All I Want For Christmas

Sarah Palin's Book

Very interesting "review" of Going Rogue found here.

Sarah Palin's Book:
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I'm still in the midst of reading Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue. I have been angry for more than a year now about the way she has been, and continues to be, savaged by the liberal media. She has done nothing to warrant this treatment. If she had been a Democrat with the identical record of achievements, she would be celebrated as one of the heroes of the left.

Her only crime was that when she was chosen as McCain's running mate, their poll numbers shot up fast and far enough that the left realized she might actually be the thing that beat Obama! Therefore she had to be destroyed.

And having once treated her with such gross unfairness and indecency (if you view their records dispassionately, there was nothing wrong with her, like inexperience or ignorance, that was not wronger with Obama!), the left has to keep proving that their victim somehow deserved the vicious, snarling, tearing attacks on her.

So ever since her book came out, we have seen it reviewed as if it had been scrawled on toilet paper by a child. Many have reviewed the book as if its author were well known for her stupidity, though in fact nothing is clearer than her vivid intelligence – she is far smarter than any of the people I have heard call her stupid. For one thing, they are so stupid they call someone stupid without actually checking to see if she really is. That's stupidity.

And yet, there remains this: I disagree with her on at least half the issues that matter to her. After all, even though I'm a moral conservative, I am a Democrat and for good reason, as long as you define "Democrat" the way it was defined in 1977.

She is not my dream candidate for president. I'm hoping for somebody better. So I don't enter her book as a partisan of hers. She has my sympathy as a victim, but not my support as a candidate or my agreement on any but a handful of issues.

So I'm not going to review her book. Instead, I'm going to refer you to a review written by someone I had assumed would despise her.

Before I do, though, I want to tell you a little teeny story. Many years ago, when Rush Limbaugh's first book was newly in the stores, I was curious and bought his book on tape – read by him. I had never heard his radio program, but he was clearly making waves and I wanted to find out what he had to say.

As with Palin, I disagreed with at least half of Limbaugh's views – but I found him enormously entertaining and I saw why he was a hit on the radio. He was very good at what he did. And sometimes I did agree with him, and then it was a pleasure to hear what he had to say. Heck, it was a pleasure to listen to him even when I disagreed!

It happened that the book was in my car as I provided a ride to two friends of mine, professors at a university. When they got in my car and saw the cover of Limbaugh's book, you'd have thought it was the bloody corpse of a tortured cat, they reacted with such horror. They could not believe that I would read something by such a rabid right-winger.

At that moment I realized that even though these men thought of themselves as intellectuals, they were not. They were deliberately stupid with the stupidity of self-inflicted ignorance. I asked: Have you ever listened to him? No, they said. Then how did they know they hated him? Because everyone they knew said ...

Yes, stupid. I said to them, "I can't possibly know what I think about someone until I make some effort to find out who they are, how they think, what they're actually doing." I did not say: I just learned a lot more about you than you will ever know about Rush Limbaugh.

Right now, Palin's book is accomplishing exactly the same thing that Limbaugh's book did back in the day: You can find out who the stupid bigots are by seeing who hates and despises and ridicules the book without having read it.

I'm reading it. I'm not finished. And I'm not going to review it. Because a friend of mine pointed out a review of Going Rogue written by a genuine intellectual and man of the left, Stanley Fish.

His review says everything I would say about her book, and says it better than I could say it. In addition, he brings his own experience with the bigots into his review. So I urge you: Get online and read Stanley Fish's review, if you want a fair-minded treatment of the book by someone who strongly disagrees with at least some of Palin's ideas and beliefs. There is not one word of Fish's review that is, in my opinion, wrong.

But having read my words here, and Fish's words from The New York Times online, you still have to read Going Rogue and find out for yourself what the book means and who Sarah Palin is, before you're qualified to talk about it.

