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The Spectacle Blog
This LZ Granderson piece should have appeared in the Onion, but instead it ran on CNN’s website. He actually compares efforts to get to the bottom of Operation Fast and Furious to the public’s desire to know about the “pregnancies and marriages of D-list celebrities.”
By allowing guns to infiltrate Mexico’s drug cartel, we thought we could trace them up the ladder to the leaders. Take off the head and the body dies. As for the innocent people who lost their lives? Collateral damage. That’s the uncomfortable backstory to this scandal. And there are likely other operations like it in our nation’s history that we don’t even have a clue about.
And maybe it’s better for us not to be so nosy, not to know everything because, to paraphrase the famous line from the movie “A Few Good Men,” many of us won’t be able to handle the truth.
First, these are odd ideas about government accountability and the flow of information coming from a journalist. But the point of the Fast and Furious investigation isn’t to leak national security secrets, which most of us accept are legitimate. It is to determine who was responsible for an operation that endangered national security and innocent lives so we can hold them accountable. Congressional oversight of the executive branch is as much a part of our constitutional design as the government’s inherent power to secure the country.
View all comments (8) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by W. James Antle, III
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/06/27/dont-be-nosy-about-fast-and-fu
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JD| 6.27.12 @ 4:10PM
How does any liberal justify giving more angry press to the Valarie Plame story than to this story?
Bob K| 6.27.12 @ 6:36PM
What can we say Mr Antle? They are your colleagues talking like this. Journalistic standards are delicate and easily bruised it seems.
". ........ many of us won't be able to handle the truth."
And the standards seem to be so flexible that they apparently won't hold up under the weight of the truth either.
Our local liberal talk show host, who insists that he is a journalist, just this afternoon pleaded for the public to call the news media to tattle on anything that might bring any local elected leader into disrepute. "If you know if anyone of the (elected leaders) is cheating on their spouse call the local news outlets and tell them!" He actually said that. Then I turned the car radio off. Now that is REAL journalism! Ain't it?
Kingofthenet| 6.27.12 @ 7:22PM
I know Conservatives NEVER want Facts or Truth to get in the way of a good story, but I BEG you to please read this article that details what REALLY happened:
http://features.blogs.fortune......?hpt=hp_t2
W. James Antle III | 6.27.12 @ 8:08PM
The Fortune piece relies mainly on believing the testimony of some, mostly unnamed people rather than the testimony of other people. What gives you confidence that it represents "Facts" and "Truth" other than it says what you want to hear?
Kingofthenet| 6.27.12 @ 8:51PM
Well if Congress REALLY wants to find out what happened and possibly try to avoid this in the future rather than just beat the Obama Administration over the head to score political points, the FIRST place to start has to be the Prosecutors in Arizona, they need to testify and Congress needs to ask, Did the ATF ask your office to indict these individuals and did you refuse?
RJ| 6.27.12 @ 7:32PM
LZ Granderson, like many in the mainstream media is simply a propagandist, intent on providing cover for a corrupt regime. It is a complete farce for an administration that has been leaking national security procedures and activities to the press to claim "executive privilege" in denying subpoenaed information to Congress. The administration is charged with implementing the laws passed by Congress. As part of its oversight, Congress is entitled to know what the Department of Justice did in Operation Fast and Furious. To deny Congress this information is allow the executive branch to be unaccountable for its actions; a further step toward dictatorship.
J.C.Eaton| 6.28.12 @ 3:04AM
LZ Granderson.....a real and worthy heir to the Peter Zenger legacy. What a collossal tool.