{"id":355,"date":"2008-11-03T15:20:29","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T15:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=355"},"modified":"2011-07-29T16:02:03","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T16:02:03","slug":"the-palin-prank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=355","title":{"rendered":"The Palin prank"},"content":{"rendered":"

The prank call to Sarah Palin<\/a> by two Montreal radio hosts last week has had lots of coverage<\/a> in the<\/a> American<\/a> media. Just this morning the two were on CBS’ “The Early Show” (click here<\/a> for the video of their appearance on CBS). The Globe and Mail has a more accurate transcript<\/a> of the call than others that have been published. While some media<\/a> don’t seem to get what was so funny about the whole thing, Salon.com does a pretty good job of explaining it all here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today they also published a more detailed account of how this prank came to be, which includes a couple of other amusing details from behind the scenes:<\/p>\n

S\u00c3\u00a9bastien Trudel and Marc-Antoine Audette, co-hosts of Les Cerveaux de l’info, the drive-home show on Montreal’s CKOI-FM, spent five days last week persuading Ms. Palin’s Republican Party staff that French President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to speak with her by phone and wish her well in tomorrow’s election.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

“When we started to work on the idea last Tuesday,” Mr. Audette said in an interview yesterday, “we thought it would be mission impossible. But after about a dozen calls, we started to realize it might work, because her staff didn’t know the name of the French President. They asked us to spell it.”<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Clearly, the joke is not just on Sarah Palin. What’s hilarious is that these guys got so far in just a few days of trying to reach Palin in these last few days of a busy campaign. This says a lot about her staff, who also needed to write down the name of the French President in case they forgot it.<\/p>\n

After trumpetting her experience of living next to Canada and Russia as proof of her foreign policy experience, the fact that Palin clearly doesn’t even know the name of Canada’s Prime Minister is only icing on the cake. After all, not knowing the name of the leader of the United States’ number one trading partner<\/a> has never been something that has prevented someone from becoming President.<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, I just discovered a 2000 Democracy Now interview with Rick Mercer<\/a> regarding George Bush’s famous endorsement by Jean Poutine. Great listening.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The prank call to Sarah Palin by two Montreal radio hosts last week has had lots of coverage in the American media. Just this morning the two were on CBS’ “The Early Show” (click here for the video of their appearance on CBS). The Globe and Mail has a more accurate transcript of the call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canadian-politics","category-humour","category-us-of-eh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}