Not So Smart: Think Progress Bites On Bachmann Satire As Real

The Think Progress blog finds retiring Rep. Michele Bachmann to be a very major enemy of “progress.” Their willingness to believe anything about her came back to bite them. They treated as real news an obvious satire that  Bachmann proposed the idea of “Americanization Facilities” where the illegal-immigrant children “would be put to work to pay off the costs of their past, present and futures care.”

The Raw Story blog made excuses, as the lefty blogs Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars also couldn’t tell their fantasy from reality. Their headline: "Crazy racist Bachmann story so believable liberal websites fall for parody.” Any of these blogs could have simply Googled for "KCTV" and discovered they are channel 5 in Kansas City.

Paul Spross's Think Progress item had "CORRECTION" imposed, and the words “The news site KCTV7 News is a parody. Rep. Bachmann (R-MN) never made the statement. We sincerely regret the error.” Spross totally bought the idea that Bachmann would think every child should learn English and then work half the day:

When pressed by conservative radio host Jason Lewis about what life would be like in the camps, Bachmann elaborated that the purpose would also be to inculcate the children into English-speaking American culture. “Well, we’d of course want these facilities to be ideal, you know, for the children to work and learn,” Bachmann continued. “They’d spend half of their day working, and the other half learning what every child should learn, and that’s English, you know, English and American history. And as soon as they learn English with some degree of fluency, they can attend local schools, maybe with a voucher program, or something like that. And then they could work when they aren’t in school.”

This ending paragraph of satire summed up what leftists are willing to believe:

“She wants to create Republican indoctrination camps and force these poor children into lives of indentured servitude,” posits documentarian and activist Jose Antonio Vargas. “She’s talking about labor camps where we raise an army of future Republican voters, and work them like slaves until they get old enough to possibly deport, if it comes to that. No one should be taking anything this woman says seriously.”

No one should be taking what these leftist sites say seriiously if they're unwilling to do a little elementary fact-checking. Karoli at Crooks and Liars confessed: "UPDATE: It appears we were duped and this story is from a satire site. We apologize for the error." And: "Yeah, I got pwned. How sad is it that it was just this side of realistic enough to believe in the first place. When you have a reputation for making outrageous and ridiculous comments, it becomes easier and easier to believe something that should have been dismissed out of hand."

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Daily Kos and "HarpboyAK' hasn't acknowledged any error as of Monday morning.

Twitchy offers a roundup of how Jonah Goldberg and others responded to the Bachmann fake.

Earlier on NewsBusters: Soros-Funded Think Progress Falsely Claims Global Warming Melted Street Lights in Oklahoma