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One If By Misstatement, Two If By Ignorant: Palin Gets an "F" in American History
Why is Sarah Palin touring American historical sites?
Apparently to because she has decided to try and learn some basic details of the country’s founding story.
Unfortunately, the endeavor is not going well.
Even with conservatives cutting education budgets, every schoolchild who has paid even scant attention in history class knows that “the midnight message of Paul Revere” was a warning to the rebels of what would become the United States that the British redcoats were on the march to disarm the dissenters.
But that was news to Palin.
When she got to Boston, with the apparent purpose of recalling Revere’s ride at the Old North Church, the former governor of Alaska started talking about: "He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed."
Ouch.
It is tiresome to pick on Palin. She has taken more than her share of hits on matters of geography, newspaper reading, American allies and favorite founders. Even conservatives ridicule her -- it was Glenn Beck who pressed her on the favorite founder issue.
Truthfully, there is no point to piling on.
Palin is not going to run for president because (as the polling makes abundantly clear) Republicans do not want her to be their candidate, because (as the polling makes even more abundantly clear) Americans would never elect her and because she is not about to give up her lucrative book, broadcasting and speaking fees to go back into public service.
It has ever been the case that Palin’s patriotism extends only so far as it benefits her own self-interest.
What is now equally evident, however, is that her historical bumbling is not a misstep here, a misstatement there. It is a pattern, a pattern of disconnection with and disinterest in the American story. Like so many politicians, she uses American history as a prop, not as inspiration, and certainly not as instruction.
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41 Comments so far
Show All"Like so many politicians, she uses American history as a prop, not as inspiration, and certainly not as instruction."
Too bad there wasn't some comparison and contrast with the current elected dictator.
So which are the inspiring bits?
Ronnie didn't know much about history either, and he got elected president. He flubbed question after question when he sought the nomination in 1980. His reply was that while he didn't know, he'd have people reporting to him who did.
While president, among the many things he flubbed was the reason that the scheduled Vietnam elections if 1956 weren't held was because the USSR, China and North Vietnam were afraid that the communists would lose. He got elected twice.
I do agree however that Palin may bow out because of loss of money.
But Palin can't even fake it. At least Ronnie could string togeather a coherent sentance that had some internal logic. Palin opens her mouth and let's an almost random string of words pop out. When she mouthed the above example she seemed to have no idea at all where she was going to end up or even what word came next as she fumbled and mumbled along.
There is a difference between an intellectual light weight and an air head.
True story. Can you just imagine what kind of utter morons she and George W would have if they mated?
Chris Christie?
lol Swish!
RR, at least, was capable of being trained to act and, therefore, learn his lines.
Although I agree with the gist of this article, it is tough to read a critique of someone else's ignorance that begins with several grammatical errors.
The only error I noticed was the insertion of a "to" where it didn't belong. There may have have been more. I didn't find them.
The original blog on the "Nation" didn't contain the offending word. This appears to have been a transcription error.
Ms. Palin continues performing her superb impersonation of Tina Fey's impersonation of that goofy Alaskan half governor. Thus show business swallows itself.
I personally believe..., that the reason Sarah Palin can't find herself to the door of the Whitehouse is cuz she was born in South Alaska and such as, the people of Iraq don't know about Paul Revere either who hates the British also, such as the Palestinians who also could... help educate the u.s. americans how to read history books and build up our futures...
Hilarious!
Higgs Boson, have you been around a hadron hatchery lately to collect a bunch of kaons that maybe could be used to melt all the heavy elements thus shutting down the entire military industrial complex?
If you haven't already read it, get a copy of Frederik Pohl's 'Starburst' and read it.
More irrelevant tripe by this author (in my own opinion).
How profound. Sarah Palin isn't real smart and doesn't know alot. I am on record as saying that the Dems would have had to invent her, if she didn't exist already. Some targets are so easy that i would be embarrassed to have written this article. But i guess he can't dig up anything else to say in support of Obama.
And come on CD......Certainly you can find more relevant articles out there????
Dude, I'm not from Missouri or anything but could you dig up just one article by John Nichols to show us where he has blatantly supported Obama in the past...?
I appreciate this article just in the fact that it'll be excellent archival material in leading future generations to see the truth in what's going on in these times!
Supporting Obama..., Indeed!
