‘FastnFuror’ and Captain Ahab

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The caption comes from a pair of posts by Ed Kilgore at the Political Animal blog. The first, natch, is FastnFuror:

[O]ur wingnutty friends have become exercised over the great issue of this era, Eric Holder’s stonewalling of Darrel Issa’s demands for a document dump related to the “Fast and Furious” gun walking operation, and now the president’s assertion of executive privilege against their release.

F&F does sound like it was a mess, albeit one that simply followed tactics developed and used in ATF operations during the Bush administration. I generally tend to assume all sorts of sordid and ineffective practices pervade everything remotely related to the the border-centered “war on drugs,” which is one reason I wish we’d more or less call it off.

But there’s something especially weird about conservatives raising such a ruckus over what you’d expect many of them to consider eggs broken in making a holy omelet—or over victims of gun violence, for that matter. Is the current hysteria just reflexive hyper-partisanship? Is it displaced fury at Holder for his opposition to GOP voter suppression efforts? [Yes] Is ATF-hating (remember Wayne Lapierre’s reference to its agents as “jackbooted government thugs”) just systematic now? Or is this all about the bizarre conspiracy theory—which few of the people in full shriek today mention—that F&F was actually aimed at discrediting U.S. gun dealers and hence justifying a crackdown on the Second Amendment? [Yes again]

Next is Darrell "Grand Theft Auto" Issa as Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. Issa As Ahab:

Lord know where the FastnFuror is ultimately headed; perhaps towards a sort of cartoon Gotterdammerung, perhaps to a deal where House Republicans accept a few thousand documents from the Justice Department and declare victory.

The whole thing actually makes more sense as one man’s crazy pursuit finally achieving its obsessive goal. Whatever else is going on, from farce to expose of law enforcement excesses on up to a full-blown constitutional crisis, there’s no question Rep. Darrell Issa has managed to maneuver the U.S. House and a Cabinet secretary into his own private theater of the absurd. Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald takes a good look at Franknfuror from that perspective:

California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, finally got his big trophy and moment in the cable news sun today when his committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, following nearly seven hours of testimony on the ATF’s botched “Fast and Furious” gun scandal.

The action, which came in spite of a last-minute move by the White House to claim executive privilege, now tees up the full GOP-controlled House to hold Holder in contempt, which it is expected to do soon. The vote is arguably a partisan witch hunt, but it’s also a long time coming and a rare big win for Issa, who entered his chairmanship with an extremely ambitious agenda that has largely fizzled….

Issa [has] often ended up shooting blanks…. His investigations into WikiLeaks, Fannie and Freddie, the FDA, and countless others have failed to expose any massive wrongdoing by the administration and after a year and half, he has little to show for them….

Other investigations bordered on fringe absurdism, like when he asked the Department of Justice to investigate ACORN more than a year after it went extinct. There was also the hearing he held probing the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, which famously included a panel featuring zero women….

So today’s vote is critical to Issa’s legacy, helping to salvage an otherwise disappointing tenure. And despite the contempt vote, Fast and Furious has proven a slog, taking over a year and half after being largely ignored by the non-Fox News media (Fox covered it plenty). Rush Limbaugh today to a caller frustrated by the slow pace of Issa’s investigation into Holder: “You could, on the other hand, credit Issa for delaying this until an election year when more people are paying attention, when it’ll have more impact.”

This kind of sums up how Congress winds up in situations like FastnFuror, and why so many Americans persistently hate the whole institution: who cares about Darrell Issa’s “legacy” as an investigative titan, other than Darrell Issa and his staff?

Well, the NRA and its legions of looney conspiracy theorists for one. Steve Benen writes 'Madness of the highest order':

Newt Gingrich appeared on CNBC last night and argued, with a straight face, that the so-called "Fast and Furious" controversy was part of an elaborate ploy to enact gun control. He wasn't kidding.

As Gingrich sees it, the Bush and Obama administrations deliberately attempted misguided sting operations so there would be deadly gun violence along the U.S.-Mexican border, which in turn would repulse the American mainstream, which in turn would create a demand for gun-control legislation, which in turn would cause Congress to pass gun-control laws, which in turn would cause a breakdown of Second Amendment rights.

Well, you might be thinking, Newt Gingrich is, you know, Newt Gingrich. Surely more sensible and more responsible figures in American politics see this conspiracy theory as ridiculous. But therein lies the point: this crackpot idea is the basis for the "controversy" itself.

* * *

And yet, this nuttiness has been fully embraced by many House Republicans, many Senate Republicans, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, the NRA, and some deeply strange folks on far-right blogs and talk radio. To put it mildly, it's disconcerting.

UPDATE: Darell Issa has advanced this conspiracy theory himself. From RightWingWatch, "Issa, speaking to the NRA faithful, advanced the baseless and reckless conspiracy theory that the Obama administration intentionally lost track of guns sold through the program in order to boost gun violence and clear the way for an assault weapons ban."

The Rachel Maddow Show on Wednesday night did a full take down of the "happiness is a warm gun" NRA conspiracy theorists who believe that the "guvmint" is secretly plotting to take their precious guns away — "precious, my precious." The NRA has made this a litmus test issue for Tea-Publicans. NRA to score Holder contempt vote.

What it boils down to is that the lunatics are running the insane asylum that is the Tea-Publican Congress.

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There is also the fact the Obama Justice Department has aggressively resisted Tea-Publican efforts at voter suppression. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she was alarmed that Republicans were using “contempt of Congress to frivolously use that really important vehicle to undermine the person who is assigned to stop the voter suppression in our country.” Pelosi: Attacking Holder part of GOP voter suppression plan | The Raw Story:

“This is no accident,” she told reporters. “It is no coincidence. It is a plan on the part of Republicans” to monopolize Holder’s time and “undermine his name” in the midst of a presidential campaign in which some states are grappling with claims of voter suppression efforts.

The US government filed a lawsuit last week seeking to block Florida’s purge of voter registration rolls, claiming Florida was being discriminatory and violating national law by “conducting a systematic program to purge voters” from its lists.

Holder has led the fight against such voter suppression measures.

Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) issued a carefully worded, brief statement after Issa’s announcement of contempt.

“It is unfortunate that the Committee scheduled a contempt vote against the Attorney General when federal law prohibits him from turning over many of the subpoenaed documents, but I am guardedly optimistic that a path forward exists that will serve the legitimate interests of the Committee in conducting rigorous oversight, protect the legitimate interests of the Department in its ongoing investigations and prosecutions, and avoid the needless politicization of this very serious issue,” Cummings said.