Sarah Palin, scholar of esoteric Americana or just plain dense....You decide...

Sarah Palin Was Merely Referring to a More Esoteric Paul Revere Text

• 6/5/11 at 2:00 PM
 
• 80Comments

Photo: Getty Images

Earlier this week, Sarah Palin made one of her more memorable gaffes in recent memory, while recalling the classic story of Paul Revere: "He who warned, uh, the … the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and, um, ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots," she said, seeming to mix up who was warning whom about what. But on Fox News today, Palin said the lamestream media was quick to mock her, of course, without even realizing she had made no mistake at all:

“Part of his ride was to warn the British that we’re already there - that, ‘Hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have,’" Palin said. “He did warn the British.”

According to the Washington Post, Palin appears to be referring to a part of the story in which Revere is detained by the British and warns them, while at gunpoint, that 500 American militiamen await in Concord. That segment isn't in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, the layman's version of events, but is in fact described elsewhere in historical accounts. In any case, Palin's been repeatedly blending aspects of that story with the one in which Revere warns the Americans that the British are coming, but at least she recounts Revere's famous quote — "Hey, you’re not going to succeed!" — with 100% accuracy.