-By Warner Todd Huston
Good for me but not for thee is Obama’s refrain as he invoked Executive Privilege to keep hidden his actions with the disastrous Justice Dept. program called Fast & Furious — a program responsible for several deaths of American law enforcement officers as well as hundreds of Mexican citizens.
In 2007 when George W. Bush fired a small handful of U.S. Attorneys, he invoked Executive Privilege to prevent a Democrat controlled Congress from looking into his firings. At that time Obama went before the cameras of the Larry King Show to denounce Bush for hiding “behind Executive Privilege every time there’s something a little shaky taking place.”
Yet now that Congressional investigators are looking into the disastrous and murderous gun running program sponsored by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama is suddenly invoking the very thing he scolded Bush for using.
There can be only one reason for this: Obama was fully aware of the program and knew that people were dying. Now he’s trying to hide it.
The White House is defending its use of EP claiming that it has waited longer than any recent president to use the artifice.
This single fact is true, of course. Then again when a president has a subservient Congress and a subservient press for most of his first term in office, he doesn’t need to use Executive Privilege, right?
Worse, Obama, Holder and a cadre of leftists have been claiming that this was all Bush’s fault and that a similar, earlier program was started under Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The Bush AG knew about this program, they said. Holder even asserted this in his Congressional testimony.
Now even that has been retracted. Representative Darrell Issa now reports that Holder has made a retraction saying he “inadvertently made the claim.”
So, it appears that there really was no such knowledge, nor was the earlier program similar to Obama’s Fast & Furious.
The truth appears to be Obama lied, people died.
**UPDATE**
Also in 2007, Obama said he’d avoid using it because Exec. Priv. is “subject to abuse.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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