Here's the short URL: http://sn.im/fishpalin

Vids

Greta on Palin cutting her vacation short:



Palin's parents in Sandpoint, Idaho:



And I just thought this was hilarious:

The Danger of Palin and Stanley Fish

A couple of great Palin articles. First up, a piece in the Milwaukee Examiner:
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When people describe the danger of Sarah Palin, it's not about disagreement. Critics may not have even read her book, her articles or her biography. Some things are simply not allowed to be discussed...because of their inherent danger. Sarah Palin - her positions, political philosophy, career and work - is one of these innately dangerous things. And this kind of hatred and censorship has become accepted without question in much of the Western world.....

Liberal Bullies only want to destroy people who are fully willing to debate, but don't want to confront the real aggressors against and danger to freedom, tolerance and equality. Liberal Bullies are willing to lambaste our country that gives them freedom to disagree. However, their censure of dictatorships that murder and silence their own citizens is slow or nonexistant.

Liberal Bullies are willing to call America and Christianity tyrannical and oppressive. What of Uganda calling for the death penalty for homosexuality? What about Islamic theocrats such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who stone homosexuals? Lobbying against paying for abortion with our tax dollars is described as a dangerous threat to the republic's democracy - as if the ProLife lobby means to turn America into a theocracy. Where is the outcry against actual theocracies that are currently (as opposed to in time past) oppressing and killing people in the name of religion?

Sexism (the elephant in the room, whose existence is the woman politician's unique and one-sided liabilty) and the misogyny woven into the fabric of our culture is the real problem.

This is so, because even women accept and act on the assumptions, expectations, prejudices and judgments prioritzed and programmed for them by the partriarchal vision. The vision is not empirical and, thus, defensible, provable and fair; it is invisible and unquestionable. This is a truism that captures all women in its web - liberals like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi as well as conservatives like Sarah Palin.

Much of the ire and hatred they draw is virulent and unsubstantiated. This is not to say that there aren't reasons to disagree, rational reasons; but they are rarely ennumerated clearly and unemotionally. Too often women in politics who are dealing with the weighty issues are not challenged for the substance of their actions and philosophies, but are confronted with emotion about issues of little importance and value. Palin in a swimsuit is bad; her swimsuit pictures make her political prospects dubious. Obama in his swim trunks is described as asthtetically pleasing. He is the next coming of JFK:

In his recent book, The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama concedes his deep misgivings about the possibility of a negative advertising campaign directed against him, a fate he has yet to experience.

But he can console himself that when it comes to having one's midriff on public display, he is in exalted political company. The New Year's Day beach photo of him in Hawaii draws inevitable comparisons with another similar photo taken of another telegenic Democrat - John F. Kennedy emerging from the sea to the delight of onlooking women.....

It is interesting that people have decided that all people must think alike, in order to call themselves liberal-progressive-democrats or conservative-republicans. It is natural to grow and develop. And people aren't seeds encoded to live pre-determined fates. Their brains grow and develop. After traumatic brain injury, they can teach their brains to go around downed pathways; they teach themselves to do and think and behave in ways they never had before - building new pathways in the great processing center that is the brain.

So, why is it that Sarah Palin is dangerous? Is it because people who don't agree with Sarah Palin think that people who like Sarah Palin; support her; or would vote for her, if she ran for office are easily led and will ignorantly absorb and repeat anything she says? If this is the case, then Sarah Palin isn't the danger; the human lemmings that are logically essential to this perspective are the societal danger.

If people are such sponges, then anyone with whom another disagrees is, necessarily, a potential danger. He can simply speak and change a person's mind. He can make any person do things he had no notion of doing before.

Human lemmings are 'true believers'. They live on both sides of the partisan line. They vomit 'talking points' in response to any question; they don't crack books about issues that are approached from angles they have decided they do not respect; and they 'hate' people who disagree with them.

Anyone who disagrees is 'dangerous', 'ignorant' and 'wrong'.

This may remind you of the settled science of Climate Change and the "apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - (the IPCC's)] fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007."

What is dangerous (to a democratic society and also to civil discourse) is the lack of tolerance and openness to different perspectives and supporting evidence offered to support or undermine popular claims. When did it become wrong to examine whether something is true?

