Live Blog | ‘Rogue’ review
Column by Chris Graham
I’m plowing through Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and yes, I’ve finally gotten to the good parts, at least the first few.
It took 60 pages to get there. That’s longer than most of you would’ve gone, Palin fan or not.
Those first 60 pages were interminably long and drawn out.
I’m done complaining. I want to do my review as my reading continues, mainly because I’m not one with the kind of free time to just do a marathon-read.
(Which makes me like most actual fans of Palin. Which I admittedly am not.)
So here we go – with my Live Blog review of Going Rogue.
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Page 6: After taking us to the State Fair, Sarah Palin tells us that it was while waiting to take her daughter on a roller-coaster ride that she got the call from John McCain where he asked her if she wanted to help him change history.
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Page 34: Palin on meeting her future husband …
“When I saw him, my world turned upside down. I actually whispered, ‘Thank you, God.’”
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Page 42: Palin decides to enter the Miss Wasilla beauty contest, nervous about parading on stage after gaining her “Freshman 15.”
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Page 64: Palin decides to run for Wasilla City Council after being recruited by the city’s progressive leaders.
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Pages 65-66: Palin isn’t a fan of zoning.
“Valley residents, like other Alaskans, are not ‘master-planned-community’ kind of people. We are extremely independent, no community organizers necessary. Not a lot of zoning regulations needed either. We are do-it-yourselfers. … I agreed with that spirit of independence, and I voted in ways that honored people’s ability to think for themselves.”
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Page 75: She isn’t big on smoking bans, either.
“… (T)he cigarette smoke inside the cafe kind of nauseated me,” she wrote, explaining why she ended her Friday-morning routine of eating breakfast at a local restaurant when pregnant with her daughter, Piper, while she was mayor of Wasilla. “Instead of supporting a much-talked-about smoking ban at the time, though, I just stopped going to that restaurant. It eventually went smoke-free on its own, which is the way things like that should work.”
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Page 85: Her campaign for lieutenant governor falls short. The reason why: fundraising. “Unlike some other candidates, I can’t just be-bop all over the state raising money.”
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Page 87: Sarah and Todd get into a knockout, dragout when Sarah endorsed a candidate running for mayor of Wasilla running against Todd’s mom.
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Page 93: Palin is hired to serve as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Salary: $124,400 a year.
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Page 100-101: Way, way too much information about future ex-brother-in-law Mike Wooten. (She’s good at throwing people under busses.)
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Finally back at it …
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Page 116: Describing her gubernatorial-primary victory in 2006, Palin wrote – “With no negativity and with a highly energized grassroots campaign, we moved to the general election …”
“(N)o negativity,” eh? Should’ve thought about that in ’08.
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Page 135: The first “First Dude” reference.
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Nonsense Alert: Her first legislative director “turned out to be a BlackBerry games addict who couldn’t seem to keep his lunch off his tie.” Really? “The fact that his shirt was buttoned one button off and his shirttail was poking through his open fly didn’t exactly inspire confidence.”
What a petty loser.
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Thanks,Chris, for giving us your comments on the chapters you have read in Palin’s book. I, too, don’t have time to read a lot at any one time. I will eventually read the entire book when it gets to the Public Library. I’m curious about the contents but I don’t want to buy the book.
I’m looking forward to your future comments on the rest of the book.
Beverly
At first, I actually liked Palin.
The Republican strategy, if you could call it one, was to toss in a pretty female into the race but their two mistakes were having her run with a RINO left-leaning candidate who wanted to reach out across the aisle in good partisanship and one who reminds me of Teddy Ruxpin.
Their second mistake was employing a woman who hardly had a dime’s worth of worldly knowledge, making comments on how things should be in the world when she could barely point out countries on a map let alone make unqualified comments on how our foreign affairs should be handled.
By the time she mulled over the idea to wrestle after losing the race, I had lost all respect for Sarah Palin. Even before that, I reluctantly voted for McCain, wishing that the Republicans would have had less of a centrist moderate running and more of a Paleo-conservative candidate I’d have like to have seen being chosen.
I hope she doesn’t run again and even more so, let’s all hope McCain doesn’t run again either.
Instead of rallying around an ugly bus with her face emblazoned on it that carries her books, the Republican Party should seriously be launching a strategy where all of the moderates are ousted and fresh radical right wingers are entered into the foray. Further, it would do Sarah Palin good to just stay in Alaska.
Beverly,
Do a blog search on her book. They’re all out there steadily dissecting it.
With that, I wonder how much time Palin actually sat behind a computer working on this book.
Probably about the same amount of time as Mike Tyson did on his book.
Chris,
When Palin quit as Gov of Alaska, she did so to supposedly help bring about change to the great people of Alaska and the rest of America (also) from the outside.
I find it strange that she has had this incredible platform to influence policy and she has yet to offer up any real policy ideas. For instance, how would she go about fixing the ongoing credit crunch? How would she end the war in AfganistNAM? What would she do to put people back to work? I am sure if asked, she would offer to get “back to ya”, but the point is that she could have been talking about all the great ideas on Oprah. Instead, it was all catty she-said gosip. Could it be that the emporess has no clothes?
Brett – 150 pages in, yeah, clearly no clothes there. The Palin mantra, such as it is, is the basic boilerplate from GOP platforms.
Perhaps that’s her appeal. She doesn’t make things complicated. All you have to do is say something nice about Ronald Reagan, say something demeaning about anybody who shows the slightest bit of initiative or evidence of education, pledge to keep taxes low, even if your record reflects that you’re being hypocritical saying that, play the “I know you want me” sex-appeal card, and there you go, you’ve got Sarah Palin.
I really wanted to find more. That’s why I paid thirty bucks for that god-awful book. It might be there, but close to halfway through, no, nothing.
Palin said the two most important words of the summer “death panels” while carrying for the kids. Just a quick note on facebook and she knocked the Democrats off their message.
The whole brouhaha over health care this summer was attributable to her Facebook post? Really?
Looks like it isn’t just the media with a Palin fixation.
The health care deadline was July 31, then September, then October, then the end of the year, then ……
And this has … what to do with Palin’s Facebook post?
She said “death panels.” The right became more “fired up, ready to go.” More resistance in the nation slows down the bill.
When you’re trying to knock down “death panels,” you’re not advancing.
The right was plenty “fired up, ready to go” before she typed on her Facebook page.
If anything, she set the cause back by throwing out an illegitimate argument against a milieu of otherwise legitimate complaints on spending and the impact on Medicare.
Hurry up and finish the book. Can I have it when you’re done?
First instinct – yes, you can have it.
Second instinct – maybe we should do a contest, get people to write in 50 words or less why they want it, etc.
Drawback to the second course of action – do I really want to judge that contest?
Feedback? Other folks interested in my copy of the book when I’m done?
The contest will not be — take a picture of yourself with a hockey stick like Levi Johnston did.
No way!