It has been a bad week for the Attorney General and by all signs next week will be worse. I believe that the Fast and Furious scandal is a huge and as-yet overlooked problem that could do catastrophic damage to the Obama administration - dooming the president's re-election efforts.
Despite months of stonewalling and spin, the fundamental facts of the case have not changed, nor has the AG's position gotten any more tenable.
Unlike the media-generated scandals that dogged the Bush administration, Fast and Furious is serious and deadly - hundreds of Mexicans and at least two U.S. law enforcement officers have died as a result.
And yet we are expected to believe that no one knows who started it. Barack Obama is going to run for reelection and his AG will have to admit that after a year and a half, the Justice Dept. has no idea what the hell its various agencies are doing. But they'll figure it out, eventually.
Right now the GOP is trying to avoid a showdown because they want to avoid the inevitable "partisan witch hunt" line the state-owned media will throw at them. This is wise, but they are also prepping the battle space so that when they do force the vote, the issue is clear. The House and Senate hearings forced Holder into a corner, compelled him to argue that emails don't say what they say and that his people are dilligently working on figuring out how to use the filing system to figure who sent memos to whom.
If Mitt Romney is smart - and so far he has been pretty smart - he will wait until this circus is rolling and then simply demand Holder be fired for gross incompetence, perhaps adding that it is unfortunate that the president is so ignorant of what his agencies are doing - and so callous about the death of innocent Mexican citizens.
Should be an interesting week.
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