"Wasilla residents have been subject to attempts to unlawfully appoint council members, statements that have been shown to be patently untrue, unrepentant backpedaling, and incessant whining that her only enemies are the press and a few disgruntled supporters of Mayor Stein. Mayor Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth."
It was no accident that Mrs. Palin's ability to lie and dissemble became such a repeated trope that this author named the book "The lies of Sarah Palin." The catalogue that chronicles the trail of Mrs. Palin's lies is simply too numerous to list in a single book review. They cover virtually every area of this fundamentalism Christian's life: intra-personal -- she and all of the women except her sister Heather got pregnant before they were married, yet she was chairman of the "abstinence movement in Alaska;" she was just benchwarmer on the championship basketball team but claimed to have scored the wining basket; almost everything she claimed on her resume while being vetted by McCain was discovered after the fact to be either lies half-truths or outright untruths.
Professionally she was involved in a decade long vendetta to fire her brother-in-law from the police department because he was divorcing her sister. She fired a whole slew of state officials who refused to fire him. She had a similar vendetta against a Librarian who refused to burn certain books that Palin found offensive to her religion. During a bitter winter a Northern Alaskan Indian Tribe was losing it battle for survival, but Palin repeatedly denied the use of State helicopters to airlift food already donated by charities, etc.
Altogether, the vignettes in this book prove her to be another Christian hypocrite, morally shallow, power hungry and obsessively vindictive with a revenge memory like an elephant. She is a politician who ran off from her responsibilities as the Governor of a state, yet still feels qualified and entitled to be on the national ticket of one of the nation's major political parties. She leaves in her wake, a trail of unfinished business, failures in offices, from manager of an oil and gas project to Governor of the State. But most of all, she has double-crossed and betrayed the people who helped her up the ladder of success.
Thus the book also raises, in its subtext, an even larger issue about the nature of U.S. politics that would allow the likes of Mrs. Palin to rise to the top of the heap?
It seems that with Mrs. Palin's entry on the Republican ticket, we have now entered a new more dangerous era where substantive qualifications are bypassed in favor of ideological "gloss." Where "red meat" emotional issues are allowed to trump the substantive concerns of most Americans. We have a complex nation with world-class problems. How can we instead of looking for the "best and the brightest," decide to settle for worse and the most inept? Arguably, doing so opens up a whole new more dangerous window for demagogues of the Palin ilk to thrive: They get rich quickly, gain notoriety, and win elective offices solely by selling cheap "ideological snake oil." They then have their moment in the sun, screw up the country, and then move on.
For sure, Mrs. Palin is not the first to do this; nor will she be the last. However, she may be the first who has put together "a perfect storm" of all of the most dangerous qualities of a demagogue in a single package: she is mean-spirited, inept, vindictive, and lazy, but can play all the emotional chords in the correct keys of the lower octaves of America's divisive undercurrents.
And although she has been repeatedly and clearly exposed as a substantive lightweight in all her national interviews, she remains an attractive candidate? In all the interviews I have seen her lack of knowledge and preparation on issues have been a world-class embarrassment: she cannot construct a coherent substantive sentence beyond prepared sound bites and memorized catch phrases. Her discourse comes through as confusing "word salads?" We all witnessed this first hand in her Katie Couric and Charlie Rose interviews. Only two decades ago, she would have been "gonged" off the national stage?
In the Couric interview, to put it charitably, she was like a deer caught in headlights. As a VP candidate, she had read no books or newspapers and had no ideas about any of the issues. Nothing she said made any sense even to those of us who was pulling for her not to embarrass herself? With Charlie Rose, she sat mute next to New Mexico's very skilled politician Janet Napolitano. In fact Napolitano had to come to her rescue on no more than three occasions. The author describes her level of knowledge as being "barely at the level of a high school civics class." (page 135). Yet she has risen to the level of running for the Vice Presidency of the United States of America, and now is being considered for a run at the Presidency in 2012? Go figure?
I do not know how such an eventuality can be viewed in any terms other than as an immense tragedy for our nation. However, it is not Mrs. Palin who is to be blamed, but the sorry state we Americans have allowed our democratic dialogue and processes to drop. Surely we have not descended so far into the abyss of divisiveness that ideology now completely trumps intelligence and substantive preparedness? If this is so, I see no hope remaining for this nation. Five Stars
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