Nte read and liked Heather's review of Going Rogue: An American Life:

"Having read the Christian Bible in its entirety at least a dozen times, I know this one thing to be true: If you turn to it with a point to prove -- from perfunctory piety to heinous society -- you can do it. You can take a chapter or a verse out of ...more Having read the Christian Bible in its entirety at least a dozen times, I know this one thing to be true: If you turn to it with a point to prove -- from perfunctory piety to heinous society -- you can do it. You can take a chapter or a verse out of context and present it as backup for any theory you can concoct. Ask Martin Luther, or the Ku Klux Klan. Entering books with an agenda is a precarious business indeed; so when I picked up Going Rogue I promised I would silence the part of me that considers Sarah Palin to be the most dangerous political player in America, and try to learn something.

Going Rogue is not so different than, say, Living History or Madam Secretary, in the sense that it is a self-serving political memoir that intends to frame a legacy. In this, Palin's book succeeds. I found her to be affable and earnest. I empathized with her plights; I identified with her small-town sensibility.

The AP has already fact-checked the thing into the ground, and found dozens of gray areas and outright lies. Again, though, that's another standard in political memoirs. It came back to bite Hillary Clinton in the ass during the Democratic primary last year, and if you were to consider her autobiography and Madeline Albright's as the only text on American foreign policy in the '90s, you'd find yourself believing that the debacles in Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia never happened. ("Whoops! Genocide! We had no idea that was going on; we thought it was a playground fist-fight.")

Where Palin's memoir veers from the established course is the full-on axe-grinding.

John McCain's camp knew Palin was going to stretch the truth and name names. Before the book's release, McCain told his team not to fight back. Of course, they didn't realize how ugly it was going to be -- and now they've changed their tune. Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis and Nicolle Wallace bear the brunt of Palin's outrage. The three of them -- as well as John McCain -- have already released statements and participated in interviews to refute Palin's claims that she was manipulated into the now-infamous Kate Couric interview, or that she was suckered into spending $150,000 on campaign duds, or that the McCain team charged $50,000 to vet her.

But all that stuff: Uncomfortable? Yes. Dangerous? No.

If Sarah Palin were smart, she'd liken herself to Ben Franklin. He, too, started out as a blue-collar worker (who signed his name "B. Franklin, printer" for his entire life). He was a self-deprecating champion of the middle class. Unlike George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, he was approachable, the kind of guy you'd invite to the pub. And while he was a pragmatic political thinker, he wasn't what you'd call profound. But Sarah Palin is not intelligent enough to make that connection. In fact, Palin is not intelligent enough, full-stop.

And here's the part that's scary: she doesn't give a shit. Her derision for mental agility, especially the kind one gains from -- gasp! -- "elitist education" is palpable, and her ability to make other people believe that "intellect" is a dirty word is frankly terrifying.

The best example from Going Rogue is when she writes about evolution. She says she doesn't "believe in the theory that human beings -- thinking, loving beings -- originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea" or that humans are "monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees."

You know what, Sarah Palin? No one believes that! Not even cartoon characters would make it that simple!

Evolution -- like economic crises and nuclear proliferation and preemptive wars and covert wars and climate change and international human rights belligerence and deterioration of schools and energy policy and infrastructure -- is a complex conundrum that can't be shaken down to comic portrayals and written-off or solved with home-town charm.

That's the chilling thing thing about Going Rogue: the idea Palin presents that a person shouldn't be educated beyond her faith, that a simple belief in God is enough to guide a country. Even the most obtuse student of history knows that's a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Washington didn't believe it; neither did Adams or Jefferson or Lincoln or Roosevelt. There's a chance Ronald Reagan believed it, but Mikhail Gorbachev didn't, and in the end, he was the one who "brought down that Wall!" If Gorbachev hadn't been a patient, patient man, both the U.S. and Russia would probably be sitting at the bottom of their respective oceans right now -- along with Reagan and Palin's cowboy hats.(less) "