The Midnight Ride

By now everyone's heard of Sarah Palin's claim that Paul Revere's ride was in part to warn the British that they were in for trouble from the colonists who would not allow them to confiscate their weapons. This assertion elicited delighted howls of derision from the Palin-obsessed quarters in the media, but it turns out that she was correct.

Here's her statement:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It turns out Ms Palin was right about this, and her critics have egg on their faces. Again. The Boston Herald solicited the opinion of historians on the matter, and here are some of the responses they received:

Boston University history professor Brendan McConville said, “Basically 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,’ and 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 said Revere was probably bluffing his British captors, but reluctantly conceded that it could be construed as Revere warning the British.

Cornell law professor William Jacobson, who asserted last week that Palin was correct, linking to Revere quotes on his conservative blog Legalinsurrection.com, said Palin’s critics are the ones in need of a history lesson. “It seems to be a historical fact that this happened,” he said. “A lot of the criticism is unfair and made by people who are themselves ignorant of history.”

The left is so eager to make fun of Palin that they ridicule her even when she's right. They can't help themselves any more than a cat can resist chasing the dot produced by a laser pointer. Like the cat chasing the laser dot, it's really quite entertaining to watch. It's also amusing that Palin would be derided for possibly misconstruing an arcane detail of American history while the liberal media said almost nothing about Mr. Obama's failure to recall something as elementary as the number of states in the union:

The point is not that Mr. Obama is ignorant, necessarily, but that if his mistake can be excused by citing the pressures of the campaign or whatever, why not extend the same benefit of the doubt to Ms Palin? It's pure meanness to make fun of her while giving Mr. Obama a pass, especially since hers is certainly less of a "gaffe" than his was.

Indeed, and I don't mean this to be unkind, I wonder if Mr. Obama would have even known who Paul Revere was. Most Americans learn about Revere, if they learn about him at all, in elementary school as part of basic American history. During his elementary years Mr. Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia which probably didn't have much in their curriculum about Paul Revere's ride, and so it wouldn't surprise me if he had never heard of the episode until he read about Ms Palin's explanation of it.

Too bad no one had the opportunity to ask him what he thought about it at the time.

Angry Liberals

At The Daily Beast a bunch of prominent liberals tell us why they're angry. Put simply their reasons boil down to this: The 50% of Americans who are carrying the other 50% on their backs are unwilling to hand them milkshakes to drink while they're enjoying their ride.

Taxes are too low on the "super rich" (However, even if the super rich were taxed at 100% of their income it wouldn't erase the deficit) and on corporations (our corporate tax rate is the 2nd highest in the world). The poor can't get loans (it was loans to people who couldn't pay them back that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), gas prices are going up (despite vast reserves of petroleum and natural gas accessible to us in our own country), and kids are not getting nutritious food at school (niggardly taxpayers are unwilling to pay for higher quality food for our kids. Of course, there's no reason why their parents couldn't pack their lunches at home.). Moreover, people are not making the connection between storms, floods, and fires to global climate change (could that be because no connection has been empirically demonstrated? Or could it be that if there is a connection we've been told that there's nothing we can do about it anyway?).

None of these people seem concerned about the degradation of the culture, the collapse of the family, the flood of illegal immigration across our borders, the threat to world peace posed by radical Islamists, government policies which make it very difficult for small business to hire and thrive, rising unemployment, the national debt, and a host of other matters far more pressing than school cafeteria food, climate change, and whether the top 1% of American earners should contribute 38% of total tax revenue or whether we should make them contribute 40%.

The fact is that angry liberals are just impatient socialists. Nothing short of government control of our economy in this country will salve their anger and even then I doubt whether they'd be content until the federal government controls not only the economy but every other aspect of our lives as well.