The media and President Obama's administration are trying to pick targets for you - people for you to ignore, disdain, mock, distrust, fear...and hate. Don't they think that you can be trusted to make these judgments for yourself? Or did your judgment stop being sound after you voted them into office? Everyone knows Glenn Beck incites violence. Do you?

Everyone knows Sarah Palin is too dumb to find her way out of a paper bag. Then how is it that she was elected and governed as a mayor and then as a governor? This sounds like misogynistic sour grapes and the empty whining of educated derelicts. It is anonymous hate. Misogyny has infected this culture and when women challenge that restful virus, it bitterly erodes the images of these persons - women in politics - who are essential to democratic discourse. If you don't stand up against the claims that Sarah Palin is dangerous - not because of stoning anyone, or something actually dangerous can you be sure you or someone that you believe in won't be declared dangerous sometime soon?

And if you (and your government) come to think that you have lost the ability to think for yourselves, you may give away your liberty (and ability to make decisions and to express yourself) over to another's judgment. You will be paving the way to suppression of your very precious ideas. The freedom to your rights as you know them may become part of history - a distant, colorless memory.

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
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Very good, applause all around.

Next, remember Stanley Fish, the New York Times guy who gave a "Going Rogue" a fair review? Well, he's got a follow-up column here:
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The largely negative responses to my account of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” fall into four groups: (1) those who reject my distinction between biography, a genre tied to the requirement of factual accuracy, and autobiography, a genre dedicated to communicating another kind of truth; (2) those, like Caravaggio82, who reason that since the book “was ghost written pure and simple,” it could not possibly convey Palin’s “authentic voice”; (3) those who fault me for not speaking to Palin’s positions on creationism and the “birthers,” and thereby “helping to promote her” (Howie); and (4) those who were offended by my having referred to a sales clerk at the Strand book store as “a bright young thing.”

The distinction between biography and autobiography is really quite simple: the terms mark the difference between the effort of one person to get the details of another person’s life straight and the effort of one person to have her say about the kind of life she has led. In the writing of biography objectivity is both the goal and the standard for the biographer who stands at a distance from his subject. Autobiographers by definition have no distance from their subjects; they are in the business of expressing and revealing themselves, and while objectivity is often something they claim, failing to make good on that claim will not be regarded as fatal as it would be for a biographer. Instead it will be regarded as another piece of information about the personality whose portrait is being painted in words. To put in the simplest terms, a biographer is saying, “This is the way it was”; an autobiographer is saying, “This is the way I saw it and remember it.”

This does not mean that I “endorse the idea that lying is acceptable in an autobiography” (John K. Wilson) or that I am urging that we take what Sarah Palin “says at face value” (M.J.M.) or that I regard “deliberate factual inaccuracies” as “higher truths” (Lou) or that I don’t “think that facts matter at all” (skeptonomist). I am just observing that the truth or falsity of an autobiographer’s assertions is not the main focus of a reader’s interest because the autobiographer’s claim on our attention resides elsewhere — in the vividness and energy with which a significant life is being recalled. (If it were discovered that St. Augustine never stole those pears, would we throw his Confessions away or downgrade the book?) The fact that others would recall the life differently and accuse the writer of “factual inaccuracies” is certainly to be noted, but we do not expect an autobiographer to respond by pleading guilty and confessing that her ex-husband or his opponent in the primary had it right.

But isn’t this all irrelevant anyway if, as John Frum declares, “Mrs. Palin didn’t write the book”?............

Her name is on it because, no matter how many of the words are literally hers, she is its presiding spirit. We must assume that, like a director who reviews the work of his editor, she had the right of approval at every moment and could have said (probably did say), “No, that’s not what I had in mind” or “Yes, that captures my sentiments and recollections entirely.”

”Law and Order” creator Dick Wolf could not possibly supervise, never mind write, every script churned out by his production company, and yet TV critics have no hesitation in saying about a particular episode that it conveys Wolf’s usual message or embodies his vision of society. In his new book, “The Audacity to Win,” David Plouffe, campaign adviser to Barack Obama, recalls that when Obama decided to write his famous “race” speech, he said, “I know what I want to say,” and that he would call the speechwriter “and give him some initial guidance.” The rest is history and everyone refers to the speech as Obama’s. In the same way, “Going Rogue” is Sarah Palin’s book, for good or ill.

