As more bits from Sarah Palin's memoir trickle out, The Huffington Post reports:
In the acknowledgments section of her book "Going Rogue", obtained by the Huffington Post on Friday, Sarah Palin thanks her friends in the media--by first name only:
To some media professionals whom I admire because you don't let anyone tell you to sit down and shut up, please keep making the idiots' heads spin. Thanks for not taking our Freedom of the Press for granted, you bold and patriotic, fair and balanced media folks. Keep calling it like you see it: Amanda, Andrew, Ann, Bill(s), Bob, Cal, Dennis, Dick, Eddie, Fred, Glenn, Greta, Hugh, Joey, John, Jonah, Larry, Laura, Lou, Mark, Mary, Michael, Michelle, R.A.M., Rich, Rush, S.E., Sean, Tammy, Walter.... And there are more. I join you in standing up for what is right. Remember that as your voice is heard and your spine is stiffened, the spines of others are stiffened, too.
Some of the first names seem easily attached to last names--Ann Coulter, Bill(s) O'Reilly & Kristol, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, for instance--while others aren't quite as clear.
Fred must be Fred Barnes, Hugh must be Hugh Hewitt, Jonah is probably Jonah Goldberg, etc. Am I the only one outraged that Palin did not include Matthew Continetti on this list? The poor kid has been mocked mercilessly by fellow conservatives for giving up a career in journalism to become a full-time Palin courtier, and the former governor refuses to thank him. Where is her sense of loyalty? Where is her sense of decency? (I will retract these comments if he makes the Dedication page).
Meanwhile, the Associated Press, which also has a copy of the book, has begun to fact check it. Palin's falsehoods and exaggerations are not shocking in the least, but the excerpts are a hint that the book--which I had been perversely looking forward to--might be a tough slog. A taste [on why she ran for office]:
Was it ambition? I didn't think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons.
Yikes.
Update: Christopher Hitchens, in a Newsweek pan of Continetti's book, makes a smart point about Palin and the Weekly Standard elites who have embraced her:
The Palin problem, then, might be that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. If she were ever to get herself to the nation's capital, the teabaggers would be just as much on the outside as they are now, and would simply have been the instruments that helped get her elected. In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them. It's also much more dangerous, because it meanwhile involves giving a sort of respectability to ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump. The Weekly Standard (itself not exactly a prairie-based publication) might want to think twice before flirting with popular delusions and resentments that are as impossible to satisfy as the demand for a silver standard or a ban on the teaching of Darwin, and are for that very reason hard to tamp down. Many of Palin's admirers seem to expect that, on receipt of the Republican Party nomination, she would immediately embark on a crusade against Wall Street and the banks. This notion is stupid to much the same degree that it is irresponsible.
Update II: From the Times' review:
In the course of this book, she quotes or alludes to Pascal, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Paine, Pearl S. Buck, Mark Twain and Melville...