The Smartest Man In The Room And They Hate Him For It

Watched AG Eric Holder speak at this morning's House Judiciary Committee meeting on "Operation Fast and Furious", and the first question Holder gets from Republican Chairman Lamar Smith was about why Elena Kagan hasn't recused herself from the individual mandate SCOTUS deliberations.  Darrell Issa had brought props from Kinko's with Holder's face on them and could barely contain his haterade, and Jim Sensenbrenner basically said "OK so these thousands of documents you sent us don't have a smoking gun so YOU LIED! HEADS MUST ROLL!" and brought up actual, honest-to-god impeachment.

It was a long and gruesome affair as Eric Holder was having none of it and meticulously laid down what actually happened, and the Republicans kept playing with their butterfly knives the whole time while trying not to hurt themselves.  They knew they had nothing, they knew it's theater, and they knew Eric Holder is the smartest cat in the room.

And they despised him for it.  They can barely hold it in.  Instead, we're treated to trenchant observations like this from the likes of John Hinderaker at Power Line:

If the Obama administration did arrange for the shipment of arms to Mexican drug gangs, not for any legitimate public purpose but in order to advance a left-wing political agenda, and those guns were used to murder hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American border agent–which they were–then we are looking at a scandal that dwarfs any in modern American history. I think one would have to go back to James Buchanan, who ordered the shipment of federal armaments to the South so that they could be commandeered by secessionists when disunion came, to find a worse scandal. And one could argue that even that act by Buchanan, generally considered the worst President in American history, was motivated by principle and not politics, and therefore was not as craven as Obama’s gun walker scandal. But such a judgment would be premature. A great deal more investigation needs to be done before we can conclude that Fast and Furious was the worst scandal since pre-Civil War days.

Because of course, falsifying intelligence on Iraq and laying down propaganda in order to lead America into a bloody war that killed thousands of troops and hundreds of thosands of civilians over nine years doesn't hold a candle to the continuation of a Bush ATF program that ended up leading to a dead border agent.

Ann Althouse, on Hinderaker's statement:

We really do need an explanation. If Hinderaker's conclusion seems extreme, consider that it could be easily refuted by a clear statement from the Obama administration disclosing the true and legitimate purpose. The absence of such a statement propels us toward the extreme conclusion.

Such idiocy should be shunned as a national duty.  If either one had been listening, Holder today laid that out:  that this BUSH ERA PROGRAM was a terrible way to track criminals and guns used in crimes, that the program should have been discontinued, and that there's an ongoing investigation as to why it existed in the first place.  Holder stopped short of saying it was politicized Bush-era welfare for border state gun shops, but if there's any "true and legitimate purpose" to this, that was it.

Every condemnation of Holder skips over the fact that none of these fools raised a peep when these gunwalker programs were started under Bush.  And for this to be "the worst scandal since the Civil War?"  Really?  Such absolute stupidity deserves to be ridiculed.