THE TROUBLE WITH USING QUOTES

Sarah Palin closed her Thursday night debate by evoking a quote from Ronald Reagan about "freedom". As she stated:

“It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.”

As Bob Herbert pointed out in his New York Times Op/Ed, these words were used by Reagan in trying to lobby public opinion AGAINST Medicare in 1961. Apparently Reagan believed that socialized medicine was the beginning of the end for America and it's freedoms, and thought that it's passing would begin a never-ending decline into anarchy.

So nearly fifty years later, how does American's elderly view Medicare? Some 76% of all adults support it, as well as 80% of Republicans. Also, it would appear that if terrorists still "hate us for our freedom", that Reagan's Medicare prediction was way off base.

Which begs the question why Palin (or her speech writers) would use a quote that, in context, is railing against something that most Americans agree with?

Here's a video that shows Palin's quote, and Reagan's original too: