RUSH: I’ll tell you something else, folks, if I were Hispanic, you know what would really trouble me? To learn that the President of the United States had allowed assault weapons to be walked across the border to drug cartels and used to slaughter hundreds of Mexicans. If I were Hispanic, that would really tick me off.

“Holder lied, Mexicans died.”

We had a call at the end of the program yesterday from a woman who kept hearing that Democrats are blaming Bush for Fast and Furious. Speaking of which, you know how the Democrats hate guns, you know how the media hates guns. I mean, they laugh at, they make fun of people who hunt. John Kerry in the ’04 campaign going to some tackle and bait shop in Ohio and saying, “Is this where I get me a huntin’ license?” Come on.

So they hate it. The liberals, including in the media, hate it. And yet here we have a total lack of interest about Fast and Furious. No moral outrage at all. Wouldn’t you think that giving semi-automatic weapons to drug lords who use them to kill hundreds of Mexicans, and at least one American border agent, wouldn’t you think that would tick off people in this country who don’t like guns? Wouldn’t you think that would tick the media off? Wouldn’t you think that’s even more of a crime than sprinkling water up the noses of mass murdering terrorists? If you have a problem with waterboarding, then how could you not have a problem with this?

Well, it’s clear. The media, they’re going to circle the wagons and they’re going to protect this president no matter what. It doesn’t matter how much of their core beliefs they have to compromise, it doesn’t matter. We have a one-party news media too busy remembering Watergate. They can’t get over Watergate. They’re all a bunch of Woodward and Bernsteins in the press corps, and they want to go back and relive Watergate 40 years ago. That’s what this is giving them an opportunity to do. Obama invokes executive privilege and they start doing retrospectives on Nixon and Watergate 40 years ago, too busy to bother looking into the Obama regime cover-up of Fast and Furious.

We had a call late in the program yesterday from a woman who wanted to know what the difference was, because Democrats keep saying that Bush started a program. Jay Carney is saying it, they’re all saying that Bush started this program. Bush did have a program like this. It was called Wide Receiver. And I told you yesterday that I was going to explain to you the differences today in Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious, and they’re significant and they’re profound. Wide Receiver was a small scale law enforcement gun smuggling interdiction effort that involved Phoenix — I mistakenly said Tucson yesterday — involved Phoenix-based ATF agents working in conjunction with Mexican law enforcement. ATF supervisors and justice department prosecutors in Arizona were trying to build a case against a violent group of Mexican drug smugglers. Fast and Furious was an effort to build a case against American gun dealers and the Second Amendment. That’s the stark difference.

Wide Receiver was an attempt to build a case against gun smugglers and the drug cartels, to find out who they were, where they are. The purpose of Fast and Furious was to build a case against the Second Amendment. In a nutshell, Wide Receiver began in 2005. It involved four hundred guns. All of the weapons in Wide Receiver had RFID trackers installed in them, and they were actively tracked. Only the Phoenix ATF and DOJ were involved. The Mexican government was kept fully informed. They were an active participant. In Wide Receiver, the ATF agents tried to track the guns using radio devices and aircraft. They wanted to find out where the guns ended up, into the hands of which cartels and where they were, so that a case could be made. It was an effort to track these people to find them, locate them.

The Bush administration, as part of Wide Receiver, notified the Mexican government when arms and drug smugglers were crossing. When the guns were being walked across the border or when they had been purchased legally, being taken back to Mexico, the Mexican government was notified. At least 1,400 arrests were made as part of Wide Receiver. Now, once ATF found out the smugglers were disabling the tracking devices, the RFID tracking devices that were planted in the guns, they ripped them out and then the guns were lost. So the program was shut down in October of 2007. Once the bad guys discovered the tracking devices, the program was ended, in 2007. Ended.

Now, here’s Fast and Furious by contrast. Fast and Furious began in October of 2009. Obama is in his tenth month. Wide Receiver doesn’t exist. It’d been shut down for two years. Fast and Furious involved over 2,000 guns. Wide Receiver was 1,400 guns. Roughly. No tracking devices were planted in the Fast and Furious guns. The regime didn’t care where they ended up. There were no tracking devices. No effort was made to track them. No helicopters. There was no on-the-ground surveillance of the straw purchasers. None of it. The guns were sold, they were walked across the border, and that was it. Four federal agencies were involved in maybe as many as 10 cities in five states.

