Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
A splitter, a splatter, all over the street,
And a fifty-yard dash to the toilet seat.
My father’s variation:
One if by land,
Two if by sea.
We cut off the beer
'Cause you said you saw three.
Well, neither version makes any less sense than Palin’s.
He was apprehended and apparently beaten by the British after he warned John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Revere “alarmed almost every house” on the way to Lexington.
I don’t think that woman understands even the fundamentals of American history. I can just imagine Paul Revere warning the British not to take arms off the Americans:
Paul Revere: I’m warning you, don’t take arms off us Americans!
British officer: So, Mr Revere, what will happen if we take away your arms?
PR: We’ll rebel against you, that’s what.
BO: I thought you were trying to rebel against us.
PR: Just don’t take away our arms!
BO: But won’t it be harder to rebel without arms? What are you going to use, pitchforks against our muskets?
Not a strategy that would work nowadays, of course – we British have long since overcome our fear of fresh fruit. Even the Scots can manage either of those, provided they have sufficient supplies of batter and hot oil.
This is what’s really scary. Not that Sarah Palin is an idiot. It’s that other people will try to spin reality to make it agree with whatever she said.
Palin says refudiate but it’s okay because it’s a neologism. Palin refers to North Korea as our ally but it’s okay because she corrected herself (she didn’t actually, it was the interviewer who suggested to her that she meant South Korea).
I think the broader issue is the significance of these mistakes. Palin complains that when she makes a verbal gaffe, it gets lots of media publicity and when somebody else makes a similar mistake, it mostly gets ignored.
In my opinion, the difference is that Palin’s spoken mistakes are indicative of a much deeper general ignorance. Sure it was no major issue that she called North Korea our ally instead of South Korea. But foreign policy advisors who worked with Palin during the 2008 campaign have said that she was essentially ignorant of the situation in Korea, going back to why there are two Koreas.
Palin never said that she could see Russia from her backyard. She said parts of Russia could be seen by parts of Alaska, which is correct. But here’s the full transcript of the interview with Charles Gibson:
The comment about seeing Russia from Alaska got a lot of press. So it was raised again a few days later at an interview with Katie Couric:
Now the issue isn’t really about whether or not Alaska is close to Russia. It is and Palin got that right.
The issue is does Palin have any experience in foreign policy? Gibson and Couric weren’t asking Palin about geography. They were asking her about foreign policy and she offered up the proximity of Alaska and Russia as a sign of her experience. And both reporters pressed the point and asked what relevance it had to her foreign policy credentials.
“The day after the Battle of Lexington, I came across met him in Cambridge, when He shew me some blood on his stocking, which he said spirted on him from a Man who was killed near him, as he was urging the Militia on.”
Let’s hope Sarah Palin doesn’t come across this account of Revere’s, or she’ll start telling us that Curt Schilling signed the Declaration of Independence and that we owe our freedom to the Boston Red Sox.
Asking what Paul Revere is known for is a ‘gotcha question’? :rolleyes: Suppose someone shouted out, ‘Hey, Sarah! What’s your name?’ and she flubs it because she wasn’t expecting it. Would that be a ‘gotcha question’ too? I don’t know, nor have I heard of one single person in the United States – other than Sara Palin – who couldn’t at least say that Paul Revere road his horse and shouted ‘The British are coming!’* to warn the Colonists that, well, the British were coming.
*To which British soldiers, boffing willing maids, said ‘How the bloody hell did he know?’