COMMENTARY | The Obama administration hopes you're tired of hearing about the ATF's long-running firearms and smuggling scandal. The illegal gun buys and the cross-border smuggling operations go by a variety of tags: Fast and Furious, Gunrunner, Wide Receiver and Linebacker.
Those monikers refer to Bush and Obama administration probes into gunrunning operations throughout the southwest U.S. and Mexico.
The most unfortunate aspect of the congressional hearings on these activities is that they are being broadly characterized in the press as a Republican vs. Democrat political contretemps.
People tend to ignore what they perceive as partisan squabbling. But democracies depend on free and open access to information. If there is dangerous serial incompetence in the current administration or the previous one, Americans need to know about it.
The gunrunning operations are not about the development of new secret weapons systems or about critical communications to our foreign embassies. No, the wall of silence, the stonewalling, is merely to save reputations and careers.
After all the time and resources spent by Rep. Darrell Issa's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the facts of the gunrunning operation are more elusive than ever, while the blame game is being played harder than ever.
Deputy Attorney General Lanny Bruerer "apologized" for not raising the issue with boss Eric Holder in April 2010, the time he says he first learned about it himself. Bruerer might be taking the bullet for Holder, but others who warned of gunrunner problems like Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein might have told Holder, too.
In Holder's May testimony, he told the committee he didn't know "specifics" about the gunrunning operation. The attorney general's testimony is not likely to change during his scheduled December appearance before the House subcommittee.
Meanwhile, Americans are expected to believe Holder is one of the few people who didn't know about the gunrunner operations. It's possible he didn't, but that's not exactly a comforting though, either.
If America's top cop didn't know about Fast and Furious or its Wide Receiver predecessor, he should have. If he did know, he lied to Congress.
By the same token, honest testimony before Congress and full disclosure of the facts would bring to light any serious mistakes made by the current and the previous administration.
Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer who has written for weekly and daily newspapers and several online publications. He is a frequent Yahoo contributor, concentrating in news and financial writing.
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