Too Fast, Too Furious

Darrell Issa has dabbled in a conspiracy theory.

By Robert VerBruggen

http://www.nationalreview.com

June 27, 2012

.

++

Since details about the Fast and Furious scandal first started to emerge, the biggest question has been: Who in their right mind would think that letting criminals walk away with guns would be a good way to fight crime? Thus far, the only explanation seems to be this: The Justice Department thought that tying American guns to Mexican crime scenes would be useful in its attempts to round up cartel kingpins — useful enough that it was worth giving guns to criminals without bothering to track the weapons as they changed hands.

That’s not very satisfying, of course. So, some Fast and Furious critics have searched for a better one — not by analyzing the evidence, but by concocting a conspiracy theory: specifically, that the Obama administration allowed the guns to go to Mexico deliberately in order to increase gun crime there, so it could cite that crime as a reason for more gun control here. And unfortunately, Fast and Furious’s lead critic, House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa, has joined them.

Here’s what Issa told a National Rifle Association conference in April:

Could it be that what they really were thinking of was, in fact, to use this — this walking of guns — in order to promote an assault-weapons ban? Many think so, and they haven’t come up with an explanation that would cause any of us not to agree.

This comment went largely unnoticed at the time, but when ABC’s Jake Tapper pushed him to explain it this past Sunday, Issa backed off only slightly:

We have e-mails from people involved in this that are talking about using what they’re finding here to support the — basically assault-weapons ban or greater reporting.
So chicken or egg? We don’t know which came first; we probably never will. We do know that during this — this Fast and Furious operation — there were e-mails in which they’re saying we can use this as part of additional reporting or things like assault-weapons ban. So the people involved saw the benefit of what — what they were gathering. Whether or not that was their original purpose, we probably will never know.

Issa went on to make his position even more muddled — claiming to take officials “at their word” that their initial intentions were good, but noting that some “opportunists” in the Justice Department went on to use the case to promote gun control.

Fast and Furious is a horrific scandal. The public deserves answers as to who devised the operation and what they hoped to accomplish. But the theory that Fast and Furious was devised to promote gun control goes far beyond the evidence, as Issa basically admitted to ABC this weekend, and it does not withstand scrutiny. The chairman should be ashamed to have dabbled in it, and should fully retract his initial comment, unless he has a considerable amount of evidence he has not shared with the public.

The theory goes something like this. It is a well-known fact that the Obama administration supports gun control. It is also known that the administration (and the media) loves to claim, falsely, that the overwhelming majority of guns used in Mexican crime come from the U.S. Further, as Issa explained on ABC, leaked e-mails reveal that at least one Justice Department official considered using the Fast and Furious case as a source of anecdotes showing that American guns are a major cause of Mexican gun crime. These anecdotes would be used to support a requirement that gun stores in some states tell the federal government whenever a single customer bought many guns. It also seems likely that the official knew at the time that his department had intentionally let the guns go.

Add all this together, and factor in the lack of any another convincing explanation for Fast and Furious, and we arrive at the conclusion that the Obama administration got tired of pushing gun control using bad statistics about gun crime in Mexico and decided to create some better ones instead.

Or not. As Issa conceded, there is no direct evidence that anyone involved in the creation of Fast and Furious intended to increase gun crime in Mexico. The fact that someone looked to Fast and Furious for anecdotal evidence after the fact says almost nothing about the origins of the program. And on closer inspection, this theory isn’t any more understandable than the one that doesn’t require accusing the administration of murdering scores of Mexican citizens and at least one American law-enforcement agent for political gain. Even if we assume the Obama administration places no value whatsoever on human life, it’s hard to see how the gun-control scheme would have passed a cost-benefit analysis.

First, the benefits are negligible. The Obama administration and its accomplices in the media have already been more than willing to twist statistics in order to claim that most guns involved in Mexican drug violence come from the U.S. Content with their falsehood, why would they need to inflate the real numbers to back it up?

Moreover, if the goal had been to increase the overall use of U.S. guns in Mexican crimes, Fast and Furious wasn’t nearly large enough: In most years, more than 10,000 guns used in Mexican crimes are traced to U.S. sources. Fast and Furious let somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 guns go, but it will take years for them to be recovered at crime scenes, and some never will be.