If I may mix metaphors, the issue of ghost writing is a red herring, a point made inadvertently by those posters who both deny Palin the title of author and excoriate her for her lies. If she didn’t write the book, she can’t be lying in it, and if she can be called either a liar or a truth-teller, she wrote the book.

In saying this I am not, as a number of posters asserted, affirming and promoting her agenda. Connie Boyd complains that I have “written a love note to [Palin] in the New York Times,” and she asks, “Do you have a sense of responsibility left?” I have a sense of responsibility to the column I sat down to write, not to the columns some readers wanted me to write or thought I had in fact written.........

To the charge that I displayed sexism when I called a book store employee a “bright young thing,” I respond by answering “yes” to the question posed by Sarah: “Would you have referred to a bright young male clerk as a thing?” Been there, done that. Bright-young-thingness is gender neutral; it refers to the eagerness, innocence and energy in the faces of young people at the start of what they are sure is going to be a glorious adventure. Long ago, I was a bright young thing myself....

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Go drop Stanley a nice comment. Sounds like he gets enough of the other kind:)


P.S. I should mention that it appears that KTUU has a second video of Palin's Elmendorf book signing up here.

Vids, Vids, Vids....and more vids

On Quotes

There has apparently been quite a bit of hoopla over a couple of quotes in Sarah Palin's book.

Quote #1 - "Our land is everything to us...I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it -- with their lives."

Sarah Palin attributes this to John Wooden, sports guy. Turns out it was actually said by John Wooden Legs (yes, that was actually his name, please, keep your chuckles to yourself). John Woodenlegs (okay, that is funny) was a Native American activist. That quote makes more sense now. I couldn't figure out why John Wooden would wax so poetic about land, but now I know.

As far as gaffes go, not major. Next quote -

Quote #2 - "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Palin attributes this quote to Plato, but some academics are getting their panties in a wad saying that while this quote is often attributed to Plato, it's doubtful that he actually said it.

Well, blow me over. My world is shattered.

Give me a break. Do you have any idea how many quotes out there are merely attributed to historical figures and were probably never penned or uttered by them? This stuff happens all the time. There are a few quotes by Patrick Henry that people are fond of using although those quotes are merely attributed; there's no proof that he said them.

And how's about this for a misattributed quote - preachers and conservative politicians are fond of using Alexis de Tocqueville's phrase:

"Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good America will cease to be great."

When I was a teenager, I got Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (both volumes, unabridged) because I had heard that quote. Only problem: I never found those words in those pages. I thought I must have missed it, so I got the ebook version online and did word searches. Nothing. I did some more research; turns out that nobody knows exactly where that quote came from. It's been used by Presidents (Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton) along with many others even though it's clear that it is not actually in Tocqueville's book. Here's more backstory.

Nobody pays that much attention when that famous quote is billed wrongly, most people probably don't even know about it, but if Sarah Palin had put that in her book the whole world would know it now. You can bank on that.

Going Rogue Reviews

First off, I just want to say how royally ticked off I am about all of the media's "book reports" of Palin's "Going Rogue." I have to wonder how many of them actually read the book. The differences between their assessment of the book and what the book actually says and how it's written couldn't be more glaring.

If I hadn't read it, I would have thought that she hated the world, that she mangled every other word, that she talked about Katie Couric every other paragraph, and that she was using Steve Schmidt's picture for target practice in her backyard. The disconnect between the reviews and the actual book is nothing short of hilarious. I don't know who writes for these publications, but they must be the most snobbish, can't-see-past-the-end-of-their-own-nose, narrow-minded, humorless people on the planet.

The book is hilarious. It is light-hearted and warm. It does not come across as score-settling, but rather as just the way things happened from Palin's perspective. And even those parts are peppered with humor. She even makes excuses for some of the campaign mishaps. Not to mention the fact that she goes into a lot of detail about her own personal life and her career before she delves into the campaign.

And the idea that there's no policy in the book....

