05/12/2012
The Obama Administration deliberately armed foreign insurgents, consciously betrayed patriotic citizens, and conspired to cover up the facts about the murder of one of its own Border Patrol agents. More than that, all of these actions were motivated by the desire to deliberately strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights — even as the Obama Administration remains blithely indifferent to the takeover of huge swaths of the American Southwest by Mexican drug cartels.
That’s in effect the charge that Conservatism Inc. — the nexus of special interests, lobbyists and their political and media shills that is the degenerate successor of the historic Conservative Movement — has been casually promoting…after which it returns to debating whether Barack Obama took too much credit for killing Osama Bin Laden/ the fate of Richard Lugar/ hiding from Obama’s gay marriage endorsement.
Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up is the first book of Townhall.com editor Katie Pavlich, 23 years old and fresh out of the University of Arizona. It’s a career maker — it will make headlines, it will generate huge sales, it will reach a mass audience — and it will not change Conservatism Inc’s priorities one iota.
This is a tribute to Katie Pavlich. This is a condemnation of Conservatism Inc.
Pavlich concludes,
“Operation Fast and Furious wasn’t a “botched” program. It was a calculated and lethal decision to purposely place thousands of guns into the hands of ruthless criminals… the operation was a coordinated and planned effort not to track guns, but to arm thugs south of the border for political gain.”
The Obama Administration’s stated rationale: to track gun sales for intelligence purposes. The actual objective, in the opinion of Pavlich and many others — to entrap the legitimate American gun trade and to provide an excuse for gun control.
This story is still ongoing, with news breaking every day despite Attorney General Eric “My People” Holder’s continued stonewalling. But, defying an onslaught from the smear merchants at Media Matters, Pavlich has already assembled a credible case.
The introduction to Pavlick’s book is written by Jay Dobyns, famed infiltrator of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, author of No Angel, the type of federal employee that honors the ATF agents lost at Waco with a tattoo. For his trouble, Dobyns had his house burned to the ground and was accused by his own agency of doing it himself. Dobyns describes the BATF as a department that has replaced law enforcement professionals with politicians more interested in protecting their own reputations than enforcing the law.
Incredibly, what’s left of the United States is still capable of producing patriots willing to serve in what was once their government — men like Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. A Marine and a former police officer, Terry was a model Border Patrol agent, serving in the elite U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, a standout recruit with the nickname of “Superman.” However, just as the modern comic has decided American identity is an embarrassment, so did Terry’s government force him to fight armed cartel members with bean bag guns. Terry was killed ten days before Christmas 2010 — by a gun deliberately shipped to the Mexican cartels by the ATF. [Napolitano confirms gang killed border agent in battle, USA Today, December 18, 2010]
Terry’s death was the rock on which the Fast and Furious operation foundered.
Pavlich does a good job in describing the cultural context: Barack Obama’s long crusade against gun ownership had as much to do with contempt and fear of blue collar white workers as any supposed concern over crime — as revealed in his famous “cling to guns or religion” comment at a 2008 San Francisco fundraiser. When the new Obama Administration was faced with the problem of violence on the Mexican border, its top officials took aim at those they regarded as the real problem: American gun owners.
The Mexican government was also eager to pin the blame on Mexico’s descent into chaos on the American people. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Felipe Calderon touted the statistic that “90% of the drug cartels’ weapons come from America” (which Pavlich easily disproves using Wikileaked memos from Clinton’s own State Department.)
Pavlich reveals that top officials, including U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, FBI Director Robert Mueller, leaders of the DEA and ATF, and Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer, a former defense attorney for Bill Clinton, planned what would become Operation Fast And Furious. Of course, they also somehow had the idea of not even trying to recover the guns, and, crucially, not bothering to inform the Mexican government.
Burke held news conferences to denounce American gun shop owners, even as he intervened to prevent prosecutions of arms traffickers caught red handed. At the same time, American gun shop owners were pressured by the ATF — the same people who can revoke their licenses — to sell weapons knowingly to the drug cartels, the very action that Burke said he was against.
There’s no way this could possibly have led to anything other than complete disaster and the deaths of innocent Mexicans and Americans. As Pavlich points out, the only way this makes any sense is that “perhaps it was not supposed to ‘work’ all along.”
When other law enforcement officials began discovering that the trafficked and untraced weapons were turning up at horrific murder scenes, requests for information were delayed, ignored, or explained away — “If you are going to make an omelet, you need to scramble some eggs,” as one agent put it. [How border 'Fast and Furious' gun sting backfired, By Sari Horwitz, Washington Post, July 26, 2011]
In the same summer of 2010 that this was taking place, the ATF’s Assistant Director in Charge of Field Operations, Mark Chait, was requesting information on gun sales in an attempt to push a new gun control regulation called Demand Letter 3, which would require all gun dealers to tell the Federal Government if anyone purchased multiple guns.
