Fast And Furious Did Not Begin Under President Bush :: 06/25/2012

Scandal: The president's spokesman confuses a "controlled delivery" operation known as Wide Receiver with the quite different Fast and Furious and couldn't even remember the name of the Border Patrol agent killed by it.

When a Border Patrol agent is murdered in the service of his country as a result of a program run by his own government, one would think the White House press secretary would know his name. Jay Carney, his name was Brian Terry.

During a contentious press conference where even the White House press corps seemed to have had enough with the administration's tap dancing about an operation that began on its watch and got two federal agents killed, ABC's Jake Tapper had to feed a stumbling Carney the name of the Border Patrol agent killed by it.

To refresh Mr. Carney's memory, and perhaps that of the president, who never called the family, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010 at the hands of an illegal immigrant working for the Sinaloa Cartel just 10 miles from the Mexico border near Nogales, Ariz. Two AK-47 assault rifles found at the site of the Terry shooting were traced back to a straw buyer allowed to smuggle guns into Mexico with the blessing of the ATF and Eric Holder's Department of Justice.

In addition to Agent Terry, Immigration Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata was also killed in a separate incident by a weapon allowed to "walk" into Mexico from the U.S. as part of the administration's third-rate alleged attempt to track and catch gun traffickers. Let us not forget the hundreds of Mexican nationals who have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons.

Like the administration he serves, Carney was perhaps too focused on the party line that gun-walking into Mexico was something begun under President George W. Bush and Fast and Furious was merely an extension of this policy.

Dubbed "Operation Wide Receiver," the Bush-era operation was run out of Tucson between 2006 and 2007, ending before Bush left office and before Fast and Furious began under Obama in 2009. The differences between it and Fast and Furious are vast, starting with the fact that Wide Receiver produced no dead bodies.