Arrested development.  That is the term that comes to mind when I listen to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney or U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder defend the indefensible operation dubbed “Fast and Furious.”  Only someone stuck in their adolescence could respond as they do.

They both remind me of junior high school adolescents who insist the marijuana found in their backpack belongs to a friend or shrug their shoulders while explaining to the school teacher that their dog ate their homework.

In deference to the memory of Brian Terry — the border patrol agent who was murdered while intercepting illegal aliens in Arizona and whose body was found next to weapons lost in the Fast and Furious debacle — I can only sympathize with how Brian’s family must feel when they listen to the whiny excuses given for this unbelievably botched operation.

The most frequently used “whine” that proceeds out of the mouth of both Carney and Holder is, “This operation originated in the Bush administration”  — a blatant lie and conflation of Fast and Furious with the similar operation dubbed “Operation Wide Receiver” started by the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms under the Bush administration in 2006.   But both Carney and Holder fail to explain that Wide Receiver was a controlled operation where the guns were tracked into Mexico with the Mexican authorities knowledge and cooperation.  And while some of the weapons in Wide Receiver were inadvertently lost once inside Mexico, in Fast and Furious, Mexican authorities had no knowledge of the operation and the guns were intentionally allowed — by a direct order not to track them — to “get lost” once inside Mexico.

But, never mind the differences. What’s a couple minor details got to do with it?  Everybody does it…Bush did it, too.  Whine, whine, whine.

Incredibly and equally disconcerting is watching the Democrats in Congress join in this maddening chorus of denial using the same rhetoric while they accuse Republicans of going after an innocent man — Eric Holder — who, in their corrupt view, was just following in the footsteps of President Bush.  Shameful.  Sickening.

And so we stand by helplessly and watch the Terry family suffer while Fast and Furious morphs into Slow and Whiny.

For an even starker comparison of the differences between the two operations, see this chart:

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