The Mudflats

“Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here”
Dante Alleghieri, about Hell

“Abandon Truth All Ye Who Enter Here”
Me, about this:

Well, I hope they file this sucker in the fiction section or they’re going to have some ’splainin to do!

I read a couple weeks ago, when the announcement was made that Going Rogue was going to be released months early, but that they still had to do the final edits and fact checking.  Anyone who’s been paying attention to Sarah Palin got a good chuckle out of that one.  Fact checking Palin’s memoir?  It almost sounds like a word problem for 8th grade math.

If Harper Collins has a team of five fact checkers, and they work for 10 hours a day, and it takes 18 hours to fact check the average page, and her memoir is 400 pages long, when will the book be ready to go to print? (tap tap tap on calculator)  If they take weekends off (and who wouldn’t have to?) that would be 36 weeks.  Obviously, THAT didn’t happen, so we are left to do the dirty work ourselves.  This is good news and bad news for Sarah Palin.  The good news for her is that she gets to bask in the warm rosy glow of attention from the media she hates, but the bad news is that the news is not going to be good.  The last time the media was left with the job of investigating Palin, it didn’t turn out too well for the then candidate.

Already news organizations and alert journalists and writers are picking apart the excerpts of Going Rogue that have been made available to the press today.  Geoffrey Dunn, who is writing a book on Palin already has  “The First Ten Lies from Going Rogue” on The Huffington Post.

Not surprisingly the first lie is right on the cover.  No point drawing things out and making us wait.

1)  The Cover Byline: Palin didn’t write the book by herself. Most books with known ghostwriters list their co-author’s name on the cover. In this case it was Lynn Vincent (a well-known homophobe). Going Rogue does not.

Other fact checkers include AP News, who gave a detailed breakdown of claims and the facts that refute them HERE.  They do say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s that article summed up for you in one handy visual.

This book is going to keep Andrew Sullivan busy for months. 

But let me just say that my first objection comes even before the first lie.  She had me until “Rogue.”  That’s right, she was able to write one whole word (Going) before the first head bang moment.  I wrote a blog post a while back about the ugly irony of the book title, and talked about it on the Rachel Maddow Show.  It is also the subject of the essay I wrote for the book “Going Rouge – An American Nightmare.”  The book contains essays by many others whom anyone would be proud to hang out in a book with – like Jim Hightower, Max Blumenthal, Naomi Klein, Joe Conason, Jane Hamsher, Mike Taibbi, Shannyn More and a host of others.  They’re stuck between the covers with me, and they can’t get out.  (I flash you a sinister smile, and rub my hands together like a fly)

And just to give you all a smattering of what you can expect from that “other book” that you’ll actually WANT to buy, you’ll be seeing some excerpts of Going Rouge up on The Huffington Post this weekend, including my essay, which I hope you will enjoy.   The whole book will be available on November 16, and only available on line HERE.

Brace yourself.  Between the interview on Oprah, Going Rouge, and Going Rogue, Palin is going to be back in the spotlight this week with a vengeance, like it or not.  So, grab yourself an adult beverage or a cup of tea, and some popcorn and snuggle in.  Because you’ll have only two options – buy yourself a ticket to an uninhabited island, or make the best of it and jump in.