Why I'm no big fan of Think Progress

Corrected Feb. 15: I meant to refer to Think Progress, not Media Matters, in this whole story. (That said, while Alan Dershowitz becomes more neo-con all the time, MM may be iffy on wanting to do oppo research on Faux broadcasters.)

Via Memorandum, the Think Progress story I was blogging about was immediately below Dershowitz's rant about Media Matters talking about doing personality-based oppo research on Faux broadcasters, and I conflated the two. This post is now edited.

Think Progress is Democratic Party establishmentarian mixing a bit a celebrity politics and cherry-picking from the Green Party to make a cheap political point, which ignores real politics, shows that TP is ultimately just another Democratic Party shill, and, like the mainstream media it professes to sometimes despise, willing to play horse-race politics coverage.

So what if Roseanne Barr (who is on the Green Party presidential ballot) would pull 6 percent against Mitt Romney and Barack Obama? In the real Green Party world, she didn't even win 6 percent of the Green Party vote in the Greens' first primary, in Ohio.

And, Think Progress folks KNOW that this is just celebrity name recognition. If they know she couldn't pull 6 percent in the Green primary, then they're guilty as hell of setting up a straw man. If they DON'T know that, they're even more guilty of political ignorance in the name of focusing on the bipartisan duopoly.

Yes, they're riffing off a poll by Public Policy Polling, and it's just a blog post, not a full story. But, this Alyssa didn't have to go there. And, she certainly didn't have to "go there" without actually writing about the Green party. That's because the same arguments against including Barr, two paragraphs up, apply to PPP just as much as TP. Ditto, the condemnations of TP in the paragraph immediately above apply to PPP. When folks like this refuse to take politics outside the bipartisan duopoly seriously, I refuse to take them seriously.

Jill Stein, who won the Greens' Ohio primary with 90 percent of the vote, is nowhere mentioned in the poll.

But, the burden is more on Think Progress. It didn't have to have a silly blog post about this. It didn't have to play all these political games. But it did.