On her Friday night show on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow went on a tirade to try to explain away the Fast & Furious gunrunning scandal. She referred to it as another “paranoid delusion of the conservative movement and the conservative media machine.” Maddow then did mental gymnastics which would have earned Dominique Dawes an Olympics gold medal.
MADDOW: Just like with the Shirley Sherrod story. Fox News has been very upset that they haven`t yet been able to bait the rest of the real media into following this crazy conspiracy theory of theirs yet, and they are starting to overtly bait the mainstream media into covering it and they are starting to lash out and blame people who do not cover it yet.
Leave it to MSNBC to sickeningly twist the deaths of 300 Mexicans and two U.S. Border Patrol agents to undermine the importance of the Fast and Furious story in this way.
Twitter exploded at Maddow last night and this morning.
.@maddow is a hack RT @cayankee: RT @NCHornet: Debunking MSNBC Hack Rachel Maddow's Lies About 'Fast and Furious' – http://t.co/eFOaBzRH
— Fred the Great (@fredontwittur) June 23, 2012
Maddow extended her attacks on the newsworthiness of Operation Fast and Furious on Bill Maher’s HBO show last night.
Nick destroyed them MT @mediaite: @BillMaher, @Maddow, & Reason's @NickGillespie Have Epic Showdown Over Fast & Furious http://t.co/dk3yCsqK
— Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) June 23, 2012
One blogger on methodically takes apart Maddow’s ridiculous claims.
BLOCKBUSTER! – Debunking Rachel Maddow's Lies About 'Fast and Furious' http://t.co/ODJ9rncn @DLoesch @JoelPollak @DRiehl @MelissaTweets #p2
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 23, 2012
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 some weird guy no one’s heard of named Michael Vanderboegh from Alabama. 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.
The Fast and Furious scandal amnesia is also hitting the New York Times and America’s esteemed halls of academia.
Carrie Brown-Smith is a University of Memphis journalism professor.
Awful. 45 journalists killed or missing in Mexico since 2007. http://t.co/yVktTQWl
— Carrie Brown (@Brizzyc) June 23, 2012
Oh, the horror! The New York Times has discovered 45 journalists have been killed in Mexico in gun violence during the past 5 years. That’s like having a front page story on Sept. 12, 2011, noting how many cars were destroyed outside the World Trade Center.
Neither Ms. Smith nor the New York Times realize how self-aggrandizing this story is. Their honest belief is that they can’t accurately report the macro environment that Fast and Furious operated in because of journalists getting killed. So the answer: don’t report it at all.
The upside to this collective case of Fast and Furious dementia — at least the mainstream media is finally talking about the scandal and Americans will soon learn more about how Border Agent Brian Terry was killed.
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