Things that will suprise no one

Hey, it looks like Sarah Palin is just making stuff up again:

Former Gov. Sarah Palin, who has had a rocky relationship with the state's capital city, says in her book there were some ugly threats made against her daughters while they were attending Juneau schools.

Those threats reportedly caused daughter Willow Palin to be removed from the Juneau School District.

Palin said it ended the "honeymoon" for her kids in their new role as children of the state's governor, though she admitted the honeymoon had already ended for her.

The alleged threats made against Palin's daughters are raising questions among officials who would likely have been made aware of them at the time, had they been made or had Palin taken them seriously. . . .

Palin provided no details about where the Internet site was, how seriously she took the threats, how she knew it was posted by students, or what steps she'd taken to ensure her family's safety.

Former Juneau School District Superintendent Peggy Cowan was superintendent during the period in question and said she never heard of such concerns. . . .

Juneau Police Chief Greg Browning similarly said his department has no record of ever being alerted to such threats.

His department's school resource officers are in Juneau schools daily, and would likely have been alerted to such threats, had they been made, he said.

The Alaska State Troopers provide a security detail for Palin, but trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said the first they heard about the allegation was from Palin's book.

"AST has no record of a report like that being made to our agency," Peters said. "Additionally, we have no way of determining if a report of that nature was made to another agency."

I figured someone would report on this sooner or later. Juneau is a small town in many ways, and of the many stories I've heard about Palin's kids -- especially the two older ones -- this one had never come up. And now I suppose we know why.

I've pretty much given up on trying to plumb the psychology of someone like Palin. But as far as this latest fable goes, it seems possible that she invented it to add greater (albeit fabricated) detail to the outrage she expressed over David Letterman's tasteless joke about her daughter being impregnated by A-Rod. More likely, I suspect, the story is one more aspect of Palin's deranged relationship to Alaska's capital. Describing Palin's relationship with Juneau as "rocky" would qualify as a major understatement. Her loathing for the city was palpable during the brief periods she actually spent in residence, and her absence from the capital city during legislative sessions (especially 2008) was the stuff of legend. Her book is almost completely uncomplimentary about Juneau, which she portrays as a swamp of political corruption and extramarital affairs. She congratulates herself for living in the governor's mansion for a few months (and for firing the chef), but about the only thing we learn about the people of Juneau is that she was happy to annoy her neighbors by installing a trampoline in the front yard. (As an aside, I'll note that I have acquaintances who live in that neighborhood, and no one recalls her putting a trampoline there. Nor would anyone have given a shit if she had.)

With that in mind, I'm not surprised that Palin would make up stories about her imperiled kids to justify her decision to leave Juneau and take a state per diem for living in Wasilla. Palin ranks among those Alaskans -- most of whom live in the Anchorage region -- who would prefer to remove the capital entirely from Southeast Alaska, where it's been since the Russian purchase in 1867. (Juneau has been the capital since 1906.) Over the past decade, the loss of government jobs in Juneau has been a source of growing concern; the past several administrations have relocated significant positions (including commissioners' offices) to the Anchorage area, producing a phenomenon known as "capital creep." Several formal efforts to move the capital -- most recently a ballot referendum in 2002 -- have failed, but the informal process continues to be a problem. As everyone knows, the departure of government entirely from Juneau would absolutely wreck the region, hacking away a quarter of its economy at the very least. And Sarah Palin was the sort of person who seemed to believe that outcome would be completely acceptable.

So is Sarah Palin the sort of person who would make up stories about threats of gang rape to provide literary cover for her personal and political aversion to her state's capital city? I dunno. Her fabrications usually have such a random quality to them, it's hard to imagine she's operating with much of a method. Like a Zen koan, Palin's lies can only be understood by relinquishing the quest for understanding.

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Reading Stanley Fish so you don't have to...

