Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

As the 2012 presidential election cycle neared, speculation abounded that Palin might, after four years of Barack Obama, offer the nation a Return to Abnormalcy. Perhaps to signal that she was a new-and-improved Sarah Palin, vastly better informed than the one Katie Couric had eviscerated, she used a 2011 visit to a Revolutionary War site in Boston to retell the story of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride: “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.” Millions of schoolchildren who had learned that Revere’s mission was to warn the colonists that the British were, in fact, coming, were saddened to learn that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had lied to them. Revere’s actual mission, per Palin, was to warn the British to keep their hands off the colonists’ guns, which made him an eighteenth-century antecedent of NRA activists like Charlton Heston. Another detail of Palin’s account—the part about Revere “ringing those bells”—was of unknown origin.