Where was the public outcry for justice when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry bled to death at the hands of a drug cartel in cahoots with the U.S. government?  It happened in the Peck Canyon corridor northwest of Nogales, Arizona -- nowhere.  The general public didn't hear about it.

It's been one year and two months since agent Terry died.  Within weeks of his demise, his shocking murder would illuminate a bizarre and murderous government plot to run guns, lots of guns -- over 2,000 guns -- into the hands of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Members of Sinaloa were behind 19,097 murders in Mexico between 2006 and 2010.  But that didn't stop the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in conjunction with the U.S. attorney's office in Arizona from initiating a program in 2009 that would add at least 300 more dead bodies to that sobering pile of human remains south of the border.

Within 24 hours of Terry's death, officials had traced two AK-47s to an ATF Phoenix-based operation dubbed Fast and Furious.

Soon bloggers at sites like cleanupatf, sipsey street irregulars, and Washington Examiner were joining forces to blow the lid off a mindless, deadly program that had collapsed into a destructive free-for-all.  As ATF whistle-blowers like John Dodson came forward with reports of illegal gun-buying, untraceable weapons, threats of demotion by power-crazed superiors, and their futile efforts to stop the Fast and Furious madness until Terry's death, mainstream editorial boards across the country failed to report the story.

Not since Lenin gathered his fellow Bolsheviks together in 1912 at the Prague conference to plan the publication of Pravda has there been such an all-out effort to quash facts that out in the open might bring down Attorney General Eric Holder and the whole Obama administration.

An amoral herd of left-wing journalists acting like "bootlicking propagandists," as Orwell once called members of his own British press in 1944, might find it difficult in the long run to get away with suppressing a scandal involving mass murder.  Orwell warned reporters, "Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. ... Once a whore, always a whore."

A pimped out press slavishly covering for corrupt leftist regimes while bringing down the opposition is nothing new.  It happens openly every day in places like Cuba and Venezuela.  But here in the land of the free press?

Parsing the Spin

Last November, Dennis Wagner of The Arizona Republic wrote a chronological exposé of the Fast and Furious scandal.  But he put a fancy spin on his article which illustrates perfectly how a Big Lie can emerge from a kernel of truth told with bad intent.

*The once-obscure case in Phoenix blew into a national controversy, putting a giant bull's-eye on President Barack Obama and the Justice Department.

Wow.  You see, it's not about the real victims.  Poor President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder must be protected from those gun-nuts (like Palin) marking maps with bulls-eyes everywhere.

*Cartels, which operate like quasi-military outfits, were well-armed before Fast and Furious. It is impossible to say whether the flow of guns into Mexico increased because of the gun-walking case or has diminished in the aftermath.

Here's a reporter toeing the Party line.  The message to non-elite readers from hoity-toity Wagner: what I'm saying is tantamount to nihilism, but you won't get it; you'll only think to yourself, yes, drug cartels are armed to the teeth -- a few more weapons wouldn't make a difference.  Of course, now the reader is free to commit all kinds of atrocities because, heck, in our violent culture, someone will die anyway.

*Firearms were allowed into Mexico during two earlier operations, including a 2006-07 Tucson case known as Operation Wide Receiver. Those investigations were carried out quietly during the George W. Bush administration, without public controversy.

Translation: Bush and Gonzalez started it (falsification), so it is OK for Obama's ATF to murder Mexican civilians and U.S. Border Patrol agents.

Wagner quotes the "experts" in the end.  Harry L. Wilson, director of Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College, expounds on conspiracy theories and the idea that anyone who believes the government was "intentionally putting guns into Mexico as a ploy to regulate firearms in America ... is just beyond paranoia."

Translation: don't think.  You're not up to the task.  You're mentally unstable anyway.

"Cover-ups often are worse than what you are trying to cover up," states Wilson.  I wonder if Zapata's or Terry's parents would agree.

Putting the Shoe on the Other Foot

In addition to slanting the truth, the gung-ho press has no problem doing unto others what they would not have done to them.

Flashback.

2002 - Attorney General John Ashcroft and the forced covering of Lady Justice's breasts in the DoJ's Great Hall created such a stir in the leftist press that the story was news for weeks.

2007 - Ashcroft's successor, Alberto Gonzalez, fared even worse; the media firestorm became so intense that he finally resigned for his part in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys general.  A New York Times editorial depicted Gonzalez as a "consiglieri to Bush's imperial presidency" and pummeled him for "abandoning his duties as guardian of election integrity and voting rights."

Even Senator Obama, appearing on Larry King Live in the same year, called for Gonzalez's resignation, accusing him of being a "president's attorney," not the "people's attorney."  Obama told King that "part of the role of the attorney general is to say to the executive branch these are the limits of your power, here's the things you can't do."

The audacious junior senator from Illinois chastised Gonzalez, indirectly, for carrying out "political vendettas" ordered by the White House.  Obama described Bush's AG as an "attorney general who saw himself as enabler of the administration as opposed to somebody who was actually trying to look out for the American people's interest ... for that reason I think it's time for him to step down ... and for another attorney general who can exercise some independence" to be appointed.  King sat spellbound.

Then there's John Mitchell, the only attorney general to go to prison on charges of obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and lying under oath.  A Nixon loyalist 'til the end, Mitchell's involvement in the Watergate break-in, which involved photographing documents, planting microphones, payouts, and an eventual cover-up, landed him lots of bad press and a 19-month stint in a minimum-security facility in Alabama.

Sans murders of innocent federal agents and civilians, the Washington Post played out the Watergate scandal until 25 defendants were charged with various crimes.

Too bad that agents Brian Terry, Jaime Zapata, and hundreds of Mexican civilians, with "more to come" according to Holder, didn't die under a Republican administration.  The wheels of justice grind down to a full stop when Democrats circle the wagons.

The Washington Post, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Reuters, the Associated Press, and countless others along with  their political backers routinely characterize the Fast and Furious murders as part of "a botched ATF sting operation that went awry," "an ill-conceived operation," "a witch hunt," "political fodder," "deeply flawed," "horrible screw-up," "bad judgment," and a "Republican red herring."

Various  big media outlets that ran 120 stories of Herman Cain's alleged sexual dalliances from November 2 to November 15 didn't see a need to enlighten the masses about Fast and Furious.  The number of times "F and F" was mentioned in the same time span?  One. 

Are informed journalists who remain silent in the face of evil culpable for sins of omission?  Are journalists who intentionally subvert truth and invert facts, allowing corrupt government officials to ride roughshod over the rule of law, complicit in the very crimes they're covering up?

Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report.