Don’t let Dems Confuse Fast and Furious with Wide Receiver

Aside from the philosophic reasons why I am a Republican, it also made me proud to be one when Republican leaders marched into President Nixon’s office and said, “You have to go”. Democrats are so different. When one of their own is caught red-handed in some scandal, they close ranks, they spin, and they lie. This is what they did with Bill Clinton; this is what they did with Jim Wright; this is what they did with Charles Rangel; Barney Frank, Tim Geithner, etc., etc., etc., and this is what they are trying to do with “Fast and Furious”.

What they are trying to do is conflate “Fast and Furious” with a similar, but very different program under President Bush called, “Wide Receiver” “Wide Receiver” was a program that closely followed a small number of guns that went to Mexico; it was done in cooperation with the Mexican government; few guns were unaccounted for; lots of bad guys were arrested; and no lives were lost. Under “Fast and Furious”, thousands of guns were sold to Mexican outlaws; it was not done as a cooperative effort with Mexico; the guns were not followed and were lost; and then two guns turned up linked to the murder of two US Border Patrol agents.

The motivation of “Wide Receiver” was to identify and arrest some bad guys; the motivation of “Fast and Furious” seems to be to cause such mayhem as to jolt Americans into supporting gun control.

If you ask Yahoo what the difference was, this is the answer you get:

Why are people comparing Bushes operation to fast and furious?

Fast and Furious was an extension of the 'Wide Receiver' operation that Bush's AG started - Nope!!

That program was done in cooperation with the Mexican government with agents on both sides intent on making arrests AND stopping the guns from getting across the border. They lost a total of TWELVE guns, and closed down the operation. F&F lost THOUSANDS of guns, the Mexican government was never told of the operation, and no attempts were made to either make arrests OR stop the guns from going over the border. HUNDREDS of deaths are directly related to F&F, with guns being left at the scene of the murders or captured.

On Fast & Furious, "Blame Bush" is a Lie

By Guy Benson 6/20/2012 Townhall.com  (Excerpt)

"Throughout today's House Oversight Committee hearings on possible contempt charges for Attorney General Eric Holder, Democrat members repeatedly asserted and imtimated that the deadly gun-running program had originated under the previous administration. Their clear aim was to muddy the waters on who is ultimately culpable for this blood-stained travesty, to suggest that Republicans are engaged in a shameless partisan witch hunt, and to feed the pliant mainstream media a handy alternate narrative as they begin to cover the controversy. Katie documented why this variant of "Blame Bush!" isn't remotely applicable to Fast & Furious in her book, and former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy exposed and distilled the Left's deliberate obtuseness on this subject last November:

The key to [Democrats'] strategy is conflating two very different programs: Operation Fast & Furious and a Bush era ATF initiative known as “Operation Wide Receiver.” In the questions from Judiciary Committee Democrats (principally, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer — there may have been others but, again, I didn’t see the entire hearing), it emerged that Wide Receiver began in 2006, when Alberto Gonzales was the Bush administration attorney general...Wide Receiver actually involved not gun-walking but controlled delivery. Unlike gun-walking, which seems (for good reason) to have been unheard of until Fast & Furious, controlled delivery is a very common law enforcement tactic. Basically, the agents know the bad guys have negotiated a deal to acquire some commodity that is either illegal itself (e.g., heroin, child porn) or illegal for them to have/use (e.g., guns, corporate secrets). The agents allow the transfer to happen under circumstances where they are in control — i.e., they are on the scene conducting surveillance of the transfer, and sometimes even participating undercover in the transfer. As soon as the transfer takes place, they can descend on the suspects, make arrests, and seize the commodity in question — all of which makes for powerful evidence of guilt. Senator Schumer’s drawing of an equivalence between “tracing” in a controlled-delivery situation and “tracing” in Fast & Furious is laughable. In a controlled delivery firearms case, guns are traced in the sense that agents closely and physically follow them — they don’t just note the serial numbers or other identifying markers. The agents are thus able to trace the precise path of the guns from, say, American dealers to straw purchasers to Mexican buyers.

To the contrary, Fast & Furious involved uncontrolled deliveries — of thousands of weapons. It was an utterly heedless program in which the feds allowed these guns to be sold to straw purchasers — often leaning on reluctant gun dealers to make the sales. The straw purchasers were not followed by close physical surveillance; they were freely permitted to bulk transfer the guns to, among others, Mexican drug gangs and other violent criminals — with no agents on hand to swoop in, make arrests, and grab the firearms. The inevitable result of this was that the guns have been used (and will continue to be used) in many crimes, including the murder of Brian Terry, a U.S. border patrol agent. In sum, the Fast & Furious idea of “trace” is that, after violent crimes occur in Mexico, we can trace any guns the Mexican police are lucky enough to seize back to the sales to U.S. straw purchasers … who should never have been allowed to transfer them (or even buy them) in the first place. That is not law enforcement; that is abetting a criminal rampage."  Townhall.com