The O’Reilly Factor and America Live followed in the Hannity show’s footsteps yesterday by evoking the parents of murdered Border Patron agent Brian Terry as a means to vilify Attorney General Eric Holder for withholding documents in the Fast and Furious case. And guess who else is doing the same thing? John Boehner. What a coincidence!
On June 21, Larry Margasak, of the Huffington Post wrote:
While a confrontation between the legislative and executive branches of government would be an academic dispute to most voters, Boehner on Thursday injected a human element into the battle over documents related to Operation Fast and Furious. He said the family of slain border agent Brian Terry deserved answers about the guns that killed him.
That very night, Terry’s parents turned up on the Hannity show - where Sean Hannity blatantly exploited them to make political attacks on Holder. Suddenly, it became a trend on Fox News.
The next day (yesterday), in a segment billed by FoxNews.com as “Border Patrol union calling for Eric Holder to step down,” Kelly gratuitously played a clip of Terry’s mother on a talk radio show in Philadelphia saying her son “believed in justice and he believed in telling the truth… and I know he would be saying, 'You know what? I died for my country,'… and I think he deserves the truth… and if this was a bad thing that they did with Fast and Furious, it should be acknowledged so it never happens to anybody else’s son.” What does this have to do with a union calling for Holder’s resignation? Nothing.
In fact, Fast and Furious was long ago disbanded and disowned by the Obama administration so, as Kirsten Powers later asked O’Reilly in that context, “What are we really talking about here?”
There has been a Fox News witch hunt for Holder since at least 2010 when Kelly cooked up, along with a Republican activist, a phony-baloney accusation that Holder was refusing to prosecute minorities guilty of voter intimidation (never mind that nobody had been intimidated) in a deliberate effort to suggest that scary black people would be waiting for white voters at polling places across America.
Now, Kelly just happens to be in synch with the Republicans again in going after Holder. And so was her guest, George McCubbin, of the National Border Control Council. He announced to Kelly’s America Live viewers, “The Terry family still has questions that need to be answered.” As if this whole thing has been about them.
Kelly’s interview with McCubbin wasn’t exactly hard-hitting. She ended it with a Holder-bashing prompt in the form of a question. She noted that McCubbin had said Holder’s actions were “a slap in the face to all border patrol agents who serve this country.” Then, in a call for more Holder-bashing, she asked “Why did you say that?”
McCubbin said, “The reason is simple. We lost one of our own. Agent Brian Terry was one of our brothers and we want answers as well.”
Fast forward to The O’Reilly Factor.
“Do you believe the parents of Brian Terry have a right to know what happened in the case?” O’Reilly asked his two Democratic guests. Later, he said the House Oversight Committee is doing all it can to get the documents (the Obama administration is withholding) “for those parents.”
The America Live video is below. The O'Reilly Factor video is at Mediaite.