"But all of this gun-walking stuff started under Bush!"

I was talking with a good friend of mine from Boston yesterday -- we'll call him "G" -- and happened to get around to politics. I know you're stunned. Now G doesn't follow politics closely. When I mentioned Operation Fast and Furious and President Obama's claim of Executive Privilege, he innocently asked a question that is probably the result of indoctrination by vintage media:

"Didn't all of this gun-walking stuff start under Bush?"
A commenter at Savannah Now ("Ransomed Tyrant") offers an excellent, concise answer to this very question, which was a much better version of my response to G.

Wide Receiver [the Bush-era operation] was a gun smuggling interdiction effort that involved Phoenix-based ATF agents working in conjunction with Mexican law enforcement. It was a Phoenix border operation only. They were trying to build a case against a violent group of Mexican drug smugglers and the Mexican drug cartel to discover who they were and where they could be found. Wide Receiver began in 2005, involved 400 weapons, and all the weapons had RFID trackers installed in them. The Mexican government was informed and actively involved. The program was ended in 2007 when the drug dealers discovered the trackers that had been installed. No lives were lost.

Fast and Furious was begun in 2009 by the Obama administration and was an unconstitutional effort to build a case against American gun dealers, American private gun owners, and the Second Amendment. The Mexican government wasn’t involved in Fast and Furious. Over 300 people were killed, including two Americans. Wide Receiver no longer existed; it had been shut down for two years. Fast and Furious involved over 2,000 guns. The Obama regime didn’t care where the weapons ended up. There were no tracking devices and no effort was made to track them. No helicopters. There was no on-the-ground surveillance of the straw purchasers. The guns were sold and then walked across the border, and that was it. Four federal agencies were involved in maybe as many as 10 cities in five states. Fast and Furious was Obama’s effort to gain false information so he could use the information to introduce his gun control bill. Obama and Holder are tyrants. Twice said and twice true.

It turns out the Holder Justice Department and the Obama administration have been lying, deflecting, and covering up Fast and Furious ever since.

If any of this stuff had Bush's fingerprints on it, then why would Obama exert Executive Privilege? To protect Bush?