Legal Insurrection tipped me to this one: apparently, ThinkProgress (link available via Legal Insurrection) got itself in a bit of a tizzy over a story in the Mexican press that one of the Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden was the son of Mexican immigrants, which apparently means (according to TP) that we need to pass the DREAM Act* and that the military is by the way keeping Latinos down. Now, let’s establish something right off of the bat; I don’t know who was on that SEAL team, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to hear that one or more of them were of Latino ancestry. Or any other ancestry, frankly. That’s not the point: the point is that when you’re a hardcore partisan ideologue using a story for agitprop, you should probably check the story first to make sure that you don’t get burned.
ThinkProgress did not check the story first.
Quick: read this sentence (from the original Mexican newspaper article that sent TP into a tizzy) and tell me what’s wrong with it. It’s OK if you don’t speak Spanish: neither do I, really – and I still can pick out the howler, so you should be able to, too.
El soldado Rubén Mejía, nacido en este país y de padres guanajuatenses, ha sido ascendido a sargento por el operativo en que un equipo enfrentó y dio muerte a Bin Laden.
“Sargento.”
Continue reading BREAKING: ThinkProgress pig-ignorant about military.