I've never bothered to "follow" Sarah Palin. As far as I can tell, her followers-- in the broadest sense of the term-- are a cultish handful of admiring wingnuts and yahoos, mass-media mavens and kibitzers always looking for "colorful" stories and scripts, and an equal or larger number of liberal-lites who simply love to hate her.
Actually, "hate" may be too strong a term; it's more accurate to characterize her critics from the "left" as loving to deplore her.
Her innate brashness, arrant ignorance, and natural knack for demagogically playing to the cheap seats must particularly irritate Serious, Earnest political wonks.
So it's no surprise that the liberal-lite commentariat is morbidly obsessed with her doings, even as they sputter that she's really beneath contempt and undue notice. When she emerged as a candidate in 2008 as a kind of "anti-Hillary Clinton", twits like Joan Walsh, then Editor-in-Chief of Salon, went ballistic and turned that cyber-rag into a platform of daily anti-Palin invective.
The rest of the liberal-lite commentariat similarly bayed and howled, chasing after Palin like rabid racing greyhounds madly pursuing a mechanical bunny around a circular track. They actually saw themselves as at a portentous Amerikan crossroads, or turning point, in which it was incumbent upon them to forestall the equivalent of Weimar Republic Germans bringing Adolf Hitler to power.
I didn't invent this parallel-- you could look it up.
The fact that Palin is no intellectual, and has in fact parlayed her aggressive anti-intellectualism into an asset, is bound to infuriate educated citizens and elicit their scornful animosity. I imagine even some old-school Republicans roll their eyes at the Palin phenomenon.
But is a bumptious idiot really any worse than odious pseudo-intellectuals like Newt Gingrich, or the smarmy, unctuous Mitt Romney-- or the Harvard-educated constitutional scholar Barack Obama, for that matter?
I stand by a bit of a response I wrote during the 2008 campaign, when I foolishly pointed out the folly of raging anti-Palin hysteria among "progressives" and liberal-lites-- and was predictably accused of being a "Palin supporter" in the polarized binary logic endemic to political hysteria:
"While I don't endorse obnoxious cretins as model candidates, consider all of the Serious, Experienced, Impeccably Credentialed, and Highly Qualified Misrepresentatives we keep electing on every level.
Don't they, by and large, turn out to govern as plutocrats, dictators, and war criminals? I'm in no way 'pro'-Palin, but the Fine and Upstanding 'bona fide' players with sparkling curriculum vitae are as bad in their own way-- or worse."
You are absolutely correct OS. Sarah Palin's charm is that she is ignorant, she knows it, we know it and she just doesn't give a shit. This is considered confidence. This contrasts with our President who said that he couldn't do something or even comment about an issue because he didn't want to scare the markets. He is the only President I've seen who constantly claims that he doesn't have the power to do things that obviously needs to be done. Jackson, Lincoln and both Roosevelts acted boldly because they knew that the Constitution is a vague document that grants powers to those bold enough to assume them. It's a disgrace that this Constitutional scholar always finds reasons not to act. He could have ended DADT with a stroke of the pen but didn't because he said he had no right to overrule Congress. Congress doesn't have the right to micromanage the military but the Commander in Chief does. I know this but you would think a Harvard educated lawyer would know this too. Palin may be stupid, but she appears to have more balls than Obama.
You certainly spend a lot of time talking about not talking about.... discussing the reason for not discussing the reasons.. oh, well.
Palin is a birth defect with a hunting rifle, who enjoys taking innocent lives for sport, but all her victims die in earnest.
And, yes, she's all of the above.
Her cult consists of a bunch of teabuggering old men with popcorn boxes in the front row of every one of her stage performances. I was told that by Pee-wee Herman.
Let's see... Palin's simplicity/stupidity and/or lapses of history vs Obama's willful and murderous escapades around the world, including his late night hits on old, unarmed, cripple men, shooting them point-blank in the face, then dumping them into the deep blue sea, then laughing & gloating about it to the world. Not to mention raiding the treasury for this friends in high-finance.
So far Palin hasn't been as fucking evil as this president. Its time for a change --any change. This fuck needs to go. At this point I'll take anything. Frankly I'm past tired of GWB II. Besides, its looking more and more like there will not be a third-party candidate strong enough to kill-off the one-party beast.
Decisions, decisions.
"So far Palin hasn't been as fucking evil as this president."
