Tour Guides are Vicious Liberals

He who warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and, um, making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that, uh, we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.

~ Sarah Palin on the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

Now the Boston Preacher that Gave Sarah a tutorial on Paul Revere spills the beans:

I had carefully set aside last Thursday to work on the sermon to be delivered at my 35th reunion at Hamilton College last weekend. Then the National Park Service called Wednesday afternoon inquiring whether we could open up early for a special visitor. No problem. We are a house of prayer for all people and we try to be hospitable to politicians of all stripes, whether or not we happen to agree with them.

…

I gave them our standard talk about Paul Revere and the two men who hung the lanterns in the steeple, Robert Newman and John Pulling. I added a bit about the debate between John Hancock and Sam Adams after they received the warning from Revere (Hancock: "Staying and fighting will look good on my resume when I run for president." Adams: "You are too rich to fight. Let's get out of here." Adams ultimately won that debate.) I did mention that Revere was arrested by British troops and led back to Lexington, warning those British troops that the minutemen had been alerted.

After the introductory talk, we climbed up to the bell ringing chamber, where I talked about how Paul Revere how founded our bell ringing guild in 1750 as a teenager. Governor Palin was particularly interested to see a copy of the original bell ringing contract between Paul Revere and his friends and the rector of Old North, Dr. Cutler. The contract portrays a group of teenagers using democratic principles to organize their bell ringing guild. We did not have the time to get to the top of the steeple to see the lanterns.

…

I was surprised and bemused when the video of Governor Palin's impromptu history quiz went viral the next day. I knew where all the factoids she cited came from and take responsibility for putting them in her head. I will not take the blame for the odd order those factoids came out. Perhaps it was too much information in too short a period of time to digest properly. Maybe if we climbed to the top of the steeple and viewed the lanterns, the governor wouldn't have focused on the bells. Who knows?

Reverend Stephen T. Ayres is vicar of the Old North Church, also known as Christ Church in Boston.

Didn’t Sarah study Communications and Journalism at those 5 colleges she burned through on way to her Bachelors Degree? I think she did, which makes the word salad prose she speaks in all that much more charming. But Poor Sarah really can’t admit to making a mistake.