And if the goal was simply to accumulate anecdotes about American guns that were used by Mexican criminals, it’s not clear why the Justice Department would need a richer source than the 10,000 weapons that are traced to the U.S. each year without Fast and Furious. (In pointing out that the Left overstates the extent of the gunrunning problem along the border, conservatives often forget that there really is a problem.)

And second, the potential costs of such a scheme are enormous. Like most putative conspiracies, it would require too many people to keep their mouths shut. Even if we assume that only a couple of people would know about the program’s true motivations, plenty of others would need to stay silent about the ATF’s tactics and the Justice Department’s spin on the case. Not only would ATF agents need to watch hundreds of guns walk without blowing the whistle or letting rumors spread, but gun-store owners would need to remain mum as people trafficked guns under ATF supervision without being arrested, and Justice insiders would need to stay quiet as press releases touted anecdotes about gun trafficking that had actually been facilitated by the ATF. Further, any time a law-enforcement officer contacted a gun store to investigate a firearm that had been sold there, the officer might learn that the ATF had instructed the owner to let the gun go.

It was always just a matter of time before Fast and Furious became public knowledge, and at that point the statistics and anecdotes become useless as gun-control propaganda — and a scandal is born.
It’s hard to see why the gun-control-conspiracy explanation is more believable than the botched-sting-operation one, even if the latter seems like it could be the work of the Underpants Gnomes from South Park, and even operating under the assumption that the Obama administration cares not a whit for human life.

Unless far more evidence surfaces to support it, we should put this theory to rest.

— Robert VerBruggen is a deputy managing editor of National Review.

Derek Jeter: Highlights

S.B. 1070’s Day in Court

The Arizona law wins some and loses some.

By Heather Mac Donald
http://www.nationalreview.com
June 26, 2012

The Supreme Court has upheld the provision of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 that the Obama administration and the illegal-alien lobby most feared: Section 2, which reaffirmed the existing power of Arizona’s local police to inquire into someone’s immigration status if the officer has reason to believe that the person is in the country illegally. In upholding Section 2, the Court has vindicated the power of judicial review and of reason itself. The lower courts’ efforts to invalidate the patently constitutional provision became progressively more laughable as the case rode up the appeal circuit, culminating in the administration’s own tortured verbiage before the Supreme Court. Even the most liberal justices could not accept the contortions of plain meaning that the solicitor general and two Ninth Circuit judges (opposed by a powerful dissent from Ninth Circuit judge Carlos Bea) inflicted on congressional law in their desperate attempt to overturn the Arizona provision.

The administration hated Section 2 because it would throw into sharp relief its de facto amnesty for illegal aliens. Section 2 raised the specter of Arizona traffic cops, say, regularly being told that federal immigration authorities have no interest in detaining an unlicensed illegal alien who has just run a red light or is driving under the influence. However, now that President Obama has issued his own executive amnesty for over 1 million illegals, the administration should not be troubled at the prospect of being shown in yet another forum to be indifferent to immigration enforcement. But it continues to fiercely oppose Section 2 because it turns out that merely asking an illegal alien about his status has a deterrent effect that interferes with the open-borders agenda.

The Court also rightly rejected the lower courts’ premature granting of a preliminary injunction in a facial challenge against Section 2. The Court argued that the section needs to play out in practice to see if its enforcement raises any constitutional problems. Memo to the ACLU: Drop your racial-profiling suit against the section; you’re not going to get past this ruling.

The majority took official note of the harms done to Arizona by illegal immigration, citing Center for Immigration Studies research on the disproportionate rate of felonies committed by illegals in Maricopa County.

I am frankly flabbergasted, however, that the majority, joined by the otherwise dissenting Justice Alito, invalidated Section 3, which makes it a state misdemeanor to violate a federal law requiring legal aliens to carry their registration papers with them. The precedent relied on by the Court concerned a much more complicated state registration scheme that clearly added new requirements to the federal one. Unfortunately, the drafters of Arizona’s Section 3 appear to have needlessly given a pretext for invalidation by changing the federal penalties in the most trivial of ways: not including probation as a penalty and not allowing for pardons. These details of Section 3 were not relied on by the lower courts and have been given prominence by the SCOTUS majority as a bootstrap supplement to its rigid and overly broad reading of preemption doctrine.