The operation that ATF explicitly approved, against the misgivings of American gun sellers, was going to be used to push gun control on Americans.
If it were not for the (predictable) murder of Brian Terry, it might have worked.
Pavlich does an excellent job covering the cover-up at the ATF and the Justice Department as officials worked to evade responsibility. Pavlich shows that, from the beginning, Holder’s Justice Department was “unwilling to cooperate,” forcing disgruntled ATF agents to go public. Republican members of Congress have had to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve even minimal compliance. Furthermore, the Department of Justice still refuses to confirm or deny whether the murder of ICE Special Agent Jamie Zapata in Mexico was also linked to weapons from Operation Fast and Furious.
The Main Stream Media, Pavlich shows, has mostly reacted by trying to defend the Obama Administration. Loyal courtiers like Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and the commissars at Media Matters attacked the messenger, telling the American people that the real problem was not the government shipping weapons to Mexican cartels, but crazy right wingers and the National Rifle Association.
This pattern continues today. Thus a story directly implicating the Justice Department in the deaths of American and Mexican citizens is ignored, even as the Great and the Good agonize over the dire threat posed to the Republic by George Zimmerman.
The dismissive reaction from the Left, and faux conservatives like Bill O’ Reilly, is that such charges are a “conspiracy theory.” Media Matters provides a clip of O’Reilly dismissing her thesis as a “conspiracy thing”. (See transcript of O’Reilly badgering Pavlich here.)
But the effort to disarm and dispossess Americans is no fanciful theory. The protagonists are refreshingly honest about their intentions.
Similarly, even a casual glance at the federal government’s immigration policies reveals pandering and active encouragement of mass illegal immigration on the one hand, combined with ruthless determination to stamp out American resistance in states like Arizona and Alabama on the other.
Obamites make no secret about what they want with immigration — nor do they conceal their desires with Second Amendment issues. In the eyes of our rulers, the problem is not that Arizona ranchers must be armed to avoid being murdered; the problem is that they still have the right to fight back.
Even now, as waves of mob violence flood over the country at the beginning of what will surely be a “long, hot summer,” Democrats in the House (notably overt Reconquista advocate and MECHA member Raul Grijalva) are forcing a vote on the “Trayvon Amendment,” denying federal money to states that have “stand your ground” laws.
Significantly, in Fast and Furious Pavlich also reveals why the Mexican government, usually so aggressive in defending its perceived interests against the hated Yanqui, quickly muted its objections. After an initial call for extradition of those responsible, Mexico was brought to heel by being told by the American Deputy Secretary of State that it would have $500 million for counter-narcotics operations pulled if they didn’t remain silent.
Pavlick’s revelation is interesting in its own right. But it also reveals the center of the current immigration crisis: not Mexico — but the United States. As Pavlich demonstrates, the Mexican government remained silent about the murder of its own citizens in exchange of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal aid. On critical policy issues, the puppet regime in Mexico City has no choice but to respond to its Yankee paymaster.
The disturbing conclusion: immigration patriots who criticize the Mexican government’s blatant plans for Reconquista are missing the point — the real marching orders are coming from Washington DC, and corporate America.
Fast and Furious is an extraordinary story, revealing a government not just malevolent, but almost totalitarian.
As President Obama might say, let me be perfectly clear — a nation suppressed by its own institutions is an occupied country. Our government was originally designed to be the political expression of our particular people. But the Obama regime functions as a Minority Occupation Government, dedicated to suppressing the liberties, confiscating the earnings, and dispossessing the people of the historic American nation.
But what can a “Conservative Movement” featuring the likes of Rich Lowry do in the face of something so monstrous? What would Mitt Romney say about “Fast and Furious” if he was confronted with this book — complain the operation was too expensive?
Special Agent Dobyns in his introduction to Fast and Furious suggests that the system can be rebuilt and the ATF can return to its “true purpose.”
Perhaps some conservatives think President Romney or some other Establishment figure can just put all back to rights and America can be returned to “normal.”
However, what if we are past that point? Electoral victory seems increasingly difficult given demographic realities. The American nation has already been all but unmade in vast regions of the country. Mass immigration, tyrannical government action, and fanatical anti-white government activism seem to continue regardless of what party is in power. What if we are occupied by a system that goes beyond one party?
And then there is the most critical question — if America is occupied, and the “conservative movement” knows it, what happens next?
If their answer is a tax cut for Attorney General Holder, then we need a new movement.
James Kirkpatrick travels around the United States looking for a waiter who can speak English.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.