Yes, the Republican National Convention has focused on nominating Donald Trump for president. Still, Jim Geraghty of National Review Online writes that other important messages have emerged from Cleveland.
The decision by a lot of big-name Republican lawmakers to skip the Cleveland convention was a blessing in disguise, because it cleared the stage for ordinary Americans who suffered the cruel, random, and deadly consequences of the Obama administration’s policies.
The speeches from the non-politicians on Monday night weren’t always professionally polished or slick. During these presentations, the high-level media risers to the right of the stage seethed with exasperated sighs, gasps of disbelief, and eye-rolling groans. But the speakers told Americans stories they needed to hear — and while Monday’s effort to force a vote on the rule shows Republican delegates aren’t fully unified on the qualities of Donald Trump, the roaring arena showed they are united in fury at the thought of Hillary Clinton continuing the misrule from the Oval Office.
Some Americans might ask, “Why rehash the Fast and Furious scandal?” — and most other Americans won’t even remember the details of the wrongdoing. But Fast and Furious was an early, important example of the Obama administration’s culture of unaccountability.
If a Republican administration had allowed known gun traffickers to make “straw purchases” — legal purchases of firearms in significant quantities to be resold to criminals on the other side of the border — and let more than 2,000 firearms flow into the hands of the cartels, the national outrage from both Democrats and the media would be explosive. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent Brian Terry was shot to death with one of those weapons.
The Department of Justice’s inspector general found that everyone around Attorney General Eric Holder seemed to know about the gun-running scheme but, conveniently, no one told him about the program or its risks. Moreover, no one at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was ever fired for their actions relating to Fast and Furious.
The GOP convention featured Terry’s siblings, Kelly Terry-Willis and Kent Terry, speaking from the Arizona–Mexico border — a border that most Americans want secured, but that seems to only intermittently catch the administration’s attention.
“Instead of celebrating the holidays with him, we buried him not far from the family home,” Kent Terry said. “Two weapons recovered at the scene were traced to the Obama administration’s doomed ‘Fast and Furious’ gun-tracking operation. Guns were used against Americans, on American soil, and yet no one in the Obama administration was ever held accountable for its failure.”