A more interesting and plausible objection to Section 3 would arise only once the law was put into practice. If Arizona decided to fine or jail someone under Section 3 whom the feds wanted to ignore, it would be in conflict with executive-branch enforcement priorities. Finding a constitutional conflict in such a situation would require raising executive discretionary decisions about (non)enforcement of the law to the status of congressional statutes and executive regulations under preemption doctrine — an important issue that the majority ducks (and that Justice Alito claims must be resolved against the federal government’s preemption claim). Since the Court has overturned Section 3 on a facial challenge, however, we will not soon have a ruling on that question.

In light of the majority’s rigid reading of preemption doctrine with regards to Section 3, it is not surprising that the Court also invalidated Section 5, which criminalized work by an illegal, and Section 6, which allowed the warrantless arrests of illegals for deportable offenses. Unfortunately, the demise of those sections does not bode well for the southern states whose immigration-enforcement laws went farther than Arizona’s in several respects.

Where are we left in terms of jurisprudence? At first blush, it is hard to find a coherent doctrine at play here. The Court previously upheld an Arizona law imposing additional penalties on employers who repeatedly and knowingly hire illegal aliens. In theory, the Court could reconcile that decision with its invalidation of the S.B. 1070 penalty against illegal workers, but a determined jurist could just as easily argue that Arizona’s employer law should be invalid as well under today’s reasoning.

The Scalia dissent is the only opinion to acknowledge the political context of the Court’s decision.
The justice uses the Obama DREAM Act to presciently discredit what is being reported as the administration’s vindictive decision to suspend its 287(g) agreements with Arizona. (Those 287(g) agreements authorize local police officers to act as immigration agents in determining an alien’s status.) Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano did officially whine on Monday about the burden that Section 2 will put on her allegedly straightened agency, an argument that the administration already unsuccessfully pressed to invalidate Section 2. Scalia points out that DHS has just voluntarily saddled itself with an enormous additional administrative load in inviting over 1 million illegal aliens to apply for amnesty; the department’s complaint that it cannot afford to work with Arizona in identifying and responding to illegal aliens within its border is therefore specious.

Scalia’s dissent is also the most breathtakingly sweeping in its assertion of a historic and inherent state authority to police state borders, regardless of what the feds do or do not do, a position that has only been implicit in the defenses of S.B. 1070 up to now. It is a must read, one that raises the question for S.B. 1070 supporters whether their position ineluctably leads as well to Scalia’s radical federalism.

As for the politics, we are back to square one. Obama is calling — surprise! — for “comprehensive immigration reform.” And Romney is calling for a “national immigration strategy,” whatever that means. At least Romney, after an hour or so of dithering about the opinion, has affirmed what he calls the “duty and the right” of states to “secure our borders and preserve the rule of law” — a covert defense of S.B. 1070. Until Romney spells out his intentions regarding federal immigration enforcement, however, it is not yet possible to know how a vote for Romney will alleviate the country’s problems with illegal immigration.

After the oral argument in Arizona v. U.S., open-borders advocates asserted that S.B. 1070 was irrelevant, since the rate of growth in the illegal population had slowed to a bare trickle. The policy of enforcement by attrition, which S.B. 1070 adopted, was no longer needed, the advocates argued. That claim is dead wrong. One reason why growth in the illegal population has slowed is the mere possibility of state enforcement. Law enforcement works, even if it is only threatened. That means that every state that cares about reducing the costs of illegal immigration should now adopt its own counterpart to S.B. 1070’s Section 2.

— Heather Mac Donald is a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of The Immigration Solution.

Film Review: 'Rock of Ages'

Rock of Ages is a Head (Against Wall) Banger

Rock 'n roll clusterfuck about as appealing as venues' piss-stained urinals

 

By Rex Reed

The New York Observer

http://observer.com/

June 13, 2012

As rock musicals go, Rock of Ages can’t go fast enough. This sloppy freak show is two minutes shy of two solid hours of screaming swill, without a shred of freshness, insight, cleverness or coherence to be detected within a two-mile radius. It’s based on a noisy Broadway jukebox joke that was never much to write home about in the first place, but it still had a soupçon of humor and banal charm, both of which are bewilderingly missing on the screen. The fact that the show is still running testifies to the confounding disregard for taste and intelligence rampant among today’s mass-market audiences. I haven’t seen a movie this bad since Battlefield Earth and Howard the Duck.

