"Full Watergate Mode": The Collapse of the Gunwalker Plot Cover-Up and Legitimacy. For Leviathan, there is no putting this genie back in the bottle.

The Gunwalker Scandal genie is out of the bottle for good.

In political science, legitimacy is the popular acceptance of a governing law or régime as an authority. Whereas “authority” denotes a specific position in an established government, the term “legitimacy” denotes a system of government — wherein “government” denotes “sphere of influence”. Political legitimacy is considered a basic condition for governing, without which, a government will suffer legislative deadlock(s) and collapse. -- Wikipedia.

. . . This is an important piece. Perhaps the most important Gunwalker scandal analysis I've done since I broke the story here on 28 December. I know from friends and correspondents that it has already been forwarded to the offices of Issa, Smith and Grassley, for their in-boxes this bright and shiny Monday morning.

What they do with it is up to them, but, and it is impossible to overstress this point: the entire legitimacy of the federal system, and that of both political parties, and not just the transient hopes of Barack Obama for a second term, hangs on the outcome of this scandal.

History teaches that regimes demonstrated to be illegitimate to their own people are swept away. This is just such a moment. The federal fireman has been caught setting deadly fires. What happens to the arsonists -- and those who gave them the gas, matches and sent them on their bloody way -- will demonstrate to all if this system DESERVES to continue to be tolerated by the victimized people who pay for the entire fire department. In fact, tax receipts will be the least of the system's worries if justice is not done in this monstrous offense to the Constitution and the inalienable, natural and God-given rights and liberties that it merely codifies.
-- A question of legitimacy and a post that bears repeating. "The Official ATF Field Manual of the Gunwalker Scandal," Sipsey Street Irregulars, 16 May 2011.

So I wrote in mid-May. The idea that Fast and Furious is only a piece of a the larger Gunwalker Plot is catching on. Russ Vaughan writes at American Thinker that the Gunwalker Scandal is "Much More than a Third Rate Burglary."

So, we have the purported targets of OF&F, financers and decision-makers, located in Mexico, and the professed method of identifying those targets being the tracking of the illegal weapons to them directly. But with the law enforcement resources responsible for that tracking having been kept ignorant of the entire operation, the alleged rationale for OF&F falls flat on its face.

And if government officials are willing to lie and obfuscate, as I believe Agent Newell and others most likely have, to a congressional investigating committee; and if the Justice Department is willing to stonewall document subpoenas and refuse to produce subpoenaed witnesses, this administration is in full Watergate mode. What conclusion is to be drawn from their behavior other than that there are much bigger fish to be caught in Issa's net than a few overeager field operatives?

Are the big fish of the Obama administration ignoring the basic lesson of Watergate -- that it's the cover-up, not the crime, that can bring down a president? But then, in the present situation, we have illegal arms-smuggling, apparently to further a domestic political gun control agenda, which may have resulted in the deaths of Mexican citizens and two United States federal officers. Now that is a crime, a real and true crime, and most certainly a much more serious crime than a third-rate burglary.

There is no underestimating the damage that the Gunwalker Scandal has already done to the political legitimacy of the Obama administration and the monstrous lie of the benevolent Federal Leviathan -- trading essential liberty for temporary safety -- that it represents. This is no small thing.

Thanks to the NRA, even the Fudds get it now. Of course the NRA had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this point and they'll have to be motivated further if we are to succeed in laying the entire plot bare, but the fact is that many if not most of American gun owners now GET IT: Gunwalker was, and is, about facilitating the murder of innocents to justify more restrictions on American firearm owners.

This is true in the absence of the greater and more damning revelations yet to come. And they certainly WILL come.

This loss of the last shred of political legitimacy, combined with the strategic military and political fact of the Internet, limits even the most deadly means of tyrannical manipulation and misdirection, such as another Reichstag Fire.

"A regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power." -- Colin Powell

Not that they couldn't do it, but it would not be believed by enough people to make it work. The political rehabilitation that Bill Clinton achieved in the aftermath of the OKC Bombing would not work now, today, for Obama. They might convince the credulous. They might even convince themselves. But they could not convince us, in part because people would instantly be asking "Qui Bono?"

If the struggle been liberty and tyranny in this country ultimately does go to guns, the Gunwalker Scandal will be listed in the history books as one of several delegitimizing factors for the conflict.

The Federal Leviathan has already been hung upon their own legitimacy petard. How much damage they do to themselves will be determined by how much longer they seek to avoid justice. In any case, there is no way the Gunwalker genie is going to be put back in the bottle.