Va at Whiskey Fire:

I confess I anticipated the possibility that Fish would review Going Rogue, as he has fashioned himself in his Times blog into a more loquacious Ann Althouse, but I hoped it wouldn't be quite like this. But now, there it is, indelibly posted on Stanley Fish's blog forever, daring me to believe that there is any point in going on, that there is any amount of success and eminence you can achieve that can't be hopelessly shat away. I make my living, such as it is, reading books and teaching other people how to read them, so I take Fish's embarrassing review as a personal affront. But it's more than personal; it's existential. Not only is Fish's review an object lesson is just how inane it is possible for a person to be and still mean it, it implicates all human endeavor in its inanity. It says: the only context in which it makes sense for you to be reading this is in a rocking chair, slowly rocking, on the front porch of civilization, rocking slowly as the sun sets, rocking slower, and ever slower, until you and everything there is expires.

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Going Rogue, chapter 5

In the 16th and early 17th centuries, English Puritans developed a method of Biblical and historical interpretation known as "typology." In its simplest form, typology involved the discovery of Old Testament precursors -- events, people, rituals and other elements of scripture -- that foreshadowed or prefigured similar details in the New Testament. According to Puritan interpretation, Old Testament "types" were recycled and fulfilled in the works of Christ, the somewhat awkwardly-termed "antitype." (Puritans also used Old Testament "types" to make sense of their own historical situation, as when they interpreted Native Americans as anti-types for the people of Canaan, heathens whom the Puritans -- as anti-types of Israel -- needed to drive from the new holy land.)

Reading the last few chapters of Going Rogue, we can see how Puritan theology supplies a useful tool for understanding Sarah Palin's political development, and especially her bizarre decision (on my birthday, no less) to leave the governor's office. For instance, here's a "type" from chapter 1, in which a young Palin and her friend Chuck are beleaguered by by a state trooper:

It was Christmas Day; we were out in the middle of nowhere, a couple of kids on a snowmachine up against a big dude with a gun and a badge. I couldn't help wondering about his priorities, if he really didn't have more important things to do, like catching a bad guy, or maybe helping a poor plady haul in her firewood for the night. Looking back, maybe this was my first brush with the skewed priorities of government.

And three decades later, the "anti-type" as Palin whines about the eighteen ethics complaints filed against her since the summer of 2008:

We never imagined our critics would be so unscrupulous as to make a mockery of a serious issue like the ethics act. My state had been rocked by real ethical violations. We had lawmakers taking bribes and going to prison, the former administration's chief of staff pleading guilty to a felony, and oil service executives ready to go to the clink. But now partisan operatives were using the reformed ethics [sic] to level charges against me that were as trivial as they were absurd -- charges that were eagerly reported by the press as though they were actual news.

What a bass-ackward way of doing the people's business.

The book is loaded with similar type/anti-type pairings (e.g., the biased reporting of the local Wasilla paper prefigures the antics of Katie Couric and Andrew Sullivan; her resignation from the oil and gas board prefigures her swan dive from the governor's office; her loss in the 2002 lieutenant governor's race prefigures her loss with McCain in 2008; and so on). But since Palin's book is fundamentally a tale of martyrdom and apotheosis, she's able to ennoble her decision to quit the very job that supposedly qualified her to serve as Vice President. The dozen-plus ethics charges, the heinous fabrications of left-wing bloggers, the endless FOIA requests from reporters -- all of these are merely the stations of the cross as Sarah Palin lumbers toward Golgotha.

Financial hardship is painful but bearable. Loss of reputation I can take. But I could not and cannot tolerate watching Alaska suffer . . . .

I prayed hard because I knew that if I resigned, it might very well end any future political career.

But then I thought, This is what's wrong with our political system. Too many politicians only consider their next career move. They don't put the people they are serving first.

