After yesterday’s thorough palate cleansing — a sweet tribute to a mom, begetting others like it — it’s downright refreshing to have a normal transmission from the PostScript bunker, where we’re all just folks who hate each other. Today we’re hating — 4,800 times and counting — in the comments to Dana Milbank’s column disapproving of Rep. Darrell Issa’s pursuit of Attorney General Eric Holder.
Milbank is not impressed with Issa’s position that, since a Border Patrol agent was killed in a shady way, Holder needs to divulge a whole bunch of documents dating from after the death — and after the program that might be implicated in the death was shut down — so Issa and his House committee can determine whether the Justice Department planned and executed a cover-up.
Milbank writes: “Republicans want to know whether top officials at Justice or the White House knew about the gun-walking program, which, although they haven’t turned up evidence of this, would be a reasonable line of inquiry. But casting doubt on their motives are the documents they are demanding: only those since February 2011 — two months after Terry was killed and the program was shut down.”
Until it gets good, hard proof that Holder didn’t send memos about a cover-up, it seems, the committee will not rest.
But it doesn’t look good for Holder and President Obama to hide things, so the more they stall and pout and obfuscate, the better the committee will feel about themselves, righteously demanding answers to . . . something.
So! It’s a good day for the inflamed partisanship industry.
MichSeag is inflamed that Republicans are not investigating the actual gun-walking operation, code-named Fast and Furious:
The underlying F&F program may indeed have been FUBAR. But it is Issa that isn’t interested in it. He is witch-hunting any little email or memo or some line in an obscure internal document that he can blow out of proportion and take out of context to smear Holder with - and by proxy, the president, just a few months before the election.
Alantibbetts thinks the inflammation is part of a deliberate bipartisan strategy to get us all shouting at each other, rather than at our government:
Meanwhile, in other news the US Senate passes a $1 TRILLION famr subsidy bill. Pay no attention to the legislation behind the curtain. We have a nice dog and pony show in the center ring.
T5grrr says inflamed partisanship led to deliberate disclosure of things!
Yes, the ATF gave them all of the documents. In printed form, thousands of pages. Now if I were trying to deliberately stall an investigation, this is exactly what I would do, smother them with paper and hope they don’t notice a few missing pages.
Yes, there is a skunk in the works, a very big and very smelly one that needs to be kicked out.
NoTheocracy thinks the inflammation will work itself out, once it’s obvious enough that the investigation is political:
Issa assumed his chairmanship determined to find something on the Obama administration. That this is the best he can do is a testimonial to the Obama administration and a reflection of the witch hunt that Rs are determined to carry out.
And andrew23boyle is inflamed that Democrats’ inflammation appears to be swelling their eyes shut:
It is sad that so many PREFER to remain ignorant of the complete facts of this case and what lies in the tens of thousands of documents that our employee Eric Holder refuses to share with the people and our representatives but I guess that’s the world in which we live.
But . . . who benefits from all the inflammation? Well, we in the fireproof PostScript bunker noticed a couple of commenters hatching a theory: that other commenters are, in fact, paid to be inflamed partisans and paid to post on The Post’s columns:
Conservator thinks he or she has found one:
Is reagansuckedbigtime a paid troll or a volunteer for Team Obama? Must be a volunteer because no one would pay for this clown’s comments.
findingoutaboutyou agrees:
HE IS A GEORGE SOROS BOT.
The partisan inflammation — the whole investigation Milbank derides, and even you and me here arguing — all of it is part of the plan, and has been from the beginning. It is a plan to CREATE JOBS. Convinced that each side is winning through trickery, more and more political operations will have professional Internet commenters able to expertly inflame in 20 words or fewer, leading to more inflammation and more need for professional commenters. Eventually we will all have jobs as havers of opinions, and America will be strong again. Partisan inflammation will save us all.
