Why I love the progressive blogosphere

There's lots I'd love to say about Gov. Palin and the debate, but I'm too busy at work right now to go into it in much detail. But I did want to offer this up right away.

From Jonathan Chait at the usually-mediocre New Republic:

Palin's final quote was from Ronald Reagan, warning that without vigilance, "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

In fact, Reagan was not warning about a general lack of vigilance about freedom, he was warning what would happen if Medicare was enacted.

I don't know how much the right still goes around predicting that the progressive blogosphere will be the death knell of the Democratic party, by way of pulling it too far to the left or creating an echo chamber or whatever...my guess is it's still pretty common. But Palin's misrepresentation of Reagan is exactly the sort of thing they used to get away with all the time (in fact, Reagan more or less built his career on such intellectual dishonesty). Her fans will still believe what they want to believe, but those of us who are interested in the truth can now set the record straight next time we hear people reciting the soundbite in line at the supermarket.

Incidentally, I don't think Palin was lying. I think, like most Reagan-worshippers, she doesn't know much of anything about the truth of his record. It's all too common on the right - when they want to drum up support for a particular point of view, they just say "that's the way Reagan saw it" and there's no further need for discussion. The issue of whether or not he really would have supported the issue in question doesn't matter at all (and, often as not, isn't really answerable anyway since his record is so convoluted and inconsistent, and he spent so much time lying about his own past). In any case, this article has the truth about that quote and what he really was getting at.