On your reading list?

Oh wow! Sarah Palin and her writing assistant's new book is "currently the No. 1 pre-order item on Borders.com, and has been steadily within the top ten on Amazon" and "received a $5 million advance," according to Kate Zernike yesterday on her New York Times blog "Rolling Out Sarah Palin’s Side of the Story."
    So exciting! Says Zernike:

According to the A.P., Ms. Palin backs up other media accounts of how she was blocked when she wanted to give a concession speech on election night (Mr. McCain and his aides believed this would be unprecedented, and a generally bad idea, given her tendency for, as the book’s title puts it, “Going Rogue.”)

Rogue Palin eclipses Maverick McCain! Will Tina Fey revise her Saturday Night Live schtick?

[Palin] writes that she sat down with Katie Couric in part because she felt sorry for her, after Nicolle Wallace, a McCain aide, said Ms. Couric suffered from low self-esteem.

Wow, Sarah went on the show to buck Katie up! She has a heart of gold!

Exciting new reading for the sort of person who follows sports scores and celebrity tweets.

Sarah Barbiecuta

"Truly, Sarah Palin has come a long way," writes Gail Collins in today's New York Times (in a column ironically titled "Sarah's Straight Talk"). "When she ran for vice president, she frequently became disjointed and garbled when she departed from her prepared remarks. Now the prepared remarks are incoherent, too."

Collins mentions that Palin was the subject of a recent Vanity Fair article by Todd Purdum ("It Came from Wasilla"). I managed to read only about a fifth of that article because even Purdum seemed bored by the subject matter. But, according to Collins, Purdum says "that McCain campaign aides found it almost impossible to get Palin to prepare for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. And there is no sign, Purdum reported, that Palin has made any attempt to bone up on the issues so that next time around, she could run as a candidate who actually had some grasp of the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy."

Of course, there'll always be a large enough number of fools and jokesters¹ in this country to ensure that Palin can continue, as she will presumably want to, to enjoy a degree of celebrity. It's the American way.
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1. My friend Greg is no fool, but he's clearly a jokester: "I regularly wear a Palin/Joe the Plumber 2012 campaign button that an Obama Washington State delegate gave me." While I envy his detachment, I can't emulate it.

Fiery writing on the wall

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 5:07 PM, my friend Edwin wrote me:

"Joe the Plumber" says he has no plumbing license.
    Does no one in the McCain camp have a computer? Has no one there ever heard of Google? This company that has two employees, the owner and himself, I doubt has ever made $250,000.
    As I watched the debate I thought of a college that was going broke and all the heads gathered around the table trying to come up with a plan that could save the day. The door opens and the coach runs in shouting about how fired up the team is and how he believes they could get a bowl bid. Two guys get up from the table and give him a high-five while the others look at them like they've lost their minds.
    I miss the 60's. It was more fun watching this stuff on drugs; now it makes me want to cry.
    I see the light at the end; let us hope it's not a train.

I share Edwin's sense of foreboding. Despite the high hilarity afforded us by the crumbling McCain and preposterous Palin (whose pronouncements can be distinguished from those of Tina Fey only because Fey refrains from becoming incendiary), I can't shake off a terrible sense of doom. That McCain could be proud (or claim to be proud) of the Americans who come to his and Palin's rallies and jeer at The Other (the questionably brown man with the suspect names) is not just desperate, it is ominous, like fiery writing on a wall. My local morning newspaper reports that those very people cheered maniacally yesterday afternoon at a Palin rally within fifty miles of where I sit to write this. Oh, America.