More Blatant Dishonesty

In the last week or so, the Obama Administration has repeatedly claimed the automatic weapons fueling the wars among the drug cartels in Mexico. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put a huge portion of the blame for violence along the U.S.-Mexico border on the U.S. because we are importing drugs from Mexico and exporting money and guns. Just today, on CBS News' Meet the Press, part of a question by host Mike Schieffer was

It's my understanding that 90 percent of the guns that they're getting down in Mexico are coming from the United States. We don't seem to be doing a very good job of cutting off the gun flow.

President Barack Obama accepted this premise, without directly responding to it. But just a moment later, Obama said

And so what we have to do is to recognize that, look, this is a two-way street - as Secretary Clinton indicated - we've gotta reduce demand for drugs. We've got to do our part in reducing the flow of cash and guns south.

Less explicit than other Administration spokesmen, but still saying the U.S. is the source of the Mexican drug cartels' guns.

I CALL B.S. ON THESE PEOPLE! Automatic weapons have been illegal in the United States for 75 years. U.S. gangs have had to import these weapons to increase their firepower because they can't get them here. To the extent guns are moving south across the U.S.-Mexico border, they are coming through the U.S. — not from the U.S. (Mexico's criminal gangs traffic with U.S. criminal gangs!? Who would have thought?) And an awful lot of (non-Administration) observers note that most cartel weapons come across Mexico's southern border and point their fingers at other Latin American countries, particularly including Venezuela.

So, is the Administration lying to us, or to themselves? And if the former, what is their real agenda?

UPDATE: Now we can see where the Administration's 90% figure comes from. It appears that 90% of the guns sent to the U.S. for tracing, and successfully traced, are traced back to (or through) the U.S. But the large majority of the guns are not sent to the U.S. because they so obviously don't come from here. Surely the Administration knows this. So why is it trying to mislead us?