Once upon a time John McCain was running for President. Since he wasn’t gonna win anyway he figured what the hell and chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Might as well get a good laugh out of it. Nor did Sarah disappoint. Indeed, she continues to this day not to disappoint. To be sure, Sarah was not the first national pol not to give a fig for facts. Ronald Reagan had scant use for them before her, what with his confusion over trees and cars and the whole voodoo economics thing. He was followed of course by W and Cheney and the neocons. Fact shunners all. But can there be any argument when I say Sarah has earned a place of prominence in that celebrated pantheon? Since her appearance on the national scene she has shown herself a seemingly bottomless pit of misinformation and downright fantasy. From this treasure, this abundance of mal mots, today, then, I pluck just one, the one about the fruit flies. It started when she said:
“You’ve heard about some of these pet projects. They really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.”
What’s this? Fruit fly research? In France? Sacre bleu! But of course, if Sarah said it, it’s probably not quite accurate and, sure enough, it took the liberal media no time at all to retaliate. Fruit flies, they crowed, play a key role in genetic research because you get new generations in, like, minutes. You don’t have to hang around twiddling your thumbs for weeks, months or years to see the results of your latest diabolical experiment. In fact, as the libs were ecstatic to add, fruit flies were key to research on autism. This was especially telling as, in this very speech, La Palin had been proposing to do away with this sort of silly French research in order to have more money for studying things like, you guessed it, autism.
Now, there dwelt in the land in those days an ogre named Keith Olberman who specialized in ridiculing conservatives, and Sarah in particular. Keith suffered from Fish in a Barrel Syndrome. After the requisite snide lecture on the role of fruit flies in genetic research, especially regarding autism, he further revealed that the fruit fly research in question was NOT in Paris, France, you silly woman, but in the great state of North Carolina!
Okay, wait a sec. Granted, you never know what Sarah will say next and for sure it will have little or no connection with reality, but come on. Can her handlers, who admittedly are a pretty ineffective lot, really be that incompetent, to confuse Paris, France with North Carolina? How would that even work?
To answer this question I realized I needed to duplicate the research Sarah and her team and Keith and his team must have done to gather this data in the first place. I figured this would take some time and effort and boy howdy, where would I even start? Well, I thought, might as well start by Googling for “fruit fly research”. Within minutes – literally folks, fewer than five minutes, and it would have been less if only I could read faster – I had discovered that the fruit fly research earmark was the spawn of a Republican congressman from California and its intent was to find ways to kill a newly arrived invasive pest called the Mediterranean fruit fly that was wreaking havoc in the state’s olive groves. It had sod all to do with genetics or autism and the research was indeed happening in Paris, France – not North Carolina. Seems we, i.e., the United States Department of Agriculture (uh, that’s us), maintain laboratories in, gasp, foreign countries in order to tap into their local expertise on whatever subject we’re studying. We have these labs all over the world. And, in this case, the subject being the Mediterranean fruit fly, the work was not being done on Tobacco Road but in close proximity to the Mediterranean, i.e., the USDA lab in Paris, France.
Question, then, to Ms. Palin, Mr. Olberman and their staffs: really? You don’t know about Google? Five minutes!
