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“Don't call it a comeback/ I've been here for years.”
– LL Cool J, Mama Said Knock You Out

This book came out Tuesday, but I feel like I am tardy to the party, after a week of Palinalia, after Oprah and Baba Wawa and all the op-eds and fact checks. Blogger Andrew Sullivan, environmental groups, McCain campaign staffers and Senator McCain claim she is fibbing about everything from her record to her parenting to the titular roguery.

Can some journo fact-check the following? Picture it: a gruelling road trip through the wilds of Alaska. Our plucky heroine and her team are on the campaign trail, scrappy underdogs in the gubernatorial race, driving to “the sound of the Black Eyed Peas and an old LL Cool J remix.”

Obama's not the only leader hip to hip-hop. Sarah was change before change was cool. So she says. Repeatedly. She also dressed up as Tina Fey before Fey dressed up as her. And she would have thrown the first Tea Party protest, if there were Tea Party protests then.

Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin, HarperCollins, 408 pages, $34.99

She does not name the LL Cool J track, but I'm guessing it's Mama Said Knock You Out. I can picture her bobbing along to lines like “shotgun blast the herd” and “I think I'm gonna bomb a town.”

Going Rogue is as pugilistic as LL's rap. The haters in the Lower 49 don't know the real Sarah. She's been running things up North the right way, the commonsense conservative way, for years. And things were going great, until the lawyers and reporters from Outside ruined everything.

Palin, and her wing-nut ghostwriter, Lynne Vincent, insist that Palin's life is extraordinary in both senses. She's led a blessed life, an exceptional life, but she is also extra-ordinary, like Joe the Plumber.

Sarah wants to be with her beloved people, the Real Americans, but politicians and the media, the Fake Americans, tear everyone apart.

“ I had seen eagles and dragonflies and ptarmigan fly, but I had never seen a person fly ”— Sarah Palin in Going Rogue

Going Rogue is a mix of blue-sky optimism, red meat for the base, and purple prose. She expresses her professed love of words in the same way she loves the majestic moose or the mighty salmon: She kills, eats and excretes them.

Sarah contains multitudes: bookish nerd and relentless jock, energy expert and hockey mom, hard-driving politico and fun-lovin' Alaskan, a good Christian who never cusses and condones torture.

She is not the Caribou Barbie the McCain machine rolled out in 2008. She didn't want all those pricey duds. Nope, she'd rather gut fish in her Carhartts and Sorel boots. Those beauty pageants meanies mock? She did that for scholarships. She's not just a pretty face.

But there her mug is, starin' atcha from the cover. And the cover's on the side of her tour bus. And the book features dozens of pages of colour photos.

Palin was, in part, a ploy to lure ladies, but most of her fans are men. And when those dudes defend her by arguing that all us bitches are just jealous cuz she's cute, they don't win converts to their cause.

Sarah complains about victim feminism. But she also pitches a hissy when the sisterhood fails to rush to her defence. Some liberal women dislike her for being so anti-choice, and some conservative women think she should stay home with her darling brood. And some of us gals think she is wrong about things like policy and governance.

I don't care about her prodigious ovaries or poufy hair. I object to her slavish devotion to Reagan. The most overrated president is Sarah's hero, right up there with God and Todd. Insisting Americans need more Reaganomics, after the disaster that was Dubya, is like recommending they gain another billion pounds and burn twice as much fossil fuel.

Going Rogue is sentimental and snarky, sometimes in one sentence. Of her first days with the First Dude, she says Todd was “shy and quiet … typical of Yupik men, who, unlike some others, don't feel the need to fill up the air around them with words all the time.” Jeez, whoever could those chatty fellas be?

Her hymns to the outdoors are the textual equivalent of Thomas Kinkade paintings. Her tales of family life? Sticky sweet as a Cinnabon. The contrast between family and the people, and politics and the press, becomes more stark as the campaign tumbles into the crapper. McCain's “experts” do something Sarah cannot abide, and then a call from Track in Iraq, or quip from Piper, gives her strength to carry on.

The evil McCain operatives smoke and swear and scheme. They will not let her talk about Obama pallin' around with terrorists. They will not let her see the people. They will not let her try to save Michigan. She cannot even jog. Those elitists sold her a bill of goods. They were never going to let Sarah be Sarah! There was nowhere else to go but rogue.

I will let Sarah be Sarah. Shine on, you crazy diamond:

1. “I had seen eagles and dragonflies and ptarmigan fly, but I had never seen a person fly. … Why couldn't someone just propel herself up into the air and get it done? I stopped and looked up at the summer sky then down at the dirt road below. Then I simply jumped. … I wanted to fly more than I worried about what I looked like. My knees took most of the impact …” What precocious maverickitude. Wee Sarah wanted to see if gravity was needless, like most laws.

2. On son Track: “From the beginning, I was head over heels in love with him, and convinced I was the most important person in his world.” When most moms say this, the baby is the important one.

3. Other people use progressive as a synonym for liberal, but Palin prefers “the more common sense spirit of ‘progressing' our young city by providing tools for the private sector to grow and prosper.” Like Humpty Dumpty, Palin believes words mean whatever she wants them to. See also: Why name her kids, when she can noun them?

4. On a marathon: “When I finished that hellish exercise, I considered it one of my greatest accomplishments because it just hurt so bad.” Real Americans suffer and walk it off. Health care is for elitist pantywaists and welfare bums.

5. “There was a bright spot in Philly and his name was Joe Lieberman.”

Dang. That campaign must have been painful.

Laura Penny lives in Halifax. She has eaten moose meat.