Turtle Talk

From gawker (H/T to E.D.):

Another Day, Another Palin Gaffe

Today the Rogue has been caught nabbing a quote from quotefarm.com. What she thought was a pithy statement from UCLA basketball legend John Wooden was actually by a native American activist called John Wooden Legs and about killing soldiers.

Geoffrey Dunn at theHuffington Post points out that the epigram to chapter three, “Drill, Baby Drill” attributes the following quote to coach Wooden:

Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it—with their lives.

The only problem is that the quote was not by Wooden, it was by Wooden Legs. It appeared in an essay called Back on the War Ponies, part of a left-wing anthology. Here’s the extract:

Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it—with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated General Custer at the Little Big Horn.

Which makes it more like Kill Baby, Kill. Dunn thinks the only way the error could have been made is if Palin or her ghostwriter had grabbed it from quotefarm.com, where it is mis-attributed in the same way. This casts doubt on whether quotes from Plato and Aristotle in Going Rogue are from Palin’s own close reading of the texts.