FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

Sarah Palin tried to shame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Here's how that went.

Sarah Palin tried to shame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Here's how that went.

Sarah Palin, who once couldn’t answer a third-grader’s question about what exactly the vice president does, tried to shame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over a verbal gaffe, and it’s coming back to bite her.

In video from a conference call posted online, Palin was among AOC critics attempting to shame the House representative-elect after she mistakenly referred to the three bodies of U.S. government as the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Palin, who's gotten into conservative content farming after her failed 2008 veep bid alongside John McCain, shared a link to a blog post from her website about Ocasio-Cortez’s slip-up.

Advertisement

The New York Democratic socialist dismissed the attacks against her and said that Republicans were targeting a mistake of vocabulary to distract from actual issues.

Then Ocasio-Cortez’s supporters found Palin’s tweet. Palin was ratioed immediately with commenters noting that the ex-governor of Alaska has a far more extensive history of public gaffes.

Many highlighted that Palin infamously told Katie Couric in a 2008 interview that she reads newspapers.

“I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media,” Palin said. When pressed by Couric to specify which newspapers, Palin answered, “All of them, any of them that have been in front of me over the years. … I have a vast variety of sources.”

Others pointed out that Palin once mistakenly said that the U.S. had to “stand with our North Korean allies.” And then there was the time when she was unable to accurately answer what a vice president does.

Here are a few other times Palin tripped over her words:

  • She referred to Afghanistan as “our neighboring country.”

  • She said this: “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

  • She said New Hampshire, which is in New England, was a part of the “Great Northwest.”

  • She told Bill O’Reilly that the Constitution was “clearly” based on the Bible.

  • She said the vice president “can get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes,” even though the Constitution says the VP “shall have no vote.”

  • She mistakenly said Paul Revere warned the British that “uh, they weren’t going to be taking away our arms.” (Paul Revere famously warned colonists that the British army was marching toward them.)

Cover: In this May 2, 2011, file photo, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin waves during a fundraiser at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, Colo. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)