There is no plot, but you can write the outline for the one that’s missing on your fingernail. Stupid girl from Oklahoma boards a Greyhound bus for drug-addicted, sex-crazed Hollywood to become a rock star and meets a janitor who also wants to be a rock star. She ends up stripping, he ends up in a boy band, and the story ends up in the hopper with the rest of the clichés. The two-minute story threatens to drag on for years, populated by amplified wack jobs shrieking lyrics that cannot be translated and spitting dialogue so filthy it can’t be repeated. The director is a fraud named Adam Shankman (Hairspray) who is so inept he has a hard time figuring out if there’s any film in the camera. Hollywood blackmail comes in all sizes, but I shudder to think what it took to trap otherwise respectable people like Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones into this kind of unsalvageable garbage.

Hate sets in early. Sherrie from Tulsa (rock singer Julianne Hough) boards the Greyhound and all of the other passengers burst into song, including the children. Arriving in the middle of a parody of the Sunset Strip in the 1980s, her suitcase full of Twisted Sister albums is immediately stolen, but the prancing drug dealers and prostitutes are as cheerful and friendly as extras on The Donna Reed Show. In minutes, a janitor and wannabe rock icon (singer Diego Boneta, eons away from star status) lands Sherrie a job in the Bourbon Room, a cross between the old Whiskey a Go-Go and the noxious Viper Room where River Phoenix took the cab. It’s a hellhole, run by a fat, greasy cretin in a long Cher wig (Alec Baldwin) and threatened with police raids and foreclosure warnings by the new mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who dedicates herself to cleaning up the crime and vice that has taken Los Angeles captive. She organizes church groups to shut down the Bourbon and destroy the career of Stacie Jaxx, an alcoholic, terminally stoned, oversexed dope fiend played by a half-nude, tattooed Tom Cruise with extended nipples, black fingernail polish, a pet baboon who mixes his drinks and a lot of hair below his belly button that would, back in the day, have caused a riot at the Hays Office. It’s supposed to be a “brave” example of a fearless actor doing a stretch, but he looks more like an androgynous addict at the New Orleans Mardi Gras who has been spending entirely too much time in the wrong kind of massage parlors.

Between a barrage of unspeakable assaults on the eardrums by groups called Arsenal and Concrete Balls, the mayor’s wife, who reveals she once spent the night with Stacie Jaxx unconscious from drugs and multiple orgasms and never got over it, sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” while the mayor is getting spanked by his S&M secretary. “Listen up,” says Mr. Baldwin, preparing his teenybopper clientele for Stacie Jaxx to turn the Bourbon Room into a Xanadu of “sweat, ear-shattering music and puke—so let’s get going!” Ms. Zeta-Jones remembers the night he made her “feel like a woman”, covered with Cool Whip and Wild Turkey. Ms. Hough tells the rock superstar, “When my hamster died, your music really, really helped me through.” The audience at the screening I attended was laughing so hard I missed a lot of the sub-mental dialogue, but who could miss Alec Baldwin, in the lowest point and most embarrassing mistake of his career, bellowing “I just vomited—in my pants. It came out of my ass.” The filthy, disgusting script is by three people who should remain nameless, but I can hardly believe one of them is Justin Theroux, a good actor who would do the world a favor if he dropped his laptop off the top of the Chrysler Building. Mary J. Blige drops by to offer sage advice (“It’s not fame and fortune you came to L.A. looking for—it’s love. And love left this place a long time ago!”) Tom Cruise gets a reporter from Rolling Stone pregnant and ends up on the toilet floor covered in condoms. It’s about as entertaining as an iron lung.

I can understand the perverse temptation to make money by appealing to the base instincts of an ever-increasing audience of fools, but this assault on the IQ is where people with self-respect should draw the line. Rock of Ages is so bad it makes Burlesque look like an underappreciated masterpiece.

rreed@observer.com

ROCK OF AGES

Running Time 123 minutes
Written by Justin Theroux, Chris D’Arienzo, Allan Loeb and Chris D’Arienzo (musical book)
Directed by Adam Shankman
Starring Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta and Tom Cruise
0/4