Don’t know much about history
By The latest edition of the Palin Follies is a report that a so-far unaired portion of the Couric interview reveals that she is apparently unable to name any Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade.
Obviously being next in line for the presidency doesn’t require that one be a Jeopardy trivia champ, but on the other hand people need to keep in mind that we humans don’t come with pre-loaded software or anything.
If you’ve spent you’re whole life in a small town in a sparsely populated and very isolated part of the world, with the exception of the six years you spent messing around at five colleges, (by the way the media have remained studiously uninterested in the details of her curious academic wanderings — was she, for instance, getting kicked out of schools for poor performance?), and you can’t answer the most straightfoward interview questions without conjuring up phrases like “train wreck” and “verbal salad” even among some of your political allies, then there’s no particular reason why anyone should assume you know much of anything at all pertaining to the wide world beyond the borders of Wasilla Alaska.
I suspect the depth of Palin’s ignorance can be compared to a well in which you toss a rock, and then wait for it to hit the bottom, and then you wait, and you wait . . . and you start to wonder if the thing goes all the way to China, and finally many seconds later there’s an incredibly distant, barely audible plunk.
Does she know what the Bill of Rights is, or the Louisiana Purchase? Can she identify where the phrase “four score and seven years ago” comes from? Does she remember the Maine? The League of Nations? The New Deal? Seriously, I’d like to hear her describe what the Vietnam war was about, or for that matter Watergate or the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
And somebody who doesn’t know anything about history isn’t going to know — indeed in a crucial sense can’t know — anything about current events, which after all can only be understood properly within a sufficiently rich historical context.
Oh it’s all morbidly fascinating, until somebody gets hurt.