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

by Andy Borowitz

To many, Palin remains a joke, because when they think of her they’re thinking of Tina Fey’s impersonation. The comedian’s mockery dogged Palin: At Target, a shopper trolled her by yelling, “Oh my God! It’s Tina Fey! I love Tina Fey!” (Other customers were amused; Palin left the store in a huff and drove off.) Fey’s imitation became so iconic that, to this day, many people believe that Palin said, “I can see Russia from my house,” when in fact she never said anything so concise. It was McCain, not Palin, who first made the laughable claim that Alaska’s proximity to Russia somehow prepared her to be commander in chief. Though she later concurred, in an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, what she told Gibson was technically true: from Alaska’s Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait, you can see Vladimir Putin’s homeland. But, as we learned from the story about Al Gore inventing the internet, in the Information Age jokes travel faster than information.