Palin speaking: Who is how gullible?

The press made much of the recent sniping in the McCain campaign and the attempts by some McCain loyalists not only to criticize Sarah Palin's political and common sense, but even to portray her as positively cretinous. The kicker was the assertion that she did not know that Africa was a continent rather than a country, which should have seemed preposterous even to the most hardened but still rational liberal--or would have, had not Palin, in attempting to defend herself, given an answer so opaque or clumsy as to suggest that there was something to it:

if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context,” Ms. Palin said. “And that’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right.”

"the country"? Maybe she meant South Africa, though that's still wrong and incredibly stupid.  And she sure didn't help herself when she fell for a Canadian prank call purporting to be from the President of France.

Anyway, I always thought it sounded too good to be true--akin to the stories about Dan Quayle asserting that people in Latin America spoke Latin; that began as a joke and became an urban legend.

Now the New York Times reports the truth behind the Palin story. The accusations were attributed to one Martin Eisenstadt, on the staff of the McCain campaign:

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

Eternal vigilance is the price of not getting yourself into really embarrassing situations.