Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Scandal That Still Isn’t A Scandal

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It’s really long past time for a special prosecutor:

So now the wheels have come off the official explanation for Fast and Furious. Of course, that explanation never made much sense in the first place.

For one thing, the ATF had no authority to track the guns once they were in Mexico; for another, nobody bothered to inform the Mexicans of this intrusion on their national sovereignty.

Further, we now know that a host of federal agencies (including the ATF, the FBI and IRS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration and, very probably, top officials at the Department of Homeland Security) were all in the loop at various levels, as was the White House.

So calling “Fast and Furious” a cockamamie operation gone wrong just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

There are two possible explanations. The first is that the anti-gun Obama administration deliberately wanted American guns planted in Mexico in order to demonize American firearms dealers and gun owners. The operation was manufacturing “evidence” for the president’s false claim that we’re to blame for the appalling levels of Mexican drug-war violence.

If this is true, then Holder & Co. have got to go — and the trail needs to be followed no matter where it leads. For the federal government to seek to frame its own citizens is unconscionable.

A second notion is that the CIA was behind the whole thing, which accounts for all the desperate wagon-circling. Under this theory, the Agency feared the los Zetas drug cartel was becoming too powerful and might even mount a coup against the Mexican government. So some 2,000 weapons costing more than $1.25 million were deliberately channeled to the rival Sinaloa cartel, which operates along the American border, to keep the Zetas in check.

Of course, there’s a third explanation — that both scenarios are true, and that those in charge of Fast and Furious saw an opportunity to shoot two birds with one Romanian-made AK Draco pistol.

Any administration defenders have a better explanation?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

MSM Sheep

13 Comments

…ignoring the scandal of the century:

The Gunwalker conspiracy is the kind of story that journalists dream of breaking their entire careers. It is now in the palms of their hands: a story in which they can make a difference, take down the evil and corrupt, and ensure justice is served.

Instead of reporting, however, they are complicit. They have chosen to acquiesce to a clear and obvious evil, an aberration of our most basic values. They are no longer watchdogs, but docile sheep.

When it’s a Republican scandal, they’re watch dogs. When it’s a Democrat scandal, they’re lap dogs.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Only Now In Doubt?

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Obama’s reelection has been in doubt since his first election:

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, Obama beat McCain in 2008. Which is to say, Obama beat a Republican candidate who was too tired to fight, too slow to realize that his signature issue (national security) was temporarily downgraded, and too inflexible to switch gears away from the campaign that McCain expected to run against Hillary Clinton; and Obama did this in the atmosphere of a sudden collapse in the economy, at the worst possible moment for the GOP. Congratulations. Huzzah. Feel the magic – but since then? Well, let’s just say that the magic had a very, very short half-life…

It never existed, for me. Many others have seen through the charade as well, now.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Tom Friedman’s Latest Book

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Andrew Ferguson reviews it:

The slovenliness of our language, George Orwell wrote, makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and while Mr. Friedman’s language has been tidied up a bit, the thinking remains what it has always been. The authors call themselves “frustrated optimists.” Their frustration is owing to the depredations of the last decade, which they call (Mr. Mandelbaum nods) the Terrible Twos. But self-contradiction is also part of the Friedman brand. In many other passages, the authors specifically trace the American slide to the end of the Cold War—though still elsewhere they remark that the 1990s were “positive for America.” It doesn’t help their argument, such as it is, that the evidence of decline they cite—crumbling infrastructure, a failing public-education system—predates both 2001 and 1989 by a long stretch. Our potholes and schools have been favorites of declinists for generations.

If the authors’ frustration is unoriginal and ill-defined, their optimism is terrifying. America will rebound—we will become the us that we used to be again, you might say and Mr. Friedman does—when we regain our ability to do “big things” through “collective action.” Collective action is a phrase that means “the federal government.” Among the big things that we will do are rework American industry, through regulation and taxation, to drastically cut carbon emissions. Another one of our big things is a big increase in the gasoline tax. We will also impose on us a new big carbon tax. We will use revenues to create a “clean energy” industry with millions of “green jobs” like the ones that were eliminated earlier this month at Solyndra. Readers will wonder, like the early environmentalist Tonto, “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemo sabe?”

Go read the whole thing. You know you want to.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Official Explanation For Gun Walker

5 Comments

…is entirely false:

This is no longer about a ‘sting operation gone bad’ but a deliberate, sinister attempt to manipulate gun statistics in Mexico for political gain.

Given the outcome of effective acts of war on a neighboring country without congressional approval, and many dozens of deaths, on both sides of the border, sounds like a “high crime and misdemeanor” to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s more.

[Another update a couple minutes later]

And more at Pajamas Media, uncovered-Obama-scandal central.