Friday, June 22, 2012

Debunking Rachel Maddow's Lies About 'Fast and Furious': MSNBC Hack Falsely Claims Scandal Just Like Shirley Sherrod 'Conspiracy'

Tim Graham reports at NewsBusters, "Maddow Begs Media to Ignore Fast and Furious: Just Another 'Paranoid Delusion' Like Sherrod Scandal":
In a ten-minute rant on her show Thursday night, Rachel Maddow tried to explain the long NBC and ABC blackout of “Fast and Furious” scandal news by somehow tying it to the Shirley Sherrod controversy. The American people should move along, since this scandal is only a “paranoid delusion” and shouldn’t be covered by anyone other than Fox News. It should be carefully quarantined.

The graphic behind Maddow read “WHAT YOUR UNCLE WHO WATCHES FOX NEWS ALL DAY IS ALL WORKED UP ABOUT.”

Maddow began: “The great Fox News conspiracy about Shirley Sherrod, the racist, that nobody else was covering, was, in fact, a paranoid delusion of the conservative movement and the conservative media machine. And so now, we find ourselves, a couple years later, facing another test for the news media. Do you take the bait again? Do you follow the latest Fox News conspiracy theory?”

Actually, if there's a conspiracy, it's at Rachel Maddow's show, not Fox News. And I want to reiterate something I've said many times: Maddow truly is one of the most sinfully malicious hacks on cable TV --- and that's saying a lot, considering the competition on the left.

First, on the Shirley Sherrod "conspiracy," see William Jacobson, "Saturday Night Card Game (Repeat after me: “The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading”)." The tape wasn't misleading, so Maddow's typical left-wing claim of "conspiracy" is bogus.

Second, Maddow claims that "Fast and Furious" was all about conservatives screaming that the Obama administration was going to take away their guns. She calls it a "cockamamie conspiracy theory" and then highlights [Sipsey Street Irregulars blogger] Michael Vanderboegh from Alabama [as if he's some kind of prototypical right-wing loon]. Yeah, that's the Maddow model: the extreme-right is populated with birthers, militia-men, and gun rights cuckoos. All the rest is just a hoax. There is no "Fast and Furious" scandal. It was cooked up by the right to create fear that guns were going to be taken away.

The only problem? Well, it's the Democrats who claimed it was all about guns, U.S. guns and gun shops. These were the source of the Mexico drug cartel crisis, and the thousands of people murdered south of the border were victims of the "90 percent" of weapons that originated in America. Who said that? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, for starters.

According to Katie Pavlich, in her new book, Fast and Furious, the Obama administration claimed that "90 percent" of the guns in Mexico came from America. Pavlich highlights a 2009 Andrea Mitchell interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Asked what the U.S. was going to do about assault weapons being sold to Mexican drug cartels, short of new legislation banning high-power automatic weapons. Clinton said:
We're going to start tracing these guns, we're going to start cracking down on illegal gun sales, and we're going to go after the straw men and women who go in and buy these guns. ... We're going to use every tool at our disposal...
That exchange is at the clip, at 4:00 minutes:


And get this!

Rachel Maddow interviewed Andrea Mitchell on her own program just minutes after Mitchell conducted her interview with Secretary Clinton. Thus, Maddow knows with 100 percent certainty that the Obama administration initiated a gun-running program with the intent to slow gun traffic to Mexico, and ultimately to make the case before the Congress to ban these weapons:


And here's a CBS News interview with Homeland Security Secretary Janet "The System Worked" Napolitano, who talks about tracking guns going over the U.S. border into Mexico. The interview was conducted on the day President Obama arrived in Mexico for the summit:


And finally, here's Obama's press conference with Mexican President Phillipe Calderon. The president announced that "More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared borders":


According to Pavlich, on p. 32 of Fast and Furious, the actual figure for U.S. guns traced to Mexico is 25 percent, not 90 percent. Pavlich cites Senator Chuck Grassley's report, "ATF Mexico Gun Statistics Flawed."

And Pavlich concludes that section on p. 32:
Regardless of the actual facts, it was clear the Obama administration was united in its enmity toward American gun shop owners. Close them down, as NRA President David Keane says, and you close down the Second Amendment. After all, he maintained, what good is the right to own firearms if there is no place to purchase them?
See also last night's bombshell report, "The Fast and Furious Coverup."

CORRECTION: My apologies to Michael Vanderboegh, who is a blogger at Sipsey Street Irregulars, not a no-name weirdo. Thanks to Jimmie Bise at Sundries Shack for the heads up.

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