Fox is always terrible when it comes to letting little Joe McCarthy Jr. Bachmann run amok with wild accusations against the Obama administration, but this one with Uma Pemmaraju from this Saturday's America's News Headquarters was particularly awful. Bachmann is now calling the Mexican drug cartels "terrorists." She's pretending that Republicans have an ounce of concern for gun control or that the problem with the guns showing up in Mexico is not something they and the NRA have created themselves with terribly weak gun control laws.
She asserts criminal behavior because President Obama used his powers of executive privilege all of one time to ward off a Republican witch hunt, never mind the fact that she made no such assertions when her best buddy George W. Bush invoked it six times.
She also thinks there is some conspiracy theory behind the media giving more attention to the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act instead of the contempt vote against Eric Holder, blaming the media of course and ignoring that John Boehner was the one who decided to intentionally schedule the vote on the same day, knowing full well it would get buried because he wanted it to be.
She also had the audacity to complain about the administration leaking given her track record, or the fact that it's ridiculous to pretend that they all don't leak when it's politically convenient for them. Regardless of Bachmann's assertions here, this is not the first or the worst, or sadly the last administration that's going to leak classified information when it suits them. The fact that this woman was given a spot on the House Intelligence Committee is a tragedy in its own right.
Rough transcript below the fold.
BACHMANN: It has to because no man is above the law. It doesn't matter if you're a janitor in a church basement or if you're the President of the United States. All of us have to be under the law and the same is true for Eric Holder. Eric Holder's problem is that he got found out, pure and simple. He got found out.
He was running a political program and putting thousands of dangerous guns in the hands of terrorists in Mexico for the purpose of trying to take away our 2nd Amendment rights from us. That trap got sprung and everyone found out that Eric Holder was associated with it. And so now he's not going to give any answers to Congress. He can't do that.
And the President of the United States is pulling the same thing. He's asserting executive privilege. Well, the President isn't above the law either. This is a very real issue. This isn't political. This is legal and it looks like Eric Holder is in major trouble and unfortunately President Obama is trying to cover him on this. This is a serious, serious crime that appears to have taken place, or a serious issue I should say, and it's something that needs to be addressed.
PEMMARAJU: What do you think of the fact, for example, on a week this was amazingly produced on the one day when we had two big issues to deal with, that the day after we see most newspapers playing up the health care vote and yet the Eric Holder situation, you could find it below the full or inside the pages of the newspapers rather than being front page news?
BACHMANN: Yeah, chance of that shocking bias in the media. You'd never think something like that would happen would you? But clearly there is no question, the media doesn't want this story about Eric Holder to be told because this is an ugly story for the Obama administration and the question is how complicit is the President? What did he know? What did Eric Holder know?
And Darrell Issa's doing a fantastic job. This is about getting, this is about holding all Americans to the same standards.
PEMMARAJU: I think what most people feel, or are having a hard time understanding is, if there's nothing to hide, then why was executive privilege exerted here?
BACHMANN: Right. Exactly. But the problem is there is something to hide because now we all know, the game is up, so to speak. This was a political issue where again, thousands of dangerous guns are put in the hands of terrorists in Mexico. One of those guns killed a Unites States border patrol agent. That family deserves to have some answers and Eric Holder is saying no.
What's ironic in all of this is no administration has ever leaked intelligence secrets before, national security secrets like this administration, so the irony in all of this Uma, is that the President of the United States is telling all the secrets to the world that he shouldn't, but he refuses to tell the secrets about Fast and Furious, that he should.
And the President and Eric Holder need to tell the American people the truth.
