CHRIS WALLACE: I gotta ask you about that real quickly, though. You realize that you messed up about Paul Revere, don’t you?
PALIN: You know what?
I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere. Here’s what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that “the British were coming, the British were coming.” And they were going to try to take our arms so got to make sure that, uh, we were protecting ourselves and, uhm, shoring up all of our ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn’t take them.
At one point in the night,
Revere was temporarily detained and interrogated by British soldiers at a roadblock. He intentionally provided them a falsely inflated description of the colonial militia’s strength, though only in the most strained metaphorical reading could this be considered a “warning.”
Furthermore — again due to the need for secrecy and stealth —
Revere used no bells or warning shots, and delivered his message in face-to-face contacts throughout the night. (Palin seems to simply forget her inclusion of the bells and warning shots in her initial recounting.) Revere did instruct Robert Newman to hang lanterns in the Old North Church steeple as a signal to spread the word, but Palin omitted that aspect of the ride entirely. Which is especially curious, given that the lanterns were immortalized by the line “one if by land, two if by sea” in the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
the rest:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/05/236840/palin-doubles-down-on-paul-revere-history-lesson-i-didnt-mess-up/