Hear the audio version here (segments older than 3 weeks may be unavailable)
Last week, I commented on the Kokomo Tribune's Left Eye feature, which offered a tongue-in-cheek history quiz for readers. Of course, the quiz was really a shot at conservative politicians for perceived "errors" in recalling historical facts (yes, Joe Biden was the token liberal they chose to include, primarily because Joe gets a total pass from the media despite having more gaffes in one campaign than Dan Quayle had in four years).
It's about carrying forth the template that conservatives are idiots while liberals are intelligent. And so even in fun little quiz games, that template is carried forth. Notice that you didn't see Barack Obama and his reference to military "corpse-men" or that he sees dead people, or his reference to 57 states, or his statement that we need to give kids with Asthma a breathalyzer.
Nonetheless, I commented about the bogus nature of many of the Left Eye's set-up questions here, as I laid forth a pre-emptive strike on their promised "answers" coming this week.
Apparently reeling from the blow, the Left Eye chose to tuck the answers to the quiz away at the bottom of this week's column without much additional comment. They did ignore the college professors who have correctly pointed out that Sarah Palin wasn't technically wrong when she said what she did about Paul Revere. Whatever. Getting media writers, especially those who have a fairly obvious disdain for conservative politicians anyway, to ever give Sarah Palin the benefit of the doubt is more than we can hope for I suppose.
In addition, it was nice to see that my correction of Glenn Beck's name made it into this week's edition. They left the response to his "question" a pretty benign statement: "Conservatives didn't start the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s."
But most interesting of all was the "answer" to their original misquoting of Michele Bachmann's statement regarding the Founding Fathers and slavery. Remember, Bachmann had actually said that many of our Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to see slavery ended. That statement, of course, is true. Many of them did. The Left Eye, in their anxiousness to mock a high profile woman for her ignorance (wonder what that's about?), actually misquoted her, alleging that she said the Founders ended slavery. Probably time to expand the newsgathering beyond Hardball with Chris Matthews, guys.
Anyway, in their answer this week, the Left Eye writers actually wrote, "the slaves were freed when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War." Uh...really? I bet the southern slaves who were kept in bondage after that Proclamation would be interested to know that.
This is about as fitting an end to the Left Eye's little attempt to mock high profile conservatives for their ignorance of history as you could ask for. The Emancipation Proclamation, with as eloquent and politically devastating to the south as it might have been, freed no slaves. Slaves were freed with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that came at the conclusion of the Civil War.
Remember the opening of this "quiz" a week ago? The Left Eye writers penned:
People who should know better have a way of rewriting history to reflect their point of view - or are simply ignorant of our nation's glorious past.
I think the operative word here..."backfire."
