UPDATE: In the original version of this article, I stated erroneously that no one signed the Constitution. Reader Gary Bainton pointed out that the Constitution in fact had many signers. Here is a complete list of the signers, of which there were 40 in all. John Hancock was not among them. In any case, I apologize for the error. I’ll take an F in American history along with “Rolling Stone.”
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It is a gaffe worthy of Obama, but it will probably escape the ken of most history buffs because of something else in the buff: Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfuss appears in the nude on the cover of the latest issue of “Rolling Stone,” and for a 53-year-old woman, she looks pretty good.
On her back is a reproduction of the Constitution, which as Newsbusters’s Tim Graham explains, is a plug for her new HBO series “Veep.”
There’s just one small — well, large, actually — glitch. It is the familiar outsize signature of John Hancock. But Hancock never signed the Constitution. In fact, no one did. The famous historical document on which his super-sized signature appears is the Declaration of Independence.
USA Today noticed the inaccuracy. Graham quotes the paper as saying, “it’s It’s arguable how many Americans are up on their history enough to spot the gaffe,” adding that “Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center certainly is, and it wasted no time tweeting”:
George Washington to .@RollingStone – Thanks for the shout out but no Hancock here (picture from Signers’ Hall). http://t.co/bUHBOblDTR
— Constitution Center (@ConstitutionCtr) April 9, 2014
In a parting tweek to go with the tweet, Graham glibly points out that the October 24, 2013 edition of “Rolling Stone” featured an article by lefty historian Sean Wilentz titled “Right-wing extremism and the lessons of history.” Graham writes:
Apparently, one of those lessons is that America is let down by the press and its “twisted objectivity” where “falsehoods get reported as simply one side of an argument.”
