"The MSM are largely acting as a giant repeater..."

J.E. Dyer uses the Gunwalker scandal and the debt negotiations to illustrate how the MSM simply repeats the Obama talking points without a scintilla of analysis.

The mainstream media are failing to address two central truths about key domestic issues for America this summer.

1. Agencies of the US federal government created the “Gunwalker” problem.

2. President Obama is the one who will decide who gets paid after 2 August, if there is no budget deal.

The two issues are largely unrelated, except through the principles on which the Obama administration has handled them and the MSM are dealing with them. The latter principle is one of slavishly repeating the talking points put out by the Obama administration. In both Gunwalker and the budget stand-off, the administration has relied on obfuscation and unrealistic narratives to frame the public discussion. And the MSM are largely acting as a giant repeater, propagating the original signal without modification or loss of fidelity.

In reporting on Gunwalker, even Fox is parroting the Obama line. For some reason the fact that agents of the federal government ordered gun shop stores sell to straw buyers, in bulk, morphs into a reason to restrict people's rights to buy guns. It's insane, but we're talking about people who are not hired for their brains.

It was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) that directed licensed gun dealers and local agents to ignore activity they would otherwise have pursued as suspicious, under existing law and existing enforcement standards. The problem in this situation is not current law or enforcement standards; it’s BATFE.



The outcome of the operation clearly doesn’t justify increasing gun restrictions on the people. The falsity of the premise articulated by Ms. Stoddard is so laughably obvious, it can’t help evoking the propaganda campaigns of Soviet-era Pravda. Government creates a problem, the media talk it up, and then government increases restrictions on the people to “fix” it.

When the talk turns to social security checks it should be obvious to anyone who can fog a mirror that there is enough money coming in to the treasury to pay social security recipients. If the checks don't go out it will be because Obama decides that other people are going to get paid first. It's his decision, not members of congress.

If Obama presides over a sea of unsent Social Security checks in August, that too will be a problem of his administration’s making. As confirmed in Congressional hearings this week, there will be plenty of funds to service the debt and meet Social Security and defense obligations after 2 August. Choosing not to meet them – choosing instead to pay, for example, the salaries of union workers in the non-defense civil service – will be up to Obama