The Media Ride of Sarah Palin

Image via WikipediaThe Washington Times 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

About a political dustup over Paul Revere,

On the second of June in Twenty-eleven;

Hardly a liberal now alive, by heaven,

Won’t stop saying “Sarah Palin” with a sneer.

Sarah Palin’s impromptu, slightly rambling statement about Paul Reverelast week set off volleys of verbal musket fire from her many left-wing critics in the media. Touring Boston on Thursday, she gave a folksy account of Revere’s ride, saying he was one of the men who “warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, by ringin’ those bells and by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free.”

Revere warned the British? The tut-tutting was immediate. Reporters and commentators, having griped for days about being given insufficient courtesies on Mrs. Palin’s East Coast bus tour, had a field day. One if by land, two thousand by tweet.

It soon turned out, however, that Mrs. Palin’s version of history was correct. While Revere warned the Americans that the British were coming, he also warned the British - not for their benefit - that the Americans were coming. When Revere was detained by British soldiers during his ride, he told them, in his own words, “that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be 500 Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.” As for the bells and gunshots, David Hackett Fischer - in the 1994 book “Paul Revere’s Ride” - quotes a townsman saying that on that night, “repeated gunshots, the beating of drums and the ringing of bells filled the air.”

This was not the first time that Mrs. Palin was mistakenly taken to task by self-appointed history police. At an October 2010 Tea Party Express event in Reno, Nev., Mrs. Palin urged attendees to “party like it’s 1773.” PBS commentator Gwen Ifill and leftist busybody Markos Moulitsas launched tweets mocking the former GOP vice presidential nominee for her supposed “gaffe.” “She’s so smart,” Mr. Moulitsas wrote sarcastically. Well, smarter than him, since the Boston Tea Party occurred in December 1773.

Mrs. Palin is in good company. Ronald Reagan faced the same sniggering comments whenever he invoked inspirational examples from history. Of course, what the left is really snarking at is the notion that history even matters. Starting in the 1960s, the New Left movement rejected the past as having any relevance to the revolution they wanted to bring to this country. In their view, American history was simply a compendium of crimes committed by dead white males. When then-candidate Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform America,” he meant that to be taken literally. When Michelle Obama said in February 2008 that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country,” it was a genuine expression of the basic liberal attitude toward America and its history.

Tea Partyers and others who look to America’s past for inspiration are appealing to the great national narrative that the left has rejected. In essence, we have become two peoples: one with a vision of America as an exceptional country with a heroic history, and another believing the country and its people are burdened by a multitude of original sins and populated by groups who are owed continuing and endless debts because of that corrupt past.

If a nation doesn’t revere its history, doesn’t exalt its national story, doesn’t look with pride on its accomplishments and honor its heroes, it will not long survive. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous 1861 poem about Paul Revere sought to inculcate belief in America’s destiny. It closes with the lines, “In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear, The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.” Longfellow got several facts wrong in his epic poem, but like Mrs. Palin, he got the message right.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC.

Targeted by Default: Shifting Blame for the Giffords Shooting

Targeted by Default: Shifting Blame for the Giffords Shooting : America's Right
January 9, 2011 by Jeff Schreiber

I don’t know how they do it.

Time and time again, the left manages to pin these disgruntled, deranged individuals and their sick, twisted, bloody actions on the American right.   Despite being able to bring together millions of people from coast to coast with only one indiscretion–an idiotic redneck at a Rand Paul event who roughed up an aggressive political activist seeking access to the now-senator–the Tea Party is instantaneously blamed for the terrible happenings yesterday in Tucson, Arizona, where a congresswoman lay nearly dead and several others ended up not so lucky.

Despite being characterized by friends as “left-wing” and “quite liberal,” despite admitting to enjoying the works of Hitler, Marx and Engels as his favorite books, Jared Loughner was successfully painted as a product of right-wing political rhetoric, the physical manifestation of Sarah Palin’s “targeting” of vulnerable Democrats leading up to the previous election.

Before Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was even revealed to have survived the attack, folks at FireDogLake and the Daily Kos pinned the shooting on Sarah Palin, citing a “target map” circulated by her Political Action Committee in advance of last year’s mid-term elections.  Lefties across the Internet, quick to politicize the event before the bodies could even be counted, ignoring the fact that similar “target” lists were released by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Leadership Council, and ignoring the fact that Congresswoman Giffords had both participated in the controversial reading of the Constitution on the House floor this past week and voted against Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader, landing her in hot water with the lefternmost base of the Democratic Party.  (One entry by an author named “BoyBlue” at The Daily Kos, long since scrubbed, even went so far as to employ the headline “Congressman Giffords is now DEAD to me!!”)

In short, it doesn’t matter that a far-left Democrat shot a conservative Democrat in the head.  This was definitely the act of a Tea Party member and a product of Rush Limbaugh’s political rhetoric.

The same thing has happened before.

Partisanship on Display

Disgusting Partisanship on Display After Shooting

—Gabriel Malor

When the news broke yesterday that there was a shooting at an event for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the response for most was immediate: concern, prayers, and hope that the perpetrator is caught immediately and punished severely. Politics didn't matter in that moment; if someone shoots at one of our elected leaders, that person is an enemy of us all. The response for a few others was equally immediate: Sarah Palin.

This has become a recurring pattern for liberal commentators over the past few years. Something bad happens and somehow, without any evidence at all, it is Palin's fault and, more broadly, the Tea Party's. That was the first reaction of Markos Moulitsas and Matt Yglesias yesterday. It was widely taken up by the left side of the blogosphere who managed to convince themselves that Gabrielle Giffords had been shot on the express orders of Sarah Palin. Not kidding.

Remember, all this liberal posturing about Sarah Palin's gun rhetoric took place before we knew anything about the shooter. In fact, at that time we didn't even know how many shooters there were. Giffords had been reported dead, then alive, then unknown. For a while it was unclear whether she had been the target or the federal judge who was also killed. This uncertainty about the facts went on for most of the afternoon. But liberals kept a steady faith: this is all Sarah Palin's fault.