This is going to be a very visual post, and, as usual, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney provides little if any actual semantic content, so I will simply summarize each video. First off, we have the standard obfuscation:

Carney: blah blah blah Operation Wide Receiver* blah blah blah
Tapper: That was the previous operation; I’m asking about the current one.
Carney: blah blah blah Operation Wide Receiver blah blah blah
Tapper: THAT WAS THE PREVIOUS OPERATION; I’M ASKING ABOUT THE CURRENT ONE.
Carney: We gave documents all the documents that we needed to give.
Tapper: Given that the Department of Justice is already on the hook for ‘giving false information’ – out there in the real world, they’re going to be saying ‘lying’ instead – to Congress, don’t you think that it’s reasonable that Congress might be inclined to just get the raw data and figure it all out for themselves?
Carney: …We gave documents?

But that’s just regular Washington Beltway obfuscation. What really grates? Jay Carney visibly not remembering the name of US Border Agent Brian Terry. Who, to remind everyone, had Operation Fast & Furious guns show up at the site of his murder:

Jake Tapper had to feed Carney the name. That pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about how seriously Carney is taking this case, how much preparation Carney did before going out to answer questions about the case – and pretty much how seriously you can take Carney’s canned observations about the case, too. Hint: the answer is more or less identical, in all three cases.

I’d call for Carney’s firing, except that he won’t be there next January anyway.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Operation Wide Receiver is the administration’s desperate excuse/distraction from their gunrunning activities; it was a Bush-era program that was supposedly identical to Operation Fast & Furious… except that attempts were made to keep track of the guns being sold (Operation Fast & Furious did not), OWR was conducted with the awareness and cooperation of the Mexican government (OF&F was not), and – contra the earnest attempts of the Obama administration – the program ended two years before Bush left office. So, in other words, it wasn’t particularly identical to Operation Fast & Furious at all.

By the way: my source for the first two points of difference? The sworn testimony of Attorney General Eric Holder, back when Sen. John Cornyn was raking him over the coals in 2011. In the clip below, you can see Holder admitting the differences, and explicitly denying that the two operations were the same.

Unless he was, you know, lying there.

Again.