If you've been watching the news this week, you know the biggest story is the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Health Care Act, affirming its constitutionality.  The other big story in the news, though not as well publicized, may be even more revealing about politics, the media, and the workings of Congress.

For the first time in history, a sitting member of the president's cabinet - U S Attorney General Eric Holder - has been held in contempt of Congress.  The drama surrounding this extraordinary event involves the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and its chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, gun smuggling, the ATF (Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), the NRA (National Rifle Association) and two distinctly different stories about what happened with the ATF's "Fast and Furious" operation.  If you wrote a movie script like this, no one would believe it.

The official, congressional version, which is to say the Republican version, of events is this: The ATF had a cockeyed operation called, Fast and Furious (named after the movie because several of the suspects were drag racers), which intentionally allowed guns to be purchased in the U S and smuggled across the border to drug cartels in Mexico ... presumably so that they could be tracked.  What was supposed to happen after that is a bit of a mystery, since the ATF has no authority in Mexico, which is where the cartels are and the guns ended up.  Somewhere along the way, U S border agents were attacked, one of them was killed, and one of the guns involved in the operation was found at the scene.  Rep. Issa's Oversight Committee finds out, demands all the documents on the case from Holder, and, when they don't get everything they want, vote to hold him in contempt.  The sub-plot to this version of the story, according to Rep. Issa in a FOX News piece, is that the whole operation was actually a secret plan by the Obama administration, which wanted to foment violence with these guns and use that violence as the centerpiece of a proposed ban on assault weapons in America ... another step toward repealing the 2nd Amendment.  Okay, got that?  This is the story that was reported over and over again by the media. 

The latest version, as thoroughly documented by Kathrine Eban in her Fortune.com article, tells quite a different story.  According to Ms. Eban, the purpose of Fast and Furious was never to allow guns into Mexico and then track them, it was to find, arrest, and prosecute straw purchasers, people who are paid by the drug cartels to buy huge amounts of guns in the U S and then hand them over.  The problem with the operation was that the NRA, the most powerful lobby in Washington, made prosecution impossible.  Because of the NRA's efforts, all the gun purchases in the U S were legal, including those made by an 18 year old boy on food stamps who bought $20,000 worth of AK47s.  It should be noted that the NRA promotes itself as a protector of constitutional rights, specifically the 2nd Amendment.  In fact, it is a trade organization, whose only real purpose is to maximize gun sales.

It's impossible to say with certainty that Rep. Issa knew the first story was fake, but it's difficult to believe that a single reporter for Fortune.com would have more investigative resources at her disposal than the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  I mean ... ya know.  So I guess you have to make your own decision.