Sarah Palin fired back at critics in the media Thursday who highlighted a moment this week in which she accidentally mixed up North and South Korea during a recent radio interview with Glenn Beck.
In a discussion Wednesday about how to react to North Korea’s recent attacks on its southern neighbor, Palin accidentally said, “we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies” but then quickly corrected herself. Media outlets jumped on the isolated quote, and some neglected to mention that just eight seconds earlier, Palin had correctly identified the two countries and has spoken about conflict on the Asian peninsula at length in the past.
On Thanksgiving, however, Palin, who has signaled that she will run for president in 2012, responded, and not in the most traditional way. Writing on her Facebook page, Palin penned a satire bit entitled “A Thanksgiving Message to all 57 states,” an obvious swipe at President Obama for accidentally saying he had traveled to 57 states while he was campaigning in 2008.
In the post, Palin dug up 10 examples of times when Obama misspoke in an attempt to scold media outlets who she contends gave Obama a pass when he made a verbal mistake.
“My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come,” Palin’s post began. “With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…”
According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, which chronicled the 2008 presidential campaign, Palin “couldn’t explain why North Korea and South Korea were separate nations” when she was first tapped for the vice presidency.
Palin often makes a point of saying that she is mistreated by the media.