The damage one can do corresponds to the power one wields. Palin has no power so can do little damage. Mister Obama has great power so can do great damage.
"Its time for a change --any change. This fuck needs to go. At this point I'll take anything."
That's how we got Mister Obama.
MOONPIE: "Rage, rage at the dying of the light"..or something to that effect. These are difficult times...Will we one day say, Mr. Obama had a steady hand? Notwithstanding the anti-christ actions to ""kill or capture" Old unarmed men, Pirates and other dissidents, "Dead or Alive" has a long History in America. But this article is about Mrs. Palin and her command of history. Mr. Obama seems to always get added on. In truth, neither she or Mister Obama seem to go deep enough. They play the game...but who doesn't? In the meantime, America "gits loss in the echoes of dancing and bleeding" (c) WL. These are difficult times.
All times are difficult times to those without the power to choose without coercion.
"Like so many politicians, she uses American history as a prop, not as inspiration, and certainly not as instruction."
Best statement I've read in ages.
I just finished A PEOPLE"S HISTORY OF THE USA by Howard Zinn. It was extremely instructive but not inspirational. I am a patriot because of what this country could still be. Its history so far is shameful.
Good book, but the problem with America is not its history, but the American people.
It is the same thing. History shows that since the beginning of this nation people have used what little power they had ruthlessly. The more power they had the more damage they were able to do.
Before we hang the investment bankers up by their heels let's consider: Are we sure we would have not done the same thing had we been in their place? This is no reason not to get our money back as best we can, and this time make sure the regulations are followed to the letter.
The trouble with revolutions is that they simply exchange one gang of crooks for another. People are people. Look at Chris Christie who believes that a family earning 6,000 a year are too rich for food stamps while he rides to his son's game in a chopper----at taxpayer expense.
Wonder of wonders- how was that chopper able to fly ANYWHERE with that Jabba-the-hut creature inside of it? It must have cost a TON of money.
There is always plenty of money for the ruling class.
It is not important whether or not Sarah Palin gets the Paul Revere history correct. If she had good policies and a history of implementing them, she would have my support. (I agree that she does not, of course.)
“Even with conservatives cutting education budgets, every schoolchild who has paid even scant attention in history class knows that ‘the midnight message of Paul Revere’ was a warning to the rebels of what would become the United States that the British redcoats were on the march to disarm the dissenters.”
I’m confused; I thought that’s what Palin said.
Both Nichols and Palin make it seem that the threat from the British was to disarm the colonists. The reason for disarming them seems to have gotten lost. I thought it was because the British and the colonists were about to go to war about taxation without representation, not about whether the colonists could carry arms.
Sarah Palin is super sexy...that is the only important thing about her, and I don't see myself getting a chance to go to bed with her, so she's not relevant, to me...
What we think we know about American history is a huge part of our current problem...
America is but a continuation of ages-old European culture, and is ongoing, even now...
the Constitution was not created to enable you and I to affect government, it was created to prevent just such events, using a simple illusion...
they had already learned elsewhere what they perfected here, and the finding, an enormous, unclaimed continent loaded with game and resources and sparsely populated with friendly peoples of lower technology, could not have been better suited for their evil agenda...
We appear to be given the ability to choose our representatives through a regular voting cycle, although they actually control our choosing...
We are not given the ability to remove wayward representatives, other than the aforementioned voting cycle and choice, which, again, they control...
History is indoctrination meant to garner acceptance of the current order...a society based on the ownership of the planet surface, and all attendant things living and non...
So is religion...
Well I had to look it up, even though it was on wikipedia. Ms sara 'is' almost correct according to wikipedia only intentionally or not left out the one part she gushed on. Revere and his cohort were stopped by the british and revere did tell them there were revolutionaries ahead BUT
""Everything Revere told his British captors had a single goal, to move the soldiers away from Lexington, where he had left Hancock and Adams.""
So ms sara has some splaining to do. Like WHY revere told the british the revolutionary army was ahead. Yep, ms sara sure ought to move to texass where they love to cook up their own version of history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Revere
My self thought revere's part was small and minimal like telling Dawes it was time to ride. But being a bit of history cast in poetic prose, it is easy to think the real history is a poem by Longfellow.
For crying out loud , you would think she was a history teacher the way you CDers go on. It was an off the cuff remark. WHO CARES ??? The re-elect Obama crowd, that's who. THAT'S why this is even in the news.