I don't suppose it's worth arguing about the degree of triviality bound up with these complaints (though several of them, including the ones related to the Walt Monegan fiasco as well as the complaint involving travel funds from Palin's kids, are exactly the sorts of problems that state ethics boards should be investigating). Similarly, there's no sense in wondering if the accusations against Palin were more or less flimsy than the campaign-season accusations she herself made about Barack Obama and Bill Ayers (or the ones she explains in the book she wanted to make about Obama and ACORN). It's probably also not worth pointing out that while Palin compares her own ethics ordeal with Netw Gingrich’s during the mid-1990s -- I wish I were making that up -- our maverick savior doesn't pause for a moment to reflect on the much costlier (and less substantiated) investigations launched into the financial transactions of the fellow who happened to occupy the White House at the same time.

At the end of the day, if Palin truly wanted to "put the people [she was] serving first," she would have been a better governor. Instead, she returned from the campaign trail with a chip on her shoulder after ticking off nearly everyone she'd need to work with in the legislature. She embarked on an ideologically-motivated, fact-free campaign to reject federal stimulus funds, resulting in a protracted pissing match that gobbled up time better spent on serious policy questions; she spent months fucking with the people of Juneau, nominating an array of unqualified goofballs to fill our vacant seat in the state senate; and she spent most of her time acting as if the job she had was interfering with the job she wanted. Ethics complaints might have caused the state a bit of hassle and expense, but they didn't stop Palin from wasting valuable time on her own petty obsessions.

As Palin herself might say, what a bass-ackward way of doing the people's business.

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Going Rogue, Chapter 4

Oh, fucking hell. It's the presidential campaign. I'd forgotten about this part.

Fortunately for me, there's not much to say, really, about chapter 4 that hasn't already been written about a thousand times already. We have to endure more bullshit about Bristol's pregnancy, the wardrobe "controversy," Katie Couric, and the teleprompter in Minneapolis St. Paul (oops!), which she continues to insist malfunctioned so badly that she was forced to deliver her convention speech from memory. There are a few moments of levity -- as when Palin groans about not being allowed to give more substantive answers during debate prep, or when she receives a friendly visit from Holy Joe Lieberman before squaring off against Biden. We're also forced to read (for several agonizing pages) about the one-liners that Palin and her campaign staffers submitted -- to no avail -- to the writers of Saturday Night Live prior to Palin's late-October appearance on the show. (If prodded forcefully enough in comments, I will post these "jokes" separately. You have, however, been warned.)

But the essential weight of the chapter, however, centers on the way she was mishandled by nearly everyone around her. From what I gather, a lot of folks expected this section of the book to have something like the following effect on the people who managed the McCain campaign:



Sadly, the chapter merely amplifies grievances about campaign strategy that Palin has either hinted at or voiced directly on numerous occasions since last November. At the bottom of it all, Palin accuses the McCain people of stifling the political instincts that helped her win the governor's race in 2006. Then, as she recounts in the previous chapter, Palin "wanted to shake every hand on the trail" and meet everyone in the entire goddamn state. And because she was driving herself and her kids around in sub-zero weather -- guzzling sugar-free Red Bulls and sticking her head out the window (as any responsible parent would) to fend off sleep -- Palin was able to campaign as she saw fit. But in her account of the 2006 gubernatorial race, she tells a story that effectively sets up the rift that would emerge between her and the McCain team.

On one return trip . . . we stopped late at night in the middle of nowhere to drop off a campaign sign. Todd had spotted the unmarked dirt road we needed to take, and we rumbled down a narrow lane lined by tall, spindly black spruce until we came to a tiny wooden cabin hidden in the woods. The elderly couple who lived there had called in to a political radio show and voiced their support, so we'd looked them up and promised to deliver them a yard sign, even though you wouldn't be able to view it from the main highway.

The old people stuff them with pie, and the Palins drive away, listening to LL Cool J and the Black Eyed Peas as they ponder the "hardworking, unpretentious and patriotic people" who want to see them elected.

