The Midnight Ride of Sarah Palin

Being a man who has made a meager living writing revisionist history in my award-winning American History series--a series no less an authority than my wife refers to as "that stupid shit you write"--I know a thing or two about making up stupid shit. But unlike some of the people who make up stupid shit, I have no designs on governing. I make up stupid shit merely as a form of entertainment because that's what I do best.

Unless you've been living on another planet--Arizona, for instance--you've probably heard all about Sarah Palin's "One Nation Tour"--a bus journey through parts of our great nation designed to keep in the consciousness of "real Americans" the nuttiest mainstream political candidate we have known since, well, since Sarah Palin ran for vice president in 2008. Those of us amused by the words and actions of the woman who quit her job as governor of Alaska so that she could devote more time to her comedy career fervently hope Sarah's tour is just a prelude to an announcement of a 2012 drive for the highest office in the land.

The lady who never passes up a chance to bash our education system and those who dare to teach such elitist liberal concepts as evolution, global warming and contraception has proudly told Americans that she teaches her kids abstinence. And we all know how well Sarah's lessons of abstinence worked on that dancing reality TV star daughter of hers. At the ripe old age of 17, Bristol Palin popped out one of God's little miracles, and unless this conception was immaculate, Bristol didn't abstain. Nor did she and her lover use any kind of that evil, immoral birth control stuff Bristol's mommy believes turns nice teenage girls into sluts and reasonable people believe keeps nice teenage girls from being teen moms. Oops.

As one of those elitist Americans who were raised to buy into all that made up liberal, commie shit they teach in public schools like "sex education," "arithmetic," and--God help us--"science," I was also duped into believing my history teachers were telling me the truth about the origins of our nation. But now Sarah has shown me my teachers were wrong on at least one count.

Thanks to John McCain, we've known for nearly three years now that Sarah--a former beauty queen--has a grasp of American history somewhere on the same level of, oh, say your average beauty queen. Never was that more evident than the day Palin's current bus tour stopped at the Boston home of American patriot Paul Revere. Never one to disappoint, Sarah gave us some of her best dumb beauty queen stuff with this little piece of revisionist history:

He [Revere] who warned, uh, the... the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringin' those bells and, um, by makin' sure that as he's ridin' his horse through town to send those warnin' shots and bells that, uh, we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free... and we were gonna be armed.

This from the woman we Americans entrusted with the important Paul Revere-like task of keeping an eye on those shifty Russians. All the while we thought we were safe from a possible Russian invasion, was Sarah actually sitting on her porch ringin' warnin' bells to the bad guys?

As most grade school kids could have told Sarah, Revere's job was to ride a horse from Boston to Lexington and give warning of when and how the British were invading--"one [lantern] if by land; two if by sea." There were no "warnin' shots" and he sure as hell did not alert the British "by ringin' those bells." In fact such a treasonous act probably wouldn't have put Paul Revere high on the list of American heroes.

Despite not having a clue about Revere's place in American history--or anything else for that matter--Palin and her followers fail to see the irony in her touring the country in a bus patriotically decorated with words like "We the People" and "One Nation."

What that bus really needs is some warnin' bells.