By Konservo (aka Mr. President)
Here at ThinkProgress Watch, we like provide readers with a diverse range of perspectives. It turns out that Trajan and I both have written posts about TP’s on-going struggle to acquire factual information about reality, a task which they rarely, if ever, manage to succeed.
Rachel Maddow, a nobody who pinch-rants for Olby, screwed up just as Olby himself would have, namely, by lifting material from the Clinton/Soros propaganda machine and Left-wing hate-site ThinkProgress.
The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb explains that: Think Progress Screws Up Again, and indeed, we can assume this is true without even reading the blog, but it would be imprudent to dismiss the radical Leftists who write there merely because of the consistency with which they post lies and propaganda, defying reason, reality, and truth.
Goldfarb states:
Last week Think Progress blogger Amanda accused John McCain of plagiarizing a speech from Admiral Timothy Ziemer only to retract the story hours later.
…
Today she runs a story about North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry under the headline: “Rep. McHenry calls U.S. soldier in Iraq a ‘two-bit security guard.’”
Well, it isn’t true. Think Progress provides the video, but at no point does McHenry indicate that the “security guard” is an American soldier. In fact, if Amanda had bothered to call McHenry’s office, she would have learned that the security guard was one of the foreign contractors so reviled by the left–an individual who in any other circumstance Amanda would likely label a “mercenary.”
Mr. Goldfarb, your naïveté is almost charming.
No, Amanda does not label the security guard a mercenary. Instead she does as she and her fellow goons at TP are instructed, namely, spew propaganda at all costs and, if caught red-handed, to do her best to mitigate responsibility for the fabrication, exaggeration, and/or misinformation she posted.
The foreign contractor a despised mercenary at TP? Nay, Mr. Goldfarb, for it is the author herself who unscrupulously proffers in her own defense a point raised at ‘right-wing’ blog HotAir.com, thus, we see a woman deficient in moral principle and lacking the novelty to slither her own way out of the mess in which she finds herself. It is she who is to be despised by men and women of integrity.
Amanda spouts her pathetic apologetic:
Michael Goldfarb reports that the “two-bit security guard” was a foreign contractor, not a member of the military, as both Carolina Politics and Lance Sigmon originally reported. As Ed Morrissey states, “Does this really make it any better? After all, the contractors risk their lives as well, albeit for better compensation.”
Source: TP
So, Mr. Goldfarb, it is not wise to write-off ThinkProgress because of screw-ups like this, and being wrong about McCain, and being wrong about Iran, and being wrong about Spitzer, and being wrong about right-wing reactions to Laura Bush visiting the Middle East… and, well, just being wrong in general. For the ruthless, guerrilla-blogging tactics with which TP operates depend not upon any factual information.
Know Thine Enemy
(Thanks, Melo, for the tip about what’s’ername who’s sitting in for Olby.)