Race, the right, and Eric Holder
The first thing to recognize is how flimsy the Fast and Furious “scandal” is, at least as it relates to the Obama administration. It’s been driven by conservative media outlets for more than a year, and as Dana Milbank explained in a Thursday column, it’s hard not to see the right’s focus on it as much more than an attempt to use a genuine tragedy to go after Obama:
[ATF Agent Brian] Terry’s death is indeed a scandal, part of the “Fast and Furious” operation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost track of 2,000 guns it was planning to trace on their way to Mexican drug cartels; two of those firearms were found near Terry’s body. After that, the Justice Department shut down the program (which followed similar “gun-walking” operations during the George W. Bush administration), fired or reassigned several people who ran the program out of ATF’s Phoenix office, requested an inspector-general investigation and handed over about 7,600 pages of records to Issa’s committee.
Republicans want to know whether top officials at Justice or the White House knew about the gun-walking program, which, although they haven’t turned up evidence of this, would be a reasonable line of inquiry. But casting doubt on their motives are the documents they are demanding: only those since February 2011 — two months after Terry was killed and the program was shut down.
There’s an element of basic opposition party posturing in all of this, but again, the right’s contempt for Holder predates Fast and Furious – and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that at least part of it is an extension of the racially-charged attacks and insinuations that have been part of the right’s assault on Obama.
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/22/race_the_right_and_eric_holder/singleton/
