“In the year 1773 I was imployed by the Select men of the
Town of Boston to carry the Account of the Destruction of the
Tea to New-York; and afterwards, 1774, to Carry their dispatches to
New-York and Philadelphia for Calling a Congress; and afterwards to
Congress, several times. In the Fall of 1774 & Winter of 1775 I was
one of upwards of thirty, cheifly mechanics, who formed our selves in to a Committee
for the purpose of watching the Movements of the British Soldiers,
and gaining every intelegence of the movements of the Tories.”

http://www.masshist.org/database/img-viewer.php?item_id=99&mode=transcript

The letter shows that Revere was quite concerned about secrecy, and was nearly captured earlier.

For example this passage:
“I told them
of the ten officers that Mr. Devens mett, and that it was pro-
bable we might be stoped before we got to Concord; for
I supposed that after Night, they divided them selves, and that
two of them had fixed themselves in such passages as were
most likely to stop any intelegence going to Concord. I likewise mentioned, that we had better allarm all the In-
habitents till we got to Concord;”

Clearly, the intent was to inform the residents, without creating such a ruckus that the British would stop them.

See here: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/2011_0606you_betcha_she_was_right_experts_back_palins_historical_account/

From the article:
“In fact, Revere’s own account of the ride in a 1798 letter seems to back up Palin’s claim.”

“that’s pretty obviously not what Palin was referring to”

It’s not obvious to me what she was referring to. It looked like she was caught on the hop with a question and improvised an answer on the spur of the moment just to have something to say. She clearly hadn’t worked out what the end of the sentence was going to be when she started it.

When Paul Revere rode through the towns he was raising the alarm against the advancing British. Ringing church bells and gunshots were commonly used for the purpose. He warned the British that he had done so, in the hopes of making them more cautious. They were fighting for their liberties, and he was telling the British that they intended to fight.

The caption on the clip says “Paul Revere Warned The British LMAO!” and of course he did. But no doubt you’re not going to call out this terrible error of American history in the same way, are you?

Palin’s grammar comes out a bit scrambled – as unprepared speech often does – but it’s close enough. It was supposed to be something spontaneous and inspirational, not a prepared history lecture. (Not everyone gets to use a teleprompter all the time to avoid these sorts of problems.) It’s certainly not worth the fuss that was being made over it. This sort of thing is the equivalent of crowing over typos in blog comments.

Quite frankly, I doubt if anyone would have made such a distracting fuss if there hadn’t been a certain other ‘political gaffe’ story in the news…

#7,

“If history is being undermined in a way similar to how science is being undermined, then that is very much within our scope here.”

The same may be said of any subject on which you disagree with Republican politicians. So I take it that Discover Magazine is soon to become an unofficial outlet for the Democrat Presidential campaign?

Personal blogs can obviously do whatever they want, but I thought this one wasn’t?

#9,

“Right. So here’s a question…what historians are standing up against this stuff, and calling it out?”

I gave a link to some historians. Won’t those do?

#10,

“I clearly remember a certain person here once sniffing that if climate scientists got the right answer (on the error potential of station sites) via the wrong reasoning, they were still effectively wrong.”

In science, certainly. In other walks of life, yes, quite often. I definitely wouldn’t recommend taking the garbled pronouncements of politicians as a reliable guide to anything. But in this case I don’t know what her reasoning was.

What is the bigger story here? Palin getting minor facts out of whack, or the media completely mis-characterizing what she said?

TTT, Sarah Palin didn’t get either the right answer or use any kind of reasoning at all. She screwed up and now she’s trying to cover that ignorance up with even more ignorance and outright lies. Is this the type of person you want to defend?

But Palin is apparently in that person’s tribe, so she will not be held to the same standard. Or any standard. Truth is whatever pisses off liberals.