Not content with starring in her own "Will she or won't she?" presidential soap opera, Sarah Palin offered a revision of Paul Revere's famous midnight ride – one of the best-known events in Amewrican history – that both provoked and confounded her critics.
What was at worst a syntactic ambiguity on Palin's part during her bus tour last week became another instance of critics accusing her of historical ignorance, and her supporters just as insistently defending her from error – a battle that spilled over onto the historical event's Wikipedia entry.
He warned the British that they weren't going be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells, and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.
The British armed forces' mission was to seize arms belonging to the nascent rebels, so Palin's right in a general sense, although one assumes Revere and the other riders' primary aim was to warn the rebels and their leaders about the British military move.
As it happened, Revere also did warn the British military directly, when he was captured by British troops and interrogated at gunpoint. Revere told them what he had been doing and according to his own account warned them that 500 armed militia were waiting.
Here is what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming, the British were coming, and they were going to try take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn't take it.
But remember that the British had already been there, many soldiers for seven years in that area. And part of Paul Revere's ride – and it wasn't just one ride – he was a courier, he was a messenger. Part of his ride was to warn the British that we're already there. That, hey, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British.
So, Sarah Palin claimed that Paul Revere was a Revolutionary-era NRA member whose famous ride was for a British audience, to let them know Americans were going to win the war because they believed in gun rights.
Palin's aim – insofar as she had one – was to blow a dog-whistle for her supporters, turning the Revolutionary war into a tale about gun ownership. That's not historically inaccurate – it's the reason there is a second amendment defending the right to bear arms in the first place.
But her supporters couldn't resist trying to make history conform more closely to her version, by editing the Wikipedia entry covering Revere's ride. The rewriting was first spotted by the political website Little Green Footballs: "Man, you've gotta almost admire the sheer blind dedication of Sarah Palin's wingnut acolytes."
Official: What was the cause of the Civil War?
Official: Wait, wait. Just say slavery.