Saturday, June 30, 2012

Issa's Cursed House of Seven Gables

Has there ever been a moment in the history of House of Representatives when one political party engaged en masse in a witch hunt?  That's the valid question that can be raised by the gang of Republicans led by Rep. Darrell Issa in voting Attorney General  Eric Holder in criminal and civil contempt of Congress.

How dare Issa, the California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and wealthiest congressman of Capitol Hill (several hundred million $$).

You need to understand that this sinister grandstander said before the vote that he had no evidence  that Holder had any knowledge of the screwed-up undercover gun deal that was to lead to drug dealers in Mexico.  No evidence.  So what!  If Holder had agreed to add a few more documents to the  thousands that the Justice Department had  already turned over to Issa, who knows?  There might been a sliver of damning  information leading to Holder.  That's the Issa narrative, at least.

Folks, this isn't even good political farce.   It's a power-mad committee chairman leading his lemmings who are all over the Tea Party-driven House. Issa had to know that his stunt  would go nowhere outside the boundaries of his captives on Capitol Hill.  The Justice Department quickly announced that it had no intention of prosecuting Holder,  the first presidential  cabinet member to be voted in contempt. That's of no consequence to Issa.  He had already succeeded in showing the Obama Administration who was boss on Capitol Hill, such as this monster is.

The Congressional Black Caucus and its white allies in the House marched out of the chamber before the vote to show Issa that they had no patience for  playing his game of seeking  and destroying an African-American attorney general.  Issa's shameful behavior should have erased any hopes  among black voters that the GOP is on their side.

Issa  has turned his side in the House of Representatives into Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables, which existed under a curse.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The funny part is that Issa and the NRA claim a devious conspiracy to reduce 2nd Amendment rights and increased gun control regulations.

Grumpy Abe said...

The NRA is one of Issa's gables

Marv Katz said...

Being found in contempt by Issa and his contempt-oraries is like being called ugly by a frog. (Yeah, I know, it's old and hackneyed. But it fits.)

David Hess said...

Wasn't it a British fellow, name of Acton, who once remarked: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Issa is a tin-horn, publicity hound whose charge from the House's Republican leadership is to concoct counterfeit charges against Democratic officeholders in the hope of diverting public opinion from the negligence of the GOP's congressional blockade tactics. The ill-advised "Fast and Furious" affair was initiated by misguided ATF officials in Arizona and a local U.S. attorney there during the Bush administration and carried over into the succeeding Obama administration. Its original objective was to identify and apprehend suspected "straw" buyers (and sellers) of large numbers of military-style semiautomatic rifles that were smuggled to Mexican drug traffickers. The entire program was badly administered and misbegotten as hundreds of weapons were lost track of. When Attorney General Holder found out what was going on, he put a stop to it. By then, most of the damage had been done. And he ordered an internal investigation into how it went wrong, including an inquiry into whether any laws were broken. So far, he has refused to release documents that he claims could interfere with such investigations. His beef with Issa is over the latter's belief that Holder knew about the fiasco sooner than he said when he testified at a hearing on the matter. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association's rabid leadership weighed in on behalf of the gun dealers in the Southwest who apparently were providing wholesale supplies of the rifles to the gun-runners. If I were the Attorney General, I'd start up an investigation of the NRA for aiding and abetting the illicit sales of the weapons and obstruction of justice for interfering with a criminal probe of the gun trafficking.