When Palin gripes about the way she was hemmed in by campaign officials during the 2008 race -- the fact that she wasn't allowed to hang around on the rope lines for hour after needless hour, "really connecting with voters" who were already going to vote for the Republican ticket, or the fact that she was thwarted in her effort to make a pointless visit to Michigan after the campaign wisely yanked the plug on their efforts in that state -- all we need to remember is that Palin believes that campaigns are defined in no small part by their willingness to deliver yard signs in the middle of the night. Throughout the chapter, Palin relishes the attention of core GOP voters who drag their knuckles through the boglands of America to listen to her speak. She wants to "take the gloves off" and drive the base of the party into a white-hot fury over Jeremiah Wright. She wants to sit down at kitchen tables with millions of people and explain to them that John McCain is "bold" and "thinks outside the box," while Barack Obama consorts with terrorists and doesn't have a child with Down Syndrome.

But the fat, chain-smoking meanies in the campaign won't let her, and on November 3 God shows them who's the boss of whom.

To sum up, here's chapter 4:

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Going Rogue, Chapter 3

I realize this is a pedantic complaint, but would it be possible for Sarah Palin to launch her chapters with epigraphs that aren't of dubious origin?

The first chapter, for example, opens with a quotation from Lou Holtz that the former football coach apparently wrote exclusively for this book. (Alas, as it turns out, Palin and her ghostwriter were simply mangling a nearly identical aphorism that -- while always attributed to Holtz -- never leads back to an actual source and only appears in "inspirational" books of quotations.)

Chapter Two is introduced by a fake quote from Aristotle, who never in fact wrote that "Criticism is something we can avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing." Instead, such banalities are more properly credited to a book called Seeds of Change Greatness by Denis Waitley, a hack motivational speaker and author who once served as an executive for a skin-care Ponzi scheme.

So far as bungled epigraphs go, the third chapter is arguably the winner so far, attributing this nugget of wisdom to the renowned former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden:

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

Now, if that's not the sort of thing you'd expect a hall of fame basketball coach to say, that's because, of course, he didn't. Students of American Indian history might recognize that passage as belonging instead to John Wooden Legs, the post-WWII Northern Cheyenne tribal leader who -- though a contemporary of John Wooden's -- was not the same guy.

Yes, yes -- it's absurd to expect much from Sarah Palin, but imagine if these sorts of gaffes had appeared in books by Hillary Clinton or Obama himself.

***

OK, moving onward.

In brief, chapter 3 is a cumbersome, hundred-page turd that covers Palin's campaign for the governor's office; her first 18 months as chief executive, including her push for ethics reform and a natural gas pipeline; all the people who were mean to her for one reason or another; her last pregnancy, including the letter Palin wrote to her family in which she pretended to be God; and her family's random exploits from 2006-2008, including Todd's 4th place finish in the Iron Dog snowmachine race and Bristol's 1st place finish in getting knocked up.

Like much of the book so far, there's almost nothing in this chapter that readers wouldn't already have known if they'd closely followed the campaign last fall. With the exception of Palin's gossipy, adolescent snark about colleagues she now hates (e.g., her first legislative director, whom she describes, with devastating wit, as a "BlackBerry games addict who couldn't seem to keep his lunch off his tie"), there's not much news about Palin's public record. She warbles at length about her own mavericity -- taking on "Big Oil," deleting line items from the state budget, clucking her tongue as one state legislator after another was loaded into the paddy wagon -- but we've suffered through this exaggerated folktale too many times already. The overriding lesson from this chapter is quite simple:

• Alaskan politics was a Roman orgy of corruption before 2007
• Sarah Palin (and the few people who remained loyal to her) restored purity to state government.
  
• Well, OK, Jesus Christ -- whose spirit was conveyed through the righteous work of Sarah Palin -- restored purity to state government.

