Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

After receiving a $1.25 million advance from HarperCollins, the publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch, Palin huddled with a ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, to concoct a memoir called Going Rogue: An American Life. We’ll never know what each woman contributed, but the book exquisitely captures Palin’s knack for getting facts wrong. Each chapter begins with an aphorism, allowing her to continue in the proud Reagan tradition of attributing quotations to famous people who never said them. The biggest howler is the one that kicks off chapter 3: “Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it—with their lives.” Though Palin assigns this nugget of wisdom to the famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, its actual author was the Native American activist John Wooden Legs. Such bloopers didn’t trouble Palin’s fans, who propelled Going Rogue to number one on the New York Times best-seller list.