She gets it right,
You betcha
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Sarah Palin is the hottest act in town, and the
critics can only grind their teeth. She’s playing
the media like a violin, though the likes of Chris
Matthews and Maureen Dowd look more like bass
fiddles.
Her “secret” bus tour of America is a secret so
closely held that she travels in a Greyhound-sized
monster decorated with her name and an American flag
the size of a barn. The lady who was mocked by the
wisenheimers for saying she could see Russia from
her backyard in Alaska now sees revenge through the
windshield of her bus.
The media’s Gaffe Patrol, ever on the scout for
mistakes, errors, blunders, slips of the tongue and
other erratum the patrollers think they see in our
pols, pounced on the lady the other day in Boston
for “mangling” the story of the midnight ride of
Paul Revere. She had recounted the story that Paul
Revere warned the British when every man riding in
the press caravan was sure it wasn’t the British he
warned, but patriots.
The media’s Gaffe Patrol pounced on Mrs. Palin for
“mangling” the story of the midnight ride of Paul
Revere.
The great media ha-ha chorus jeered Miss Sarah for
days. She felt the need to try to explain. “Part of
his ride,” she told Fox News on Sunday, “was to warn
the British who were already there. ‘That, hey!
You’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to
take American arms.’”
This makes perfect sense to the Americans she speaks
to, but to the press claque this was only further
proof that Miss Sarah was the usual Republican
moron. She obviously hadn’t mastered American
history in elementary school—indeed, she didn’t even
get her diploma in the Ivy League.
Only now it turns out that she was right about Paul
Revere’s midnight ride and the press claque was
wrong. Even the professors say so, though they’re
grudging to the point of churlishness. “Basically,”
says Brendan McConville, a history professor at
Boston University, “when Paul Revere was stopped by
the British, he did say to them, ‘Look, there is a
mobilization going on that you’ll be confronting.’”
Revere, an honest tradesman, probably didn’t
employ “professor-speak” in the heat of the moment,
with words like “mobilization” and “confronting,”
but we can take the point. In the account of the
most famous midnight ride in American history, the
professor says, “the British are aware as they’re
marching down the countryside they hear church bells
ringing—she was right about that—and warning shots
being fired. That’s accurate.”
Patrick Leehey of the Paul Revere House in Boston
says the midnight rider was probably bluffing his
Redcoat captors, so maybe it could be construed that
Revere was in fact warning the British. “But I don’t
know if that’s really what Mrs. Palin was referring
to.” Prof. McConville was even less gracious
conceding that Mrs. Palin had got it right. He
wouldn’t concede that her remarks were based on
scholarship. No Ph.D, no tenure for her. “I would
call her lucky in her comments.” The rest of us
would call her correct, but that’s just how
professors think. Though not all. “It seems to be a
historical fact that it happened [her way],” says
William Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell. “A lot
of the criticism [of Sarah Palin] is unfair and made
by people who are themselves ignorant of history.”
Nobody knows exactly what Mrs. Palin is up to; the
smart money, which is often wrong, says she isn’t
actually running for president, that she’s only
having a little fun teasing the liberals who wet
their pants at the mere mention of her name. Too bad
if she doesn’t run, because she’s by far the most
entertaining politician on the scene. The media
story line is that she’s not smart enough to be
president, that her “mangling” of history proves it.
But from the looks of the chaos that Barack Obama
has made of the economy, she apparently knows more
about history than the president knows about
economics (and the concerns of the people in Mr.
Obama’s “57 states”).
Sarah Palin has hardly been scratched by the shot
and shell showered on her since she streaked like a
rocket across the landscape three years ago. She has
a gift for feeling the love and expressing the
enthusiasm Americans feel in their bones for their
God and their country. For all his cool dispassion
and occasional eloquence, it’s a gift the president
doesn’t have.