If there is one thing we can say for sure about Sarah Palin, it's that little things called facts simply do not get in her way. If you don't believe me, perhaps I can interest you in a bridge up in Ketchikan, Alaska.
I know this is not a matter of public policy or great importance, but Sarah Palin's comments about how long she has been hearing Joe Biden's speeches just really bug me. The simple fact is that she is saying something obviously untrue, that she knows is untrue. There is a word for a person who does that:
Liar.
On Monday in Ohio, Gov. Palin said
the following:
"I do look forward to Thursday night and debating Sen. Joe Biden," Palin said while introducing John McCain at a rally here. "We are going to talk about those new ideas, new energy for America. I'm looking forward to meeting him too. I've never met him before. But I've been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, second grade."
Here's the problem, as CNN obliquely hinted in its report. Sarah Palin was born on February 11, 1964. She graduated from high school in 1982. Which means she was in second grade in the 1971-1972 school year.
Joe Biden was not elected to the Senate until November 1972, and took office as a U.S. Senator on January 3, 1973, when Sarah Palin was in third grade.
Okay, you say, so she couldn't have heard about his Senate speeches until she was in third grade, not second. Not a huge deal. But wait a minute. How many political speeches can you honestly remember hearing about at any point in elementary school, much less second grade?
Or even, if you interpret her statement more loosely as just being that she heard about Joe Biden the politician, is even that statement remotely plausible? Biden was an inexperienced, first-term Senator from a tiny state thousands of miles away from Wasilla, where Palin went to elementary school. By all accounts in his first years in the Senate he was still emotionally recovering from the deaths of his wife and daughter; he was just going through the motions and left little or no impression. Certainly there is no record of him giving any speeches that gained national attention until at least 1987, when he presided over the Robert Bork confirmation hearings and began his first run for President.
In other words, Sarah Palin's statement that she's been hearing about Biden's Senate speeches since she was in second grade is pure fabrication. When I was in second grade, I had never heard of any political speeches, not even "I Have a Dream" or JFK's inaugural address. Quite frankly, if you asked Sarah Palin even today I'm sure she could not identify a single "Senate speech" Joe Biden has ever given.
The statement was obviously cooked up by some campaign strategist to contrast Palin's youth with Biden's age and experience (a little bizarre given the attempt her running mate constantly makes to suggest Barack Obama is unqualified because he is inexperienced). They wanted to lower Palin's already comically low expectations for tomorrow night's debate by suggesting that Biden, with his decades in the Senate, is the most skilled orator since Cicero, or at least since John Kerry.
So somebody tried to calculate what grade Palin was in when Biden took office in the Senate. They miscalculated it as second grade, when it was actually third.
But she couldn't just say, "Joe Biden's been giving powerful speeches in the Senate since I was in third grade." That would have been an acceptable argument, even though as I said above I'm sure Palin has no idea the quality of any of Biden's Senate speeches.
No, she had to make it into a patently false statement -- that she has been hearing about his Senate speeches since she was in second grade.
I'd love to see Gwen Ifill ask her about that. "Governor Palin, you said that you've been hearing about Joe Biden's Senate speeches since you were in second grade. What speeches of his did you hear about then?"
I think we would definitely get a deer in the headlights moment.
I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee