Sorry Tea Baggers, Washington and Franklin Opposed the Boston Tea Party
In Boston on her non-campaign tour of historic sites last week, Sarah Palin mangled the facts about the midnight ride of Paul Revere. As any school child knows, Revere rode out from Boston toward Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming for them. In Palin’s version, Revere was “ridin’ his horse through town” sending “warnin’ shots and bells” to warn the British that Americans love guns.
Earlier this year, Palin’s doppelganger, Rep. Michele Bachmann, misspoke in front of a New Hampshire audience, asserting that the battle of Lexington, which occurred subsequent to Revere’s ride, had happened in their state, not Massachusetts.
Even worse, campaigning for the presidency in Iowa back in January, Bachmann asserted that the Founding Fathers had ended slavery. She specifically cited the role of John Quincy Adams in freeing the slaves. She was apparently unaware that JQA was not a Founder and that slavery ended in the mid-1860s, long after he and his father’s generation had shuffled off this mortal coil.
Based on a new history of the Boston Tea Party — “American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution,” by historian Harlow Unger — if facts mattered to Palin, Bachmann and their tea bagger followers, they probably would have chosen another revolutionary era movement as a model:
