Fast & Furious vs Operation Wide Receiver: Not similar

  Naturally Obama is considering his options regarding the Fast & Furious scandal.
  Naturally his favorite option is blaming it on Bush.
  Howso, you ask idly, completely uninterested in the story or answer, considering Operation Wide Receiver under Bush was ended in 2007 and marked "Never Again" by those who participated in it.
  Though Obama, whose "administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government," knows nothing about Fast & Furious, he invoked executive privilege to prevent the F & F documents from being transparently revealed. 
  Unfortunately for Obama, Wide Receiver had nothing to do with F & F. Fortunately for Obama, Wide Receiver offers talking points, the truth being no object

•   Wide Receiver was a joint project between ATF & the Mexican government. 
•   Far fewer guns were involved in Wide Receiver, as opposed to F & F.
•   The guns in Wide Receiver were chipped with RFID and tracked by our and the Mexican government.
•   The RFID chips were discovered by the cartel; their removal meant that the entire operation went sour. Thus, "Never Again."
• The purpose behind Wide Receiver was to track cartel activity and to arrest those individuals for illicit activity.
• Wide Receiver operated from Phoenix only.
• 40 weapons were found in one cartel operator ALONE.
• About 250 (?) weapons were involved in Wide Receiver. Over 2500 were believed to be involved in Fast & Furious.

OTOH, Fast and Furious was instigated with a completely different purpose and no oversight:

• Fast & Furious began in 2009, 2 years AFTER Wide Receiver.
• Fast & Furious guns were NOT chipped.
• F & F guns were NOT even tracked.
• The purpose behind
• 300 Mexican citizens died under F & F; 1 American border agent died.
• Even Holder has renounced the Wide Receiver "connection" with F & F.
• In F & F, the guns kept "ending up in one cartel's" hands.
• Obama told a group of people, including Sarah Brady, that his attempt to subvert the 2nd amendment would be "under the radar." They would be working on it, he promised.
• Almost 2,000 AK47 type guns were involved in F & F. 
• No one was fired under F & F; personnel were moved.
• Fast & Furious was linked to at least ELEVEN crime scenes.
• The ATF videotaped AK47s being "walked"

  In fact, according to CBS News in March of 2011, there was widespread concern among both border agents and gun sellers, so much so that they protested to their higher ups, who replied,"  "If you're going to make an omelette, you've got to break some eggs."

  So it turns out ATF not only allowed it - they videotaped it.

Surveillance video obtained by CBS News shows suspected drug cartel suppliers carrying boxes of weapons to their cars at a Phoenix gun shop. The long boxes shown in the video being loaded in were AK-47-type assault rifles. 

Documents show the inevitable result: The guns that ATF let go began showing up at crime scenes in Mexico. And as ATF stood by watching thousands of weapons hit the streets... the Fast and Furious group supervisor noted the escalating Mexican violence. 

One e-mail noted, "958 killed in March 2010 ... most violent month since 2005." The same e-mail notes: "Our subjects purchased 359 firearms during March alone," including "numerous Barrett .50 caliber rifles.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO refutes the comparison:

In sum, the Fast & Furious idea of “trace” is that, after violent crimes occur in Mexico, we can trace any guns the Mexican police are lucky enough to seize back to the sales to U.S. straw purchasers … who should never have been allowed to transfer them (or even buy them) in the first place. That is not law enforcement; that is abetting a criminal rampage. 

  Fast & Furious wasn't about tracing weapons and criminals; it was about releasing illicit guns into the wild. 
  It's pretty clear at this point that there were different purposes for Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious.
  NRO:

By the time Cornyn was done drawing this stark contrast between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious, Holder was reduced to conceding, “I’m not trying to equate the two.” That is big of him given that the two cannot be equated. But the attorney general seemed fine with the effort to equate them — to make them one and the same — when it was Schumer asking the questions. Expect the effort to continue. “Bush did it” may be a tired defense, and in this instance a preposterous one, but it’s the one the Democratic base loves to hear.

  Juan Williams, whom I usually respect, looked totally disgusting and lame tonight on The Five claiming people die in war, thereby justifying Fast & Furious.
  The purpose of Fast & Furious was to create new restrictions on buying guns:

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3″. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

  In fact, several of the gun shop sellers were so concerned about who bought them that they said they only sold them because the ATF encouraged them to. 
  Thousands of the weapons remain at large today.
  Rush sums up the differences here: