We cats are fascinated that although Congressman Anthony Weiner's Twitter pictures completely wiped out Rick Santorum's Presidential declaration yesterday, they failed to push the infamous quitter from Alaska's Paul Revere embarrassment out of the headlines. Perhaps that's the flip side of being Sarah Palin: Yes, you get Diana-like media coverage every time you hop on a bus. You also get Diana-like media coverage every time you crash in a verbal Mercedes.
But the let's-change-Wikipedia-to-help-Palin story is alarming. Not only because we cats fear that many students get their information from that untrustworthy site, but because the pro-Palin Wiki antics so neatly fall into the Republicans' pattern of rewriting history to suit their whitewashed vision of America.
In the GOP's bizarre world, thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy. Evolution and climate change are fables, and creationism is solid, scientific fact. Life in Jim Crow Mississippi was "not that bad." The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and never raised taxes. George Washington worked the fields of Mount Vernon all by himself. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And, of course, Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen.
Sarah Palin's latest idiocy — on which she has, true to character, doubled down — is of a piece not just with the teabaggers' promotion of home schooling and the Republican attack on public education, but also with the comically inaccurate schoolbooks authorized by the highly politicized textbook boards in Virginia and Texas. As well as the right-wing ostriches who serve on boards of education in states like Pennsylvania and Kansas.
"Is our children learning?" Unfortunately, we cats think not.
(IMAGE: That is Paul Revere.... isn't it?)
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