As if the dirt and skullduggery weren’t thick enough in Washington, new controversy surrounds the ill-fated would-be firearms sting “Operation Fast and Furious.” In addition to letting several thousand firearms walk across the border illegally, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) also helped launder and transport millions of dollars in cash into Mexico in efforts to track and disrupt drug trafficking.

That’s right: the DEA is helping drug cartels make money. Of course, we all understand the need to infiltrate organizations to get to the “top guy,” but two things give us pause: First, the organizations “infiltrated” are the same ones the ATF and State Department decided to arm courtesy of Uncle Sam. Second, one might expect, as we did, that after several years we would see drug cartels taken down, weapons caches recovered, and money and drugs confiscated. We’re still waiting. The upshot is that not only are we arming Mexican drug gangs, but, apparently, we’re directly funding them, as well. But wait, it gets better.

It turns out that a parallel “gun running” effort by communistas in the Obama administration is actually responsible for the bulk of the surge in arms supply to cartels. Specifically, under the “direct commercial sales” program approved by the U.S. government, large numbers of firearms were sold directly from manufacturers to the Mexican government. Unfortunately, however, the weapons either never arrived or were diverted by military and police personnel defecting to the cartels. The Mexican military recently claimed nearly 9,000 such weapons to be “missing.”

The State Department, which oversees the program, found in a recent audit of sales from 2009, the most recent year for which publicly released data is available, that over a quarter of the roughly 19,000 guns sold that year to the region including Mexico were “diverted” or, in bureaucrat-speak, had other “unfavorable” results. For those counting, that’s about 5,000 guns a year that are almost certainly winding up in criminal hands, all courtesy of Team Hope ‘n’ Change. And, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, those guns will be turning up at crime scenes “for years to come,” and “it is going to continue to have tragic consequences.”

In the wake of this additional buffoonery by the White House, it’s reasonable to think that the “Fast and Furious” operation itself would have faded into oblivion. However, as long as new controversies surrounding this operation keep arising — this week, for example, comes the revelation that ATF officials sought to leverage the operation to implement draconian reporting requirements on U.S. gun dealers — “Fast and Furious” will remain in the headlines. After all, as Holder maintained, “I have no intention of resigning.”

Read this on the Web at http://patriotpost.us/edition/2011/12/09/digest/