Sharper Point: Arizona remembers, Eric Holder, even if you don’t
Jul 24, 2018, 1:37 PM
I’m not quite sure if Eric Holder has actually forgotten — or if he is just hoping we have forgotten — some very important things. Things that are seared into Arizona’s collective memory.
I’m told it’s a good thing for athletes to have a poor memory. If they make a mistake in the middle of the game, they should be able to forget it, shake it off and concentrate on the next play.
When I consulted political candidates, I used a similar approach. I’d tell them, “If you stumble during a speech, unless you say something factually incorrect, forget it and keep plowing forward. Otherwise, you might screw up what you’re saying now.”
However, if I was consulting former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, I would definitely tell him to work on remembering his mistakes — because he may be suffering from the worst case of political amnesia I’ve ever seen.
How else could Barack Obama’s first A.G. possibly tell Stephen Colbert that he’s actually considering running for president in 2020?!
Did Holder really forget that he’s still the only sitting member of a presidential cabinet to have been found in contempt of Congress — in the entire 242-year history of the United States?
That contempt finding came compliments of a scandal that we remember very, very well here in Arizona: Operation Fast and Furious.
Fast and Furious was a government sting that put 2,000 high-powered weapons into the hands of drug cartels and then lost track of about 1,400 of those guns.
Fast and Furious is seared into our memory here. Not only were most of those guns purchased in Arizona (under the supervision of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — an agency Holder oversaw), but two of those guns were found at the scene of the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Southern Arizona.
Terry, a former Marine, was murdered in Peck Canyon in Santa Cruz County on December 14, 2010.
In May of 2011, Holder testified in front of Congress that he “probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”
However, memos came to light a few months later that showed Holder’s office had been briefed on Fast and Furious as early as July 2010 — six months before Brian Terry was murdered.
Poor Eric Holder apparently has all sorts of memory problems, so my nonprofessional suggestion would be that he puts himself on a regimen of CoQ10, fish oil, B vitamins and any other supplements that may improve his cognition before he makes a decision to run for president.
He might not like what he finds once it all comes rushing back, but at least he’ll be in a better state of mind to decide whether he wants his (not-so-good) name dragged through the (well-deserved) mud.
And if the supplements don’t work, my kids have a couple of those memory games that may help. It’s kinda fun matching the puppy cards together, the flower cards together, the fire engine cards together …
