"Syntactic Linguini."

Mark Shea views Sarah Palin as having gotten lucky on the "Paul Revere warned the British" issue:

Palin Throws Racket, Accidently Gets Ball over Net

Proclaimed a genius at tennis by adoring fans.

I have no doubt at all that Palin was *totally* well-read in the minutiae of American Revolution lore and absolutely had this obscure 1798 letter in mind when she was babbling her syntactic linguini last week. This isn't any kind of after-the-fact attempt to patch up an illiterate gaffe or anything. I look forward to her teaming up with Newt Gingrich to deliver her erudite lectures on American history.

"Babbling syntactic linguini" seems like a fair characterization of the comment that Palin made, but, then, not everyone talks in coherent sentences and paragraphs under such casual circumstances.

Likwise, my feeling was that Palin started with the idea of "warning" which mentioned the British and then had to stretched into a warning of existential disaster. Her recitation of Paul Rever's ride was obviously wobbling badly, since most people aren't going to view the gist of Revere's importance to be the warning he gave the British.

On the other hand, Biden can't open up his mouth without shooting himself in the foot and insulting random ethnic groups.  Gore had a regular pattern of showing the oddest ignorance such as when he asked who "those guys" were in George Washington's house and he was referring to a bust of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Likewise, a media that couldn't bring itself to mention Obama's "57 states" gaffe, shouldn't be setting the standards of improptu coherence. Of course, those worthies were and are given a pass on their malapropisms.

These things happen, and pace "sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander," when the one-sided gotcha game of the media backfires, then we ought to fairly delight in the media's discomfort.

However, that's only because my disgust for the political class pales before my disgust for the media.  If I was to focus only on our political class, I would agree with Shea's obsertions as follows:

The great groove she's got going is that she can literally do no wrong with her adorers. If she bails on her responsibility as governor to chase after riches and celebrity, it's because the media was too mean. If she runs for President, it's because she has the courage to Face the Heat (though "facing the heat" means "only allowing her image to be channeled through propaganda organs" rather like Obama). If she says something stupid, it's because she's a Woman of the People who isn't beholden to those Pointy-Headed Intellectuals and their Book Learnin' because she has the pulse of Real America. If she's accidently kinda sorta right by dumb luck, then that's because she's actually the True Scholar of American History and the pointy heads don't know anything about real American History. Wondrous.


And yet another indictment of the bankruptcy of our political culture.

Pretty much.