I'm thankful for Newt Gingrich, who has inspired struggling historians everywhere with his claim that the mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him upward of $1.8 million - not to lobby his Republican pals, but merely to offer his advice "as a historian." If a former nontenured professor from West Georgia College can rake in that kind of money with history lessons, imagine how much a top prof could make from writing a history of oil drilling for BP.
Speaking of historians, I'm thankful they have reminded us that Paul Revere's job was to warn the colonists that the British were coming (as opposed to Sarah Palin's claim that Revere's job was to warn the British), and they reminded us that the opening shots of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts (as opposed to Michele Bachmann's twice-uttered claim that the shots were fired in New Hampshire).
I'm thankful for Twitter, because it's the speediest and most efficient way to confirm whether a congressman like Anthony Weiner is fulfilling his desire to go the full monty.
I'm thankful for the Ron Paul fans who relentlessly entertain me with e-mails about Paul's alleged viability as a presidential candidate - without once considering that it might be tough to elect a guy who seeks to eradicate federal disaster aid when we're still recovering from the year's floods and tornadoes and in an era when abnormal weather is the norm. In Paul's words, "We should be like 1900" - and here I thought elections were supposed to be about the future.
