It stinks having a record of your statements out there, doesn’t it? It’s almost like accountability.

The Obama administration’s decision to claim that the Fast And Furious documents are protected by executive privilege isn’t unexpected, but it is interesting. Traditionally, executive privilege means the White House is involved. So far nobody has made a serious allegation that Fast and Furious goes above Eric Holder’s head, but unless the Obama administration’s use of executive privilege is hideously imprecise this plays as a concrete admission that this comes from the president.

Namely, that the White House blew the Fast and Furious program up as an excuse to create a narrative of American guns circulating all over the world willy-nilly, and therefore we need more gun control. That’s an allegation lots of people have made; namely, that this was not some botched program set up by morons in the Phoenix ATF office but rather a fairly nasty and cynical plot to further a policy goal no matter how many eggs had to be broken to get there.

And the White House’s involvement in this, which the invocation of executive privilege on those documents suggests, would lend support to the conspiracy theory.

You’d like to dismiss the idea of Fast and Furious being a plot against the 2nd Amendment, but all it takes is one document coming out of a Cass Sunstein or Valerie Jarrett musing about the efficacy of public outrage over the ease of gun availability and how this shows the federal government needs to regulate gun sales more stringently and so on, and you’ve got a full-on political nightmare on your hands.

But as bad as that would be, it’s hard to see how it’s worse than what you have now – which is the White House protecting a bunch of incompetents when you have Brian Terry lying six feet under and his family is being denied an explanation for what the hell happened to put him there.

It’s a mess, and the president looks terrible. So does Eric Holder, who at the end of the day is likely to have far larger problems than a contempt of Congress case – he might be up for perjury.

And this is a good time to repeat our statement that the worst thing the conservative side could do is to call for Holder’s resignation. We want him EXACTLY where he is – a nice, fat, rotting albatross around the president’s neck in time for Election Day.

UPDATE: Ouch.

UPDATE #2: Judge Andrew Napolitano, on Fox News this morning, opines that you can’t assert executive privilege unless this goes all the way to the president.

It’s a safe bet that the White House doesn’t share his interpretation, but clearly there is an indication this goes over Holder’s head.