{"id":181930,"date":"2016-02-08T19:49:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T00:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/08\/today-in-historical-illiteracy\/"},"modified":"2016-02-08T19:49:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T00:49:00","slug":"today-in-historical-illiteracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/08\/today-in-historical-illiteracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in Historical Illiteracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At <i>Salon<\/i>, Andrew O&#8217;Hehir takes aim at Marco Rubio, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2016\/02\/08\/i_went_to_marco_rubios_super_sad_super_bowl_party_so_you_didnt_have_to_a_tale_of_six_layer_dip_and_disappearing_momentum\/\">effectively targets his own foot<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Let me explain \u201cPotemkin Super Bowl party,\u201d because I don\u2019t even know whether that\u2019s a totally obscure reference. In the Soviet Union under Stalin \u2014 and Marco Rubio is already deeply unhappy about where I\u2019m going with this \u2014 the state built \u201cPotemkin villages,\u201d idealized rural towns full of happy peasants for foreign visitors, while behind those fa\u00e7ades the populace lived in misery.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ummmm&#8230;Stalin?<\/p>\n<p>You are only off by almost 200 years, and the reference is only a Google away.<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Potemkin_village\">Potemkin Village<\/a> was a fake town created by a courtier in the court of Catherine the Great, Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tavricheski, who allegedly created an elaborate fraud to convince the Czarina that the lands in the south of Russia were happy and loyal.<\/p>\n<p>Attributing this to Stalin, when the term literally has its own Wiki page, does not inspire confidence on your grasp of the facts Mr. O&#8217;Hehir.<\/p>\n<p>BTW, it appears that after reading comments to his article he corrected that bit, and he should get props for that, but if you have an only vague knowledge of this sort of cultural reference, just f%$#ing Google it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Salon, Andrew O&#8217;Hehir takes aim at Marco Rubio, and effectively targets his own foot: Let me explain \u201cPotemkin Super Bowl party,\u201d because I don\u2019t even know whether that\u2019s a totally obscure reference. In the Soviet Union under Stalin \u2014 and Marco Rubio is already deeply unhappy about where I\u2019m going with this \u2014 the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[974,977,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hack-journalism","category-presidential-campaign","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181930"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}