Breakfast with the BATFE; Mexican journalist asks Obama to 'veto' 2nd Amendment

March 4th, 2011 10:00 am CT

If top officials in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE)--and, for that matter, in the Department of Justice (and Department of State?)--had thought that media (and congressional) scrutiny of the growing "Project Gunwalker" scandal would go no further than the CBS Evening News segment of Feb. 23, http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-n ... el-scandal then last night's follow-up http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-n ... -gunwalker must have come as a nasty shock. So, too, must be new articles in the Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 9966.story and from the Center for Public Integrity. http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2976/

Last night's CBS story featured courageous whistleblowing Agent John Dodson, who laid out in stark detail just how callously BATFE leadership "walked" guns into Mexico: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/ ... redPost-PE

Dodson feels that ATF was partly to blame for the escalating violence in Mexico and on the border. "I even asked them if they could see the correlation between the two," he said. "The more our guys buy, the more violence we're having down there."

Senior agents including Dodson told CBS News they confronted their supervisors over and over.

Their answer, according to Dodson, was, "If you're going to make an omelette, you've got to break some eggs."

That's right: to BATFE leadership, the nameless, faceless (and countless) dead in Mexico http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot. ... oject.html -and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry (who was armed with beanbags), http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-n ... bag-rounds and quite possibly Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata--were "eggs" that the BATFE had to "break." http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-n ... walked-gun

In fact, as objections from field agents mounted, a supervisor sent out an email telling them that, "If you don't think this is fun you're in the wrong line of work." It should, evidently, be fun to "break some eggs."

It is beginning to look as if, rather than a tasty breakfast, the BATFE's "omelette" will be served as just desserts.

Meanwhile, President Obama and Mexico's President Felipe Calderón met yesterday to discuss, among other things, border security (and the deleterious effects on same, played by the drug war violence). Afterward, there was a press conference of sorts, with one reporter from the U.S., and one from Mexico, each permitted to ask a question. See the sidebar video for the Mexican "Authorized Journalist's" question to Obama, and the reply. http://www.examiner.com/authorized-jour ... n-national

Basically, he asks why Obama doesn't "veto" the American people's right to keep and bear arms. Obama did not answer, "I wish it were that easy," but it's not hard to imagine that he was thinking along those lines. Instead, he dodged with, "I believe in the Second Amendment," but that there are ways to interdict gun trafficking without violating the right to keep and bear arms (not having the federal gun law enforcement agency actively participate in that trafficking might help, eh, Mr. President?).

Let's not laugh too hard at the foreign reporter's ignorance of the American political system, the Constitution, and gun politics--plenty of American "Authorized Journalists" are only barely less feckless. http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot. ... still.html Still, it's too bad that the press conference came before last night's CBS Evening News segment, rather than after. If the timeline had been reversed, perhaps the Mexican reporter would have asked if there were plans for the BATFE to switch to a cookbook that didn't treat the Mexican people as "eggs." Then again, perhaps not. http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-n ... alked-guns

http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-s ... -amendment