In contrast to Wide Receiver, the Mexican government was not notified the program even existed. They did not use tracking devices or aircraft to try to find and track the smugglers. The local ATF field agents were ordered not to follow the straw purchasers. Fast and Furious is as bad as everything you have conjured it to be in your mind. Wide Receiver has nothing in common, other than guns crossing the border. That’s it. Federal agents, furthermore — are you following all this, Snerdley? — federal agents were not allowed to interdict the guns and they even ran interference for the smugglers with local law enforcement on multiple occasions to make sure those guns made it across the border.

No effort was ever made to arrest the straw purchasers, the smugglers, by local law enforcement or anybody else. And none were arrested. The program was closed down only after the deaths of at least 200 Mexican civilians and two federal agents, border agent Brian Terry and ICE agent Jaime Zapata, were linked to the smuggled weapons. Now, it is important to understand that Wide Receiver had been tried and it had clearly failed before Obama’s team decided to undertake Fast and Furious.

Fast and Furious used many more guns. They didn’t track them. They didn’t try to stop or interdict the guns. They knew that they were going to end up in Mexican drug cartel hands, which is what they wanted to happen. To me, it’s almost an inescapable conclusion that they wanted to put American guns, American purchased guns — the guns were not stolen, they were purchased at gun shops, and then the straw purchasers working for the drug cartels were allowed to take them across the border.

As I said earlier, local law enforcement was shoved out of the way if it tried to get in the way and stop this. So it looks to me like they wanted to put American-bought guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels in order to outrage the American public so that you, upon hearing of all this mayhem, would finally understand that our government laws are too lax and need to be tightened down. Particularly on these kinds of guns, assault weapons, because this had failed in Congress.

The assault weapons ban had failed, and that’s not good enough for Obama and Holder and the rest of the Democrats who don’t want you having guns. This was a way to change your mind. They created crimes. They facilitated the creation of crimes. There were two hundred Mexican deaths at the hands of drug cartels. You could not escape what was going to happen here. In fact, it was just the opposite. You had to know, if you were the regime, what was going to happen — and you had to want it to happen.

Again, that is quite different from the goal of Wide Receiver. Remember the objective of the Bush plan, Wide Receiver, was the authorities wanted to build a case against the local drug cartels in order to put them out of business. It was a risky move, anyway. You allow guns to cross the border so you can track them. You find out where they go, find out where the cartel’s headquarters are and what-all is happening. It was a risky thing to do. They shut it down. When the tracking devices and the guns were found, they shut the program down.

There were no tracking devices of Obama’s guns.

There was no effort to find out where they went.

And Holder has lied so much about it. (summarized) “Oh, I didn’t know about the program. When I came into office it was already underway. Nobody told me about it in months.” It was dead! It died in 2007. There were two dormant years between Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious. Wide Receiver was a sting operation. There doesn’t seem to be any plan for any kind of a sting in Fast and Furious, at least not against the gun smugglers.

As I say, the simplest way to understand this is the Bush administration was trying to build a case (along with the Mexican government) against a violent group of Mexican drug smugglers. Fast and Furious was an effort to build a case against the Second Amendment and American gun dealers. Because after all, if Fast and Furious worked the way the regime wanted it to, guess who is in the crosshairs? The people selling these guns (in Arizona and elsewhere) that ended up in the hands of the drug cartel.

Don’t think that wasn’t part of the plan, either. So now, whatever documentation there is on this is under protection of executive privilege. It’s got to be pretty bad. Whatever is in there, Obama has to be very worried about it — and that’s why he’s hiding it. So the question here must always be: “What’s Obama hiding?” And Dick Morris said a couple days ago that it must be pretty bad to bring this up now. Because Fast and Furious, before Wednesday of this week, everybody laughed at it. Other than us.

But the mainstream media and the Democrats laughed at it. They thought it was nothing more than a branch office of the birthers, a bunch of conspiracy kooks. But now? “My gosh! This is so big that the president has invoked executive privilege. What’s in there?” In 2007, when the Bush administration closed down Wide Receiver, they said: Never again. My guess is that somebody in the Obama regime discovered this program, thought it was cool, and thought it might serve a different purpose.

And it’s heinous.

It’s heinous what they did.