What's more interesting, certainly, are the details about her early governorship that Palin decides not to mention. Though she discusses the "reassignment" and resignation of Walt Monegan, for example, she neglects to explain why she and her husband had been badgering the commissioner about State Trooper Mike Wooten (Palin's former brother-in-law) since the day she came into office. Though she defends her decision to leave Juneau at the start of the '08 legislative session to attend her son's graduation from boot camp, she chooses not to address the matter of why she stayed away from the capital city for nearly half of the days the legislature was in sesssion during her first two years in office.

Indeed, anyone halfway connected to Alaskan politics will read this chapter with slackened jaws, stunned by Palin's ability to claim for herself a leadership role that she doesn't actually deserve. It's the sort of performance that left the boys from the Weekly Standard squirming uncomfortably in their chairs -- for which, I suppose, in a strange way we should all be grateful -- but it's still quite maddening to watch.


....and here's some bonus material from chapter the third, in which Palin suggests that the Obama folks ripped off her campaign theme:

Every part of our campaign shouted "Change!" A change in campaign financing: we ran on small donations from all over the states, mostly from first-time political donors, and we turned back some large checks from big donors if we perceived conflicts of interest. A change from photo-op stops to honest conversation with actual voters. A change from emphasizing politics to emphasizing people. A change from smooth talk to straight talk -- even then.

We were amused a couple of years later when Barack Obama--one of whose senior advisers (come to think of it) had roots in Alaska -- adopted the same theme. Kris [Perry, her campaign manager] and I joked about it: "Hey! We were change when change wasn't cool!"

Because really -- after six years of George W. Bush, no one was really thinking a change of direction would be a good idea.

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Going Rogue, Chapter 2

The funniest sentence thus far in Going Rogue occurs about a third of the way through the second chapter when our heroine -- speaking through the Palinese translator Lynn Vincent -- declares that "life is too short to hold a grudge." This is a warm piece of advice that Sarah Palin predictably spends much of her time ignoring as she recounts her contentious early years in local and state politics. Few pages are allowed to turn without our deposed governor reminding us of the bêtes noires who interfered with her efforts to bring "common-sense conservatism" -- a phrase she's been loading into the wingnut beer bong for the past few days -- to the people of Wasilla and, soon enough, their fellow Alaskans. As Palin revealed in her first chapter, the first "big word" she learned how to spell was "different." And because different people are sometimes scary -- perhaps not President Black Man Terrorist scary, but scary in that ordinary, non-Negro way -- Palin knows that she'll have to deal with resistance along the road to glory.

Among the roster of liberal fascists, "good ol' boys," and uncooperative, low-level public employees with who find their way into Palin's esurient maw, we find the former Wasilla mayor John Stein, a man whose name Palin admits she can't pronounce and whose terrifying agenda seems to have rested entirely on the well-known communist wedge of building codes and land-use restrictions. Palin, by contrast, envisions Wasilla as a Hayekian paradise, where "laissez-faire principles" might crush liberalism as surely as her husband Todd scotched small woodland creatures with his snowmachine. Though she neglects to mention her campaign's emphasis on gun control, abortion and the cleansing magic of Christ's blood, Palin describes her eventual victory as a mandate for "no more politics-as-usual" -- by which I suppose she means badgering librarians, firing museum directors and police chiefs, and initiating regressive sales taxes to fund a costly sports complex on land for which the city had no clear title (land titles presumably being a big-government conspiracy to deprive The People of their squatters' rights). Along the way, Palin helps to turn her town into the "Honorary Duct Tape Capital of the World," an award bestowed by Wal-Mart in recognition of Wasilla's bone-deep commitment to not paying overbearing, know-it-all liberals to fix your shit. (Wasilla, you see, is an independent-minded place. "No community organizers necessary," she explains. Which is funny, because she's talking about President Barack Fanon Senghor!)

