Posted on December 26, 2011

by

Daniel Clark

At their 2004 national convention, the Democrats honored Michael Moore by seating him right next to former president Jimmy Carter. If that was outrageous, it was nothing compared to the fact that the next Democrat administration would conduct itself as if it were producing one of Moore's phony documentaries.

A scene in Moore's anti-gun film Bowling for Columbine depicts him opening an account at a Traverse City, Michigan bank that offers a free rifle to each new customer. After filling out some paperwork, he exits the building, victoriously hoisting his easily obtained firearm overhead. Like everything else in Moore's movies, that's not exactly how it happened.

The bank, which was also licensed as a gun dealership, administered background checks, after which it would issue vouchers redeemable for rifles kept in a vault at a remote location, about 300 miles away. Moore had already opened his account and passed his background check long beforehand, and arranged to have his gun delivered to the bank for the purpose of shooting the scene.

Moore was allowed this departure from the usual procedure because the gullible manager was eager to cooperate with what the congenitally dishonest filmmaker had told him was a story about innovative business practices. In exchange for having done him this favor, the bank and its employees were lied about, and turned into objects of derision.

The Obama administration has used this same approach in executing Operation Fast & Furious, through which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms instructed gun dealers to sell arms to suspected Mexican gangsters, in contravention of the established safeguards. The dealers must have thought they were doing their patriotic duty by cooperating with the ATF, when in fact they were being set up to take the blame for Mexican drug-related violence.

According to the latest in a series of reports by Sharyl Atkisson of CBS News, internal ATF e-mails indicate the use of Fast & Furious as a rationale for more restrictive gun regulations. In the absence of a reasonable explanation why the administration would deliberately arm the drug cartels, without making any effort to track or intercept the weapons or notify the Mexican authorities, one would have to conclude that its usefulness in furthering Obama's liberal domestic agenda was its entire purpose. After all, the president had repeatedly made the baseless claim that most of the Mexican gangs' guns were coming from American dealers. Why not create some proof?

In both Bowling for Columbine and Fast & Furious, the anti-gun activists misrepresented themselves so that they may later betray the trust of innocent gun dealers, who became unwittingly complicit in their campaign against Second Amendment rights. The difference is that peddling a pack of lies about his political adversaries was the entire purpose of Moore's deception, whereas the Obama administration meant to take it a step further, by using those lies as a basis to affect federal policy. In other words, the perpetrators of Fast & Furious hold positions of great responsibility, and therefore wield far greater power than a mere propagandist.

Moore's movies may be a bunch of lying, slanderous, intelligence-insulting, anti-American mindpuke, but that's about as damaging as they can get. When similar tactics are used by people with real power, as in a federal bureaucracy, the results can be lethal. Fast & Furious came to light just over a year ago when Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered in a shootout with Mexican criminals, using weapons that have been traced back to that operation.

These weapons have also been connected to the kidnapping and murder of the brother of the Mexican state of Chihuahua's attorney general, and have been used to kill an undeterminable but undoubtedly increasing number of others. In addition, Fast & Furious has endangered the remaining American agents in the field, immeasurably harmed relations between the United States and Mexico, and hindered future collaborations between the two countries against the gangsters who continue to terrorize the areas along our border.

This scandal is just a sampling of what can happen when power is given to a political party that models its behavior after a buffoon who specializes in creating false realities. To a superficial blowhard like Moore, real reality may be, up to a certain point, optional. The same is not true of the President of the United States, who must eventually deal with the fact that, when you deliberately arm vicious criminals to the teeth as part of a plan to disarm the innocent, good people will die.

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