The last part of the book outlines her basic premise of what she thinks about the current direction of our country, and where the country should be going instead. But her philosophy and her policies are scattered throughout the book. They are interwoven into her experiences. It is obvious. The only way you wouldn't see them is if you were blind or stupid. None is so blind as he who will not see.

I read the book before I read any reviews. I didn't want anybody else to influence my perspective of the book. Whether the book was good or horrible, I wanted to make that determination for myself. Well I made my determination. It is well-written, humorous, and heart-warming. It is optimistic and honest; sincere and unapologetic. It's just an all-around good book. I would recommend it even if you hate Sarah Palin's guts. Even if you don't believe a word in it or think that she could never be President...whatever. That stuff doesn't matter. It's still a good read.

And I have to say, I knew the media skewers things, but I never knew how much until I read the reviews of this book. The reviews are so far removed from the real thing it's laughable. And it cracks me up how these so-called super smart people can't figure it out. It's plain English, people. It's not that hard. The media, as far as I'm concerned, can go to h-e-double hockey sticks.

Going Rogue

I just finished the book.

I gotta say, it's a great read. Even if you hate Sarah Palin, even if you don't think she's qualified for anything above dogcatcher; if you don't believe a word she says - it's still a great read. Take it as a great piece of fiction, if nothing else.

It's funny as all get-out. That's what I took away the most - how hilarious it was.

I also had to reshape a few of my opinions. Given what Palin had to say about her legislative director, I guess I can throw my John Bitney post in the trash.

As far as accuracy goes, look: this is her story from her perspective. I take everyone's point of view with a grain of salt, including hers. Five people can see a murder and walk away with five different accounts of the murderer.

And I don't expect every conversation in there to be verbatim the way it actually happened, obviously. You don't remember every word that was said twenty years later. But she can't preface every conversation with the disclaimer: "I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something like this...." You should be able to figure that out by yourself.

I loved her personal stories. I loved her stories of the thoughts going through her head during the campaign. It was flat-out funny. When she described the staffers emerging from the bus and lighting cigaretts walking away looking like a cloud of smoke with legs... It's just funny. The stuff Joe Biden was doing before the debate... crack me up.

It's just an overall good book. Policy and philosophy is scattered throughout with an extra push at the end. I loved the part where she talked about Andree McLeod calling her. Sarah would just put her on speakerphone and do her stuff while McLeod would drone on and on...

She presents a different take on some things than what I thought was the truth. It's interesting to me what she included and what she left out. I'm not going to go into detail - you're just going to have to read it for yourself.

Read it - even if you hate her guts - it's entertaining if nothing else.

Fact-Checking the Fact Checks

Just based on what I've seen in the AP so far, I've got a sneaky suspicion that C4P is going to be busy for the next couple months.

They're going to need a team that specializes in fact-checking all these "fact checks" on Sarah Palin's book. Internet vids wouldn't hurt either. Time for C4P to make a name for themselves.

(sigh) I wait with patience for the day the media fact checks the actual sitting President of the United States the way they "fact check" Sarah Palin.




Still waiting............

Everybody's Writing Books

Heaven forbid we let Sarah Palin have her say without doing our best to drown it out.

First up: "Going Rouge: An American Nightmare." The "satire" version of Going Rogue. I don't really mind it, but look for the left-wing hack jobs to quote it as they did Tina Fey and try to pass parts of it off as Sarah Palin's real story. I wish the world was above stooping to that level; unfortunately, when it comes to Governor Palin, anything is possible.

Interesting tidbit, the publishers of the book, John Oakes and Colin Robinson state on their website that they embrace: "Progressive change in politics, culture, and the way we do business." Yeah, no ulterior motive there.

Second: "Renegade: Sarah Palin's Hatchetman." Another book coming out soon written by one of Sarah Palin's staffers who got grilled during Troopergate. This one (although the title is media bait, to be sure) will probably not be a smear piece. I could be wrong, but we'll see. I actually really want to read it.

And Dennis Miller.....

While you may like Sarah Palin, you obviously fell for the media narrative of the 2008 campaign. Love you, but you're way off base on Palin's book, buddy. Way off.