The rest of the chapter proceeds in the manner of skeet shoot, with Palin bitching about nearly everyone she encounters in public service, including her fellow candidates for the lieutenant governor's office in 2002, Frank Murkowski (her predecessor in the Governor's office), fellow commissioners on the oil and gas commission, and an unnamed array of "good ol' boys," corporate lobbyists and fat cats who would forever serve as foils for Palin's simulated populist tirades. Along the way, she wears her contempt for legislators proudly. Brutalizing the English language to convey her disdain, she describes them as people who "scratch disagreeable backs" for a living and who work in an environment where "the trading of favors [seems] to run through the ventilation system as a substitute for air." Indeed, for someone who professes several times in the book to having "Jeffersonian" views of government, she's awfully dismissive of republican institutions; with her belief that only the "lead dog" is able to have a clear view of public affairs, Palin unwittingly reveals herself in this chapter as someone who actually loathes collaborative public service. When fellow officials are unwilling to "get on board," she fires them (as she does in Wasilla) or shits on the floor and goes home (as she does with the oil and gas commission).

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Palin continues to believe that she has an open WATS line to Jesus, and when Chapter 2 ends, she's rocking her latest seedling and yammering away in prayer, asking for a sign from on high that she should return to public life and fuck some more things up.

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Going Rogue, Chapter 1

I should note at the outset that Going Rogue is substantially worse than even I could have predicted. The opening chapter is clearly supposed to bear several loads, including (1) establishing Palin's geographic and cultural bona fides; and (2) conveying her abiding love for Jeebus, family and Ronald Reagan. In each case, the results are pretty unimpressive.

For starters, Palin's ghost-polished descriptions of Alaska's landscape and cultural peculiarities are delivered with roughly the same verve as I'd expect to find in a mediocre historical novel written by someone who, at most, had visited the state on a cruise ship. We learn for example, the astonishing and widely-underpublicized fact that Alaskan nights are incredibly short during the summertime,

creating a euphoria that runs through our veins. Hour after hour, there is still more time and more daylight to accomplish one more thing. If we told our kids to be home before dark, we wouldn't see them for weeks.

Perhaps I haven't had enough experience with the "euphoria" of "accomplish[ing] one more thing" recently, but there's something really underwhelming about Palin's trek through the list of Generically Oddball Stuff about Alaska. Yes, people up here shoot a lot of megafauna; yes, people up here chop a lot of firewood; yes, people up here can grow gigantic heads of cabbage; yes, people up here are impressed by grazing sheep. But people up here also do tons of meth, beat the shit out of their kids, and half-purposely ram their cars into trees. When you remember that Sarah Palin is earning well over $1 million for this book, it's hard not to feel cheated when she reminds everyone that Alaska has glaciers bigger than Delaware.

Moving beyond the scenic and cultural moorings of chapter 1, we learn a bit -- all of it vaguely detailed -- about the roots of Palin's political beliefs. In a passage whose goofiness resists description, for example, we read about Palin's childhood immersion in the minutia of the Watergate investigation:

It amazed me that the whole country seemed riveted, unified by watching the events unfold. It was the first time since the moon landing that I'd seen that, so I knew Watergate had to be big. When Gerald Ford took over, I knew who he was because I remembered reading about him and seeing him a picture in a scholastic magazine. He'd been America's vice president then, sitting parade-style atop the backseat of a convertible, waving at the crowd. Now he was our president!

I'll concede that Sarah Palin was ten years old when Nixon resigned, but this is a brainless waste of a paragraph. When we consider that Palin traces her awareness of "the skewed priorities of government" to a ticket she received for underage snow-machining, one has to marvel at Sarah Palin's inability to say anything interesting about the most grotesque political conspiracy in the nation's history. She manages to write as if she's responding to a question from Charles Gibson, except that Charles Gibson is nowhere to be found.

Her ode to Reagan is similarly inept, larded with bog-standard wingnuttia like "[he] won the Cold War without firing a shot" and "[he] restored our faith" in America after the Carter interregnum. Reagan, we learn, "radiated confidence and optimism" and "had a steel spine." He believed in "ideas" like "cutting taxes" and "building a strong national defense." It's pretty vacant stuff all around, but I'm sure the second chapter will be a thousand times better.

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