CNN's Fortune has a long, detailed investigation into the truth about the Fast and Furious scandal. Briefly, Darrell Issa's witch-hunt claims that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents deliberately walked guns to Mexican drug warriors, which somehow conflates into an Obama administration plot to chip at the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms; however, CNN's investigation finds that the opposite is true. Instead,
Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies.
Fast & Furious is a a textbook example of rightwing outrage over absolutely nothing. A small piece about the death of agent Brian Terry was picked up by a disgruntled ATF agent-turned-whistleblower and a former militia member who has advocated armed insurrection against the U.S. government. From there, the right wing beat the drums of outrage, Darrell Issa found what he thought was his ticket to fame, and by now the less sane elements of the blogosphere have twisted it into a story about Eric Holder personally mowing down ATF agents in order to TAEK AWAY YOUR GUNZ, MORANS!!!
Fast & Furious is also a textbook example of the danger to the left in ignoring stories outraging the right. While Issa has been tweeting about his investigation for the better part of a year, very few bloggers on the left bothered to address the fallacies of his case. Then, when the story burst into prominence thanks to Issa's subpoena of Holder, national reporters had only Issa's version. Now the reporters are finally digging into Issa's claims, and finding that "there's no there, there."
It's surely a coincidence that Fast & Furious is getting going just as the House GOP is forced to wind down its investigation into the Solyndra non-scandal.