In case you’ve been completely caught up in Anthony Weiner’s debacle, you might not have been paying attention to Sarah Palin’s latest evidence of a martyr complex.

She’s been rolling around in a bus and learning “history.” I put history in quotes because I’m not sure she realizes what history is, since it has to do with a lot of facts. (Also, I should have put learning in quotes, because I’m not entirely certain that she knows how to learn.)

If you heard Palin’s account and no one else’s, then her blinking, gaping rant about how Paul Revere was riding around the colonies to tell people that the British weren’t going to take our arms.

See, the British wanted this to be us.

Aside from the fact that Revere’s ride was a) warning people about the impending march of the British Army and b) largely beefed up and lied about by Washington Irving, this whole situation is worrying because Palin seems to think that the reporter was an agent of the sinister Shout-Out Gotcha Question Media.

After spending a lot of time losing enough IQ points to understand what she was talking about with her gibberish, I understood that she seemed to believe that reporters were coming out of the woodwork to catch her unprepared and make her seem stupid.

Okay, fair enough. But:

1. She was asked the question while in a huddled mass of admirers and reporters. It’s highly unlikely that she didn’t think there would be questions. Although, this is Palin, so she might have thought all of the questions would have been “Why are you so damn good at what you do?” or “Why do people make a big deal of the fact that you didn’t finish one term as governor?”
2. It wasn’t a “gotcha” (in human-speak, this translates to “difficult to answer”) question. The reporter asked her what she’d seen that day. That’s it. It’s like asking a child what they did at school. She could have said “I saw trees” and it would have been a correct answer. Instead, she tried to buddy up to her already-sycophantic Tea Party base with an incomprehensible answer to an easy, simple question.

So, Sarah, I’m going to help you out. I’m going to try and tell you what situations would qualify as “gotcha” situations and questions, because you seem to have severe difficulties in understanding the term you made up for yourself.

Continue reading →