Nine days from today, in 1974, Richard Nixon resigned from office, being driven out by revelations that he tampered with evidence related to the Watergate break-in. 

It began as a "small ball" burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex.  Five men were arrested on June 17th; their funding was connected to a slush fund of a fundraising committee for the Nixon campaign.

In 1973 it was revealed that Nixon had a tape recording system in his offices, and some of the tapes implicated Nixon himself, revealing that he had knowledge of the break-in.  Nixon had doctored some of the tapes in a gambit that without the ability to recover the actual most-damning conversations he would survive politically.

He was wrong.

This morning we find that there are five people in the BATFE are largely responsible for Fast and Furious, the "walking" of over 2,000 guns to Mexican Drug Gangs in an alleged plot to try to bust the runners with the weapons.  The problem is that instead of busting the runners they were left to run the guns, and they did.  The weapons were then used for what gang-bangers tend to do with guns, which is shoot people, both in the US and Mexico.

In the finest of Washington DC traditions instead of outing those who did stupid and even criminal things -- and let's be clear folks, conspiring to deliver guns to knowingly-inelegible people is a felony -- BATFE and the DOJ instead tried to cover it up.  And while the five people allegedly identified as responsible were reassigned, they still have their jobs and have not been indicted.

There's a parallel here in the financial realm -- an individual during the S&L crisis was fingered for allowing S&Ls to backdate deposits and thus appear to be "more healthy" than they actually were.  Some of them subsequently failed and were part of why the FSLIC went bankrupt and had to be bailed out with taxpayer funds.

That individual was not fired nor prosecuted.  Worse, during the financial crisis he was fingered as the individual who allowed IndyMac Bank to do exactly the same thing.

We, the people, are the check and balance on this behavior.  We, the people, are the reason it continues to happen.  We, the people, refuse to stand and demand that every individual involved in this sort of crap be identified in public and tried for their offenses, stripped of any sort of alleged "official immunity" they might try to claim.

There is no way to have a just society until official crimes are investigated and prosecuted exactly as are those committed by ordinary people.  These are not the acts of people who have a lawful and official purpose to their acts -- they are flatly ignoring the law exactly as is a common street thug or bank robber.

The responsibility for this, my friends, is ours and until we stand and demand that it stop not only will the people continue to be bilked, they will continue to die.