Remember when Tina Fey used to play Sarah Palin on SNL? I was not a McCain/Palin supporter, but often found myself in the uncomfortable position of defending he

Remember when Tina Fey used to play Sarah Palin on SNL? I was not a McCain/Palin supporter, but often found myself in the uncomfortable position of defending her against those skits. Probably a dozen people I knew or met thought that Sarah Palin actually believed she could "see Russia from her house", as the famous line went[1]. What Palin had actually said in an ABC interview was, "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."[2] I would have been game to criticize her actual statement, a fairly empty argument that she somehow had foreign policy experience. But no --- good friends of mine actually believed this was a real statement. No amount of Googling could fix this problem, as I would then face the criticism that I was "getting information from the internet". I want to like political satire, but every time I watch/read it I think back to the dozens of instances like this one where I have felt like an outsider simply for arguing that something on a comedy show was not actually real, and we should only debate things that were really said or happened. [1] https://youtu.be/vSOLz1YBFG0?t=78 https://youtu.be/vSOLz1YBFG0?t=78 [2] http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/09/26/palin_defends_remark_on_russia/ http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/09/26/pa...