“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.
