Gregory Rodriguez: A Political History Lesson

Gregory Rodriguez, founder and executive director of Zócalo Public Square in Los Angeles, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and founding director of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University.

God bless the American media. Over the last two weeks, thousands of well-educated journalists and political experts have made their mortgage payments by commenting on the antics of an idiot congressman who tweeted a picture of his genitals, and an idiot ex-governor who sloppily manipulated history for ideological ends....

For all Palin's foolishness, I found the intellectual one-upmanship of the peanut gallery almost as lame.

But that's before I realized how much we all use and abuse history to justify our stances and actions in the present. I think Americans piled on Palin because her lame manipulation of history implicated us all.

As a young republic that fought a revolutionary war, America is short on tradition and skeptical of those in power. It has substituted it's own story, heroes and "facts" as the prime source of moral and political authority....