Darrell Issa and House Republicans’ Permanent Witch Hunt
Here’s a nice piece from the Atlantic on how Darrell Issa’s “invstigation” of the non-issue “Fast and Furious” is just another chapter in the Republican Party’s endless quest for Democratic Party corruption that has gone on since the GOP’s first takeover of Congress in 1994.
I’m sorry, but can we talk turkey — I mean, Darrell Issa — for a moment? Is there any fair and balanced news commentator (honest ones, that is, not the Fox News version) who doubts what this guy is all about? Rep. Issa himself has made no pretense of his intentions: Nail Barack Obama first, raise Issa’s profile second (or maybe that’s first), and get at the truth last.
Even before he took over the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, with zero evidence in hand, Issa called Obama “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” In his relentless search for evidence (and headlines) since, he has found nothing to back up that statement, making him look like a buffoon. (Even the Solyndra scandal turned out to be a question of incompetence, not corruption, as Issa himself has admitted.)
As Issa told my former colleague Susan Davis for her definitive profile of him in National Journal last year: “I’m a salesman …. What I’m selling is the awareness of a product.” By “product,” Issa apparently intended to mean his committee’s investigations. But clearly the main product he’s selling is Darrell Issa.
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In the current probe, Issa and the other Republicans on his committee have told melodramatic tales suggesting that border agent Brian Terry may have been a victim of the guns that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost sight of when it created its misbegotten sting program intended to trace weapons to Mexican drug cartels. But in their singular effort to find evidence that the Obama White House tried to cover up Fast and Furious, as Dana Milbank pointed out in The Washington Post on Thursday, the documents they are demanding are “only those since February 2011 — two months after Terry was killed and the program was shut down.”
All of this has engaged the passions of nearly every Republican in the House, helped along by their mouthpiece, Fox News, on which the ineffable Michele Malkin declared yesterday that the Obama administration “let [the guns] go because they had an underlying gun-control agenda.” Rep Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat on the committee, expressing the views of most Democrats, called the Holder contempt vote a political witch hunt and added, “It’s witch-hunting season, and it won’t be over until November.” But Maloney had that only partly right. It won’t be over in November. It’s been going on for many Novembers. Strident House Republicans have been on one continual witch hunt since the 1994 takeover of the House.