Why Isn't Josephine Terry A Star Like Cindy Sheehan?

It’s a good bet that you don’t know who Josephine Terry is. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney couldn’t remember her name at his daily briefing recently.

But you’ve probably heard of Cindy Sheehan. A few years ago, you could hardly avoid her. Her fame descended from the fact that, after her son Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq, she was selected by the mainstream news media as the sympathetic face of the anti-war movement. The New York Times’ Vacuity Editor Maureen Dowd anointed Cindy Sheehan with the “absolute moral authority” of a mother who had lost her son in war.

The rest of the media conditionally adopted that narrative. The condition was that gold star mothers who were proud of their sons’ service were ignored.

So, I ask again: Who is Josephine Terry?

Josephine Terry is the grieving mother of Brian Terry, the U. S. border patrolman whose murder near the Arizona – Mexico border cracked open the Obama Justice Department’s Fast and Furious gun running operation.

Cindy Sheehan gained fame because she helped advance the mainstream news media’s anti-George Bush agenda. She was so useful that they would sanitize her rants before replaying them on the news. She frequently descended into virulent anti-Semitism. Even with their help, she occasionally embarrassed them with her embrace of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s anti-Americanism and her praise of Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “rationality.”

Her usefulness waned after the 2006 midterm elections and her moral authority expired when she challenged Nancy Pelosi in the 2008 Democratic primary.

The old cliché reads that the cover up is worse than the original crime. But in the case of Fast and Furious, that’s probably not true. While the media narrative insists that this was a “botched” operation aimed at halting gun trafficking across the US-Mexican border, no effort was ever made to track the guns. How can you botch an operation that performed exactly as it was designed?

For example, tracking the guns south of the border would have required the cooperation of the Mexican government. But the Mexican government was not even informed of the operation until hundreds of Mexicans were dead.

Early on, even before Brian Terry’s death, the Obama administration was arguing for stricter regulation of gun sales while accusing Arizona gun dealers of selling to known “straw purchasers.” But the simple truth was that those dealers were actually doing precisely what they were told to do by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

As it turns out, Fast and Furious was not about identifying and arresting gun smugglers. It was about creating a political environment that would facilitate passage of stricter gun control laws. CBS’s Sharyl Atkinson acquired documents revealing precisely that.

Atkinson uncovered an email ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait sent to Bill Newell, the ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious: "Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks."

We? Who is “we?”

And if you can’t imagine that your government would think that way, then you don’t know liberals very well. A Bloomberg New Service story Wednesday reported that the Virginia-based Flight Safety Foundation was frustrated by the paucity of airline crashes in the last decade. Indeed, the last US airliner to fall out of the sky was in November of 2001. Without crashes, there was no momentum for imposing new regulations and no reason for their existence.

But why wait for a plane crash when you can cause your own?

Can you say, “Fast and Furious?”

Other than Sharyl Atkinson, the mainstream news media have participated in the cover up. CNN contributor L. Z. Granderson argued that we shouldn’t even want to know what the Obama/Holder regime was doing because, regardless of the results, their intentions were good. 

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza doesn’t want Fast and Furious investigated because he fears that it will make government look bad.

When was the last time that journalists didn’t want to get to the bottom of a story? Oh yeah. Now I remember. Every time you find Democrat malfeasance at the bottom of that story.

And that’s why you don’t know who Josephine Terry is. Her loss is no less tragic than Cindy Sheehan’s, but Mrs. Terry’s grief doesn’t advance the agenda.