'Herb' Cain

Hendrik Hertzberg captions:

What’s notable about this isn’t that Palin misidentified a Republican Presidential candidate, it’s that her wetware’s hard drive appears to have somehow recorded the name of Herb Caen (1916-1997), the sweet-tempered Winchell of the city he called Baghdad by the Bay, who wrote a three-dot, boldface-name-studded gossip column three days a week in the San Francisco Chronicle for most of the twentieth century and assured himself a permanent place in cultural history by coining the word “beatnik.” And they say she never reads the newspapers!