Take special note of that last part of reportage from Attkisson that clues up into how Holder will attempt to wriggle out of a perjury charge (underscoring mine):
The Justice Department told CBS News that the officials in those emails were talking about a different case started before Eric Holder became Attorney General. And tonight they tell CBS News, Holder misunderstood that question from [Congress] - he did know about Fast and Furious - just not the details.
The initial reaction to a defense of "I wasn't lying! I'm just lazy, shallow, stupid, or all three" is something in the realm of "Awwwww, come on! You expect us to believe that you, America's top cop, didn't know what was going on when your underlings were sending you memos to keep you informed?"
But the more you know about Eric Holder, the more it seems like that's the way things are run in his Justice Department.
Remember that Holder first entered the national spotlight as a Deputy Attorney General under Clinton AG Janet Waco -- oops, I mean, Janet Castro -- darn! I mean, Janet Reno (If that's a new name to you kiddies out there, click on the links and educate yourselves). Her tenure was spotted with previously unimaginable abuses of power and cover-ups that were ignored by a mainstream media that tried to protect the Clintons (of course, the MSM wagon circle around the Obama WH is like nothing anyone's ever witnessed). Having years before been appointed to the D.C. bench by Ronald Reagan, and having already spent many years as a U.S. Attorney, Holder wasn't a particularly controversial pick for the AG position at first. But then, in a speech commemorating February 2009 as that year's Black History Month, he called the country he's serving "a nation of cowards" regarding discussion of racial issues -- this coming months after the same cowardly nation had just elected the first African-American as its leader.
In March 2010, when Holder caught holy heck over his nonsensical insistence that Al Qaeda terrorists be tried in New York civilian courts rather than in military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, there was talk that he and the President were on the outs (and you know who always wins such battles). A thread on this topic at Patterico's Pontifications gave me the opportunity to relate what I noticed about something he said in the course of that insulting, patronizing, offensive 2009 lecture:
IMHO, everything you need to know about Eric Holder’s judgment — if not his intellect — was what he said in the waning moments of his infamous “Nation of Cowards” speech.
Read carefully [cut-and-pasted verbatim from the DOJ's webpage, bold mine]:I stood, and stand, on the shoulders of many other black Americans. Admittedly, the identities of some of these people, through the passage of time, have become lost to us- the men, and women, who labored long in fields, who were later legally and systemically discriminated against, who were lynched by the hundreds in the century just past and those others who have been too long denied the fruits of our great American culture. The names of too many of these people, these heroes and heroines, are lost to us. But the names of others of these people should strike a resonant chord in the historical ear of all in our nation: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Charles Drew, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Vivian Malone, Rosa Parks, Marion Anderson, Emmit Till (sic). These are just some of the people who should be generally recognized and are just some of the people to whom all of us, black and white, owe such a debt of gratitude. It is on their broad shoulders that I stand as I hope that others will some day stand on my more narrow ones.All right. Now, in the spirit of the Sesame Street feature “One Of These Things Is Not Like the Others,” which of those names in bold does NOT belong?
If you answered “Emmett Till” (the proper spelling), you are correct. Your prize: a half-dollar with an Obama sticker pasted on it, sold by Montel Williams as a collectible (total value: 50 cents).
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy who was brutally beaten, shot, disfigured, tied with barbed wire to a 90-pound weight and dumped into a river on August 28, 1955. His “crime”? Reports vary, but at the very least, the Chicago-born teenager — while visiting with sharecropping relatives in Mississippi — directed a wolf whistle at a 21-year-old married white woman inside a general store owned by her parents. At the most (and of course, one must consider the sources), Till allegedly actually caressed the young woman, asked her for a date, and said to her “I’ve been with white girls before.” Two white men (the girl’s husband and his half-brother, a sharecropper boss) slaughtered Till after dragging him from his bed in the wee hours of the morning. It’s one of the landmarks of injustice in American jurisprudence, and sparked — but did not begin — the civil rights movement in America.
As a reminder, I am African-American myself — twice as black as Barack Obama. I am glad to live in an American society in which I can feel free to flirt with not only white women, but women of every ethnicity without fear of ending up at the bottom of a river. But that doesn’t mean that hitting on a pretty girl is a smart thing to do when she is being guarded by someone with a screw loose. I would think most of you fellows would think twice about lingering too long on the decolletage of a mobster’s arm candy regardless of your God-given right to look at what she obviously wants to be seen. Similarly, Till’s whistling incident was shocking not only to the white family of the young woman, but also to Till’s friends and kinfolk, because they understood what the young city slicker apparently didn’t — he was in an entirely different world, and needed to watch his step. He didn’t, and paid with his life.
Those who weren’t there in post-Plessy v. Ferguson/Pre-Rosa Parks/Dixiecrat Mississippi can scarcely imagine life for a black kid. I have never lived there, but I have a parent with Deep South roots. But the fact is indisputable: Till might still be alive today if he had been wise enough to keep big his mouth shut.
Emmett Till is the victim of ignorance, intolerance, bigotry, brutality (partial list). But he is certainly not a “hero,” and I don’t know what “debt of gratitude” I owe him for doing something that is the equivalent of walking into a buzzsaw. The fact that Eric Holder mentioned Till (in his prepared speech) as notable among the likes of Douglass, Robinson, Parks, and Dr. King shows what a shallow thinker we have for our Attorney General (for now).
Comment by L.N. Smithee — 3/22/2010 @ 4:17 pmEarlier in that speech, Holder says he was "a former American history major." Really? Wouldn't an American history major know the vast difference between people who actually spurred progress among a persecuted, oppressed minority, risking their lives in the hope that some greater good might be accomplished years down the road, and a person whose sole page in American history is about how he pretty much went out of his way to get himself lynched?
(Did your face just contort with that last sentence? If so, you know why, don't you? That's the kind of "frank conversation about race" that we're not supposed to have, as opposed to conversations carefully designed to foster guilt in white people who already don't have a racist bone in their bodies.)
Anyway, the next time someone suggests -- as some already have -- that Columbia University alumnus Eric Holder is being clever and sly in suggesting he didn't always read his Fast & Furious briefings and couldn't understand a simple question at a Congressional hearing, remember the time he spoke of Emmett Till as being a hero on par with Frederick Douglass and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then you can retort, "Maybe he's just dumb."
...But, most likely, he's just a dirty liar trying to cover his inferior posterior with blood-soaked hands.
