SARAH SNAPS BACK – AT 11:11 A.M. ET:  One thing about Sarah Palin, she's learned how to snap back at the media, and we mightily applaud her.

You may have seen, in the last few days, a media tsunami against Sarah, launched by a column in the Washington Post, tut tutting her about a "mistake" she allegedly made in describing the role of Paul Revere in the American revolution.  Smug journalists laughed when Sarah said that Revere had warned the British about events to come.  Why, every American schoolkid knows that she warned the colonists. Didn't he?  Uh...  From The Politico:

After a week on the road visiting national monuments and historical sites, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin repeated her claim Sunday that Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere had warned the British that they weren’t going to take firearms away from Americans.

“I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere,” Palin told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace when asked about her gaffe made last week while her “One Nation” bus tour stopped in Boston.

Note, please, that The Politico casually repeats the "fact" that she committed a gaffe. 

“He warned the Americans that the British were coming, the British were coming, that we‘ve got to make sure we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of our ammunitions and firearms so that they couldn’t take it,” Palin said.

“But remember, the British had already been there 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 – was to warn the British who were already there, that you’re not going to succeed, you’re not going to take American arms, you’re not going to be your own well-armed person’s private militia that we are going to have. He did warn the British.

“In a shout-out, gotcha type of question that was asked of me, I answered candidly and I know my American history,” she added.

COMMENT:  It may be an uncommon take on the Revolution, but Sarah is fundamentally correct, and the press is fundamentally wrong.

But don't expect any corrections.  The media loves to correct minor mistakes.  If it gets someone's middle initial wrong, it rushes to correct it, the better to show integrity, conscience, goodness and godliness.  But if it gets something seriously wrong, like the reporting of the Vietnam War, the media "stands by our story."  It adopts its "narrative" and protects it.  Careers are involved.  Prizes are involved.  The truth is what we make it.

Look, I don't think Sarah Palin is a great expert on American history.  But the double standard by which she's judged is a media scandal.   Barack Obama can make one mistake after another, and the press never calls him out.  He can commit gaffes – like saying that they speak Austrian in Austria, when in fact they speak German.  No one cares.  Why?  Because he's Barack, and he's so smart, and he went to the right schools. 

Our press is far more embarrassing than anything Sarah Palin ever said.

June 5, 2011