In Katie Pavlich’s devastating new expose of the Eric Holder Justice Department-approved Fast and Furious operation, Pavlich doesn’t just expose the Obama administration. She exposes the mainstream media for what they are: tools of the Democratic Party, and of the White House.
As Pavlich recounts, the first mainstream media outlet to report on Fast and Furious was CBS Evening News, which aired a report by Sharyl Attkinson. She stated that the scandal itself was so awful that “some insiders say it surpasses the shoot-out at Ruby Ridge and the deadly siege at Waco.” She pointed out that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been pushing through the sale of guns to Mexican drug cartels, and that gun shops had even tried “to stop the questionable sales, but ATF encouraged them to continue.”
When the Obama administration saw Attkinson’s report, they reacted with utter fury. Officials from the administration screamed at her; as Pavlich reports, Justice Department communications director Tracy Schmaler called her up to yell at her. White House spokesman Eric Schultz “reportedly directed a barrage of expletives toward her.” Attkinson said that the White House and Justice Department labeled her “not reasonable” – as opposed to other press outlets.
From their perspective, that was correct – Attkinson wasn’t reasonable because she wasn’t parroting the party line. The rest of the media, however, was only too happy to do so. As Pavlich writes, “The New York Times and Washington Post weren’t just ‘reasonable,’ they seemed to act as press officers for the Obama administration.”
Times reported Charlie Savage penned a column in which he depicted Republicans as narrow-minded thugs out to get innocent babe-in-the-woods Attorney General Holder. The name of the piece: “Under Partisan Fire Eric Holder Soldiers On.” Meanwhile, in June 2011, the Washington Post printed an editorial decrying the “paranoia” of the National Rifle Associations and the “gun rights lobby,” even railing against them for fighting “against virtually every proposal to empower the bureau to better track and crack down on illegal firearms.”
Shockingly, the media covered for the Obama administration even when they unwittingly reported the truth. On December 15, 2010, the same day that Officer Brian Terry was murdered using a weapon sold via Fast and Furious, the Washington Post wrote a piece blasting border gun shops for dealing guns to sources south of the border. “What is different now, authorities say, is the number of high-powered rifles heading south … and the savagery of the violence,” the Post reported, neglecting to mention the fact that these gun dealers were working with the ATF to supply the guns. In fact, these gun dealers were stabbed in the back by ATF, which quietly funneled information about them to the Post, showing disproportionate selling of guns south of the border without telling the Post that the dealers were hand-in-glove with the government the entire time.
Then, of course, there was the backlash from the extreme left once Fast and Furious broke. Mother Jones called it “one of the right’s latest conspiracy theories”; Talking Points Memo mocked the claim that the Obama administration had designed Fast and Furious as a gambit to outflank Second Amendment advocates “outlandish.” Jon Stewart said such theories were “f------ crazy.” Rachel Maddow stated that it was all “the insane paranoid message from the NRA.” Her MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews said the theories sprang from a “strain of the crazy far right.” And, of course, David Brock’s Media Matters, which was coordinating regularly with the Obama administration, said it was all “hysterical rhetoric.”
As it turned out, they were all deliberately obfuscating the truth. As Pavlich reports in Fast and Furious, there can be no doubt that this scandal began and ended with the Obama administration’s willful attempt to ram its anti-gun agenda down American throats. And if Americans had to die – and if the media had to cover up for the administration – that didn’t matter one whit to Obama and his cronies. All that mattered was the scam.
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