I know that’s hard to digest in a society where pregnancies and marriages of D-list celebrities make the cover of People magazine, but there comes a point where the public’s right to know needs to take a back seat to matters like national security and diplomacy.

 

Heads should roll because of the Fast and Furious debacle. We don’t need every detail of that operation to be made public in order for that to happen.

 

If it were an isolated sting, maybe. But it is at least the third incarnation of a gun-running scheme stretching across two administrations, which means we could be pressing to open Pandora’s Box. We do not want to open Pandora’s Box, not about this and certainly not about a bunch of other potentially scandalous things the federal government has been involved with.

 

Fast and Furious? Please.

 

Being told that something’s “none of your business” is slowly being characterized as rude, and if such a statement is coming from the government, it seems incriminating.

 

Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet. . . .

 

You see, freedom isn’t entirely free.

 

It also isn’t squeaky clean.

 

And sometimes the federal government deems it necessary to get its hands a little dirty in the hopes of achieving something we generally accept as good for the country.

 

And maybe it’s better for us not to be so nosy, not to know everything because, to paraphrase the famous line from the movie “A Few Good Men,” many of us won’t be able to handle the truth.

 

LZ Granderson, CNN Columnist

This is the kind of sophomoric anti-liberty trash that passes for journalism today? Shut your mouth, mind your own business, don’t ask questions of your loving government?

Granderson may be a rabid Obama apologist who would reflexively defend anything Obama says or does, and there’s no law against that. But this man is trying to pass himself off as a journalist!

Journalism is about asking questions that corporations, governments and establishments don’t want to answer. It’s about reporting the full-story, no matter how many toes you step on. It’s about opening up power to real scrutiny. And that is something that the propagandists in big media are often incapable of — which of course is why big media is slowly dying.

I get apoplectic whenever some hawkish deficit-happy foreign policy schmuck advocates American intervention in Syria (no matter how many archaic Turkish planes are shot out of the sky) even more than I did before America struck Iraq.

The utterly bizarre imperative of American intervention in the middle east is thrown into stunning contrast against the background of utter lawlessness and destruction on America’s own border with Mexico as a direct result of the failed drug war. The clowns in successive administrations have spent so much time, effort and energy on policing the borders of Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they have failed to check the growth of the drug cartels into massive, well-armed organisations.

By trying to obstruct the congressional investigation into the botched gun-running operation Fast and Furious, and instead hiding behind the phoney front of executive privilege Obama and Holder have shown that they have something to hide.

Whatever they are trying to hide should be brought to light. You can’t have an accountable government without checks and balances, and the greatest check to tyranny is transparency.

We need to know the depth and width of Fast and Furious and the programs which preceded it: how was it authorised, how was it designed, how did it go wrong, who was to blame for it going wrong.

We need to know whether or not the widely-spread allegation that the Obama administration has sold guns directly to Los Zetas is true. We need to know whether or not El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel are working with the DEA and the Mexican government. (Both of these allegations are widely accepted as fact in Mexico).

We need to know why Obama has chosen to continue the failed drug war, even in spite of overwhelming evidence that the illegality of drugs is the very thing that empowers the criminal cartels, and in spite of the fact that Obama is a former drug user.

We probably won’t get our answers directly from politicians; while it is the responsibility of journalists to ask these kinds of tough questions, politicians will almost always deflect. But I am sure there are some conscientious people inside the DEA, inside the Mexican government, and inside the Justice Department who will blow the whistle sooner or later. Anyone who can answer these questions is serving the public good. We can handle the truth, no matter what LZ Granderson or Eric Holder thinks. We need to hold government to account for its actions.