried to build around their far larger and deadlier operations."
Mr. President. You and your Attorney General own Fast and Furious. La verdad, por favor.