Going Rogue

I like reading and I like politics, but if there ever was a book I know that would not make my Amazon shopping list in a million years, it's Sarah Palin's Going Rogue. I'm not even linking to it because, really, I don't want to make it any easier for any of you to buy it.

Anyway, in lieu of a real post on the book and Sarah Palin in general, I thought I would round up some of the funniest and damning critiques of this unabashedly batshit crazy woman.

Her nemesis, Andrew Sullivan:

"Going Rogue" is such a postmodern book that treating it as some kind of factual narrative to check (as I began to), or comparing its version of events with her previous versions of the same events (as I have), and comparing all those versions with what we know is empirical reality (so many lies, so little time) is just a dizzying task. The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious puree of such ghastly prose that, in the end, the book can only really be read as a some kind of chapter in a cheap nineteenth century edition of "Lives of the Saints." But as autobiography.

It is a religious book, full of myths and parables. And yet it is also crafted politically, with every single "detail" of the narrative honed carefully for specific constituencies. It is also some kind of manifesto - but not in the usual sense of a collection of policy proposals. It is a manifesto for the imagined life of an imagined Sarah Palin as a leader for all those who identify with the image and background she relentlessly claims to represent.

In this, the book is emblematic of late degenerate Republicanism, which is based not on actual policies, but on slogans now so exhausted by over-use they retain no real meaning: free enterprise is great, God loves us all, America is fabulous, foreigners are suspect, we need to be tough, we can't dither, we must always cut taxes, government is bad, liberals are socialists, the media hates you, etc etc.

Yglesias, being his usual matter-of-fact self:

In addition to displaying clear ignorance, on the campaign trail last year Sarah Palin demonstrated a habit of lying.

A review of the book on Foreign Policy's website:

Ultimately, Going Rogue goes rogue as a political memoir, demonstrating what can only be described as a persistent and guileless lack of knowledge of even basic foreign-policy or domestic political issues. It is what we might have expected from Palin. And it is much less than anyone should expect of a candidate for one of the most powerful offices on Earth.

Steve Walt, on the stupidity of the notion that being a "hockey mom" qualifies one for office:

I doubt if Ms. Palin would let someone perform surgery on one of her children (or even repair her car) simply because they had parenting experience or an entertaining life story. No, she'd want to make sure that the person in question actually knew what they were doing. Virtually all of us normally insist on genuine expertise when we hire anyone to do an important job -- whether it's carpentry or a cardiac bypass -- yet millions of people in this country seem to think that the most momentous decisions about our collective future can be entrusted to people who are sublimely comfortable in their own ignorance.

Obsidian Wings, dealing with Palin's complaints against Newsweek for its selection of a cover photograph of Palin in running shorts and looking pin-up-ish...that Palin herself agreed to for another magazine a few weeks back:

The bottom line is that Palin's a clown. She doesn't get a pass because her chosen clown persona is stereotypically feminine.

She caricatures herself. Day in and day out. Good for Newsweek for pointing and laughing.

The story is about why Sarah Palin is a problem for the GOP. The picture answers the question. She's a problem because she's a freak with no judgment who regularly makes a spectacle of herself. Obviously, she's a potential problem for America because she's an incompetent leader who supports terrible policies.

The New York Times review of the book, and where it directs its most pointed criticism:

The most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the news media, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million advance for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for disparaging comments by John McCain’s aides about her after the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunderheaded — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insisted, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

Although Ms. Palin writes that she is “proud of the senator” for being bold enough to put her on the ticket, some of her loudest complaints in this volume are directed at the McCain campaign’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt, ironically enough, was one of the aides to most forcefully make the case for putting her on the ticket in the first place, arguing to Mr. McCain, as Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their recent book, “The Battle for America 2008,” that she would shake up the race and help him get his “reform mojo back.” Over the weekend McCain aides fired back at Ms. Palin: Mr. Schmidt was quoted on Politico.com saying that charges about him were “all fiction.”

Back in 2008 Robert Draper reported in The New York Times Magazine that neither Mr. Schmidt nor Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, apparently saw Ms. Palin’s “lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability,” and that Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot, saw the idea of upending the chessboard as a maverick move.

All in all Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, ungrateful to the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

Nate Silver, arguing that she will definitely run in 2012:

Was quitting the Alaska governorship -- particularly in the sudden and disorganized way that Palin did it -- a decision characteristic of someone who carefully ponders all the facts and circumstances before jumping to a conclusion? Not hardly. Palin is impulsive, impatient, ambitious, thrill-seeking: not the type of politician to prudently wait for a better moment.

Slate, commenting on which American politician she most resembles:

According to an ABC News poll, only 38 percent of Americans consider her to be qualified to serve as president, and 60 percent consider her unqualified. (A CNN poll puts the qualified figure at 28 percent.) While many in the media made the mistake of underestimating her in the immediate aftermath of her selection as John McCain's running mate—she proved to have good political instincts and talent as a political performer—they are now overestimating her.

Indeed, the losing vice presidential candidate Palin most resembles is none other than Dan Quayle. Handsome, young, popular with the right-wing base, self-styled champion of family values, scourge of the "liberal media" and embodiment of Heartland America, Quayle likewise confounded observers in 1988 when Bush Sr. tapped him as his No. 2. (Only after Americans' prolonged exposure to George W. Bush did it become clear what Poppy Bush saw in Quayle.) Moreover, both Palin and Quayle, perhaps not coincidentally, enjoyed critical support from the journalist-operative Bill Kristol, whom Jacob Weisberg dubbed "Quayle's Brain" when he served as the vice president's chief of staff, and who helped push Palin onto the McCain team's radar screen. Quayle, too, we should recall, hit the best-seller list with his 1994 memoir, Standing Firm. And like Quayle, Palin seems destined—if she even seeks the presidency in 2012—to bow out early on, perhaps after the 2011 Iowa straw poll.

Matt Taibbi, calling her the country's first "WWE politician"

And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.

With Going Rogue, the 2012 reality show has already begun. As brainless political theater, she can’t be topped. It’s just too bad for conservatives that she happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed-off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman’s Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire, she’s “brilliant — fuckin’ shame it’s gonna end our careers, but still.”

I'll say this: I have never been as uniquely terrified of someone attaining office as I am of this woman. I'd sooner have Zaid Hamid and Shireen Mazari's love-child run Pakistan than this woman run America.

For those interested, my liveblogging post of the Palin-Biden debate last October.