News of the Restless

Bwahahahaha. Where else? Planted firmly, barbed-end-first, in the ass-cheek of a woman who thought she could take the shortcut to queen-bee status:

SARAH Palin is said to have pocketed a $7 million advance for the 400-page memoir she turned in four months early, but she might not have such an easy time on the lecture circuit.

After quitting as governor of Alaska in July, Palin signed with the top-notch Washington Speakers Bureau, which also reps George W. Bush, Laura Bush, Condoleezza Rice, hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger, LA Dodgers manager Joe Torre and magician David Blaine.

Palin’s bookers are said to be asking for $100,000 per speech, but an industry expert tells Page Six: “The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot.”

Oh noes! Why do you suppose that is? Oh, probably only because she IS one.

And why do you suppose THAT is? Hmmm…

“Palin is so uninteresting to so many groups — unless they are interested in moose hunting,” said our insider. “What does she have to say? She can’t even describe what she reads.”

Does she read? I know Dubya read ONE book, or at least pretended to read part of it–one far below what’s par for a man his age. Judging from what her daughter’s ex has to say, the woman who talked of banning books as mayor of Wasilla is probably no great reader herself; why else would she try to usurp the local librarian and impoverish the public bookshelves?

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Levi:

I actually never saw Sarah reading much at all–once in a blue moon, I’d see her reading a book, and I’ve never seen her read a newspaper. The Frontiersman and the Anchorage Daily News were always there in the morning, but the only one who looked through them was Todd.

Hmmm. Does she at least hunt moose? Oh, deer:

Sarah Palin has said she’s a hockey mom and a hunter, but that’s really not the case. She pays no attention to her kids when the cameras aren’t around. Track and I grew up playing hockey together, and I only saw her at about 15 percent of his games. People think that Sarah likes hunting, fishing, and camping, but she doesn’t. She says she goes hunting and lives off animal meat–I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen her touch a fishing pole. She had a gun in her bedroom and one day she asked me to show her how to shoot it. I asked her what kind of gun it was, and she said she didn’t know, because it was in a box under her bed.

People would send Sarah big painted portraits of herself. Most of them went in the garage, but she once asked me to help her put one up in the house. So I put the little tab in the back and she told me she could handle it from there. But when I came back, it was sideways. About the only thing she knows now is Gucci and Prada.

Sounds like she wasn’t really as much in touch with the huntin’ and fishin’ crowd as she made herself out to be.

I’m guessing that she was also rather out of touch with the news, and thus, collectively speaking, the people. Which is kind of sad when you consider that she had an entire state full of ’em to govern, and a governor’s job, among other things, is to be aware of issues in the local news, the better to be able to address what needs doing, competently and in a timely manner. Not just to provide lip service and window dressing, but action on the people’s behalf.

But clearly, all of that was not even on Sarah Palin’s radar. Levi Johnston again:

Sarah was always in a bad mood and she was stressed out a lot. Sometimes she would wonder why she took the job as governor. It was too hard, she said; there was so much going on.

[…]

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make “triple the money.” It was, to her, “not as hard.” She would blatantly say, “I want to just take this money and quit being governor.” She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out. It seemed like she couldn’t handle the job anymore. I think that she was just through with it all or that she’d become used to getting everything she wanted handed to her. She’d rather take the money and keep that kind of lifestyle. When a magazine offered six figures to be at the hospital when Bristol gave birth, she said yes at first but then told us not to do it.

No consistency of word or deed; no consistency between word and deed; nothing consistent at all, except the overarching theme: “Gimme money, lotsa money, yum yum yum more money.” Greed, ambition and self-promotion: Check. Work ethic: Um, what work ethic?

In everything she has ever done, Sarah Palin is the embodiment of attention deficit disorder; a Jill of all trades, and a mistress of none. Need I bring up her dubious academic record to underscore the point? She ended up, after six years, with one journalism degree, which she invoked at every opportunity during her VP campaign, but at the same time, she no longer reads newspapers. Well, duh; she never wrote for them, either, even at school. Makes sense when you consider that she was originally shooting for TV. Maybe she figured that was the easiest way to fame and fortune, as well as to capitalize on those Miss Wasilla looks!

For someone like that to aspire to writing a book–well, it doesn’t surprise me that she had help. A lot of it. How else to explain the fact that she pooped the seven-million-dollar manure pile out in such record time? And indeed, there is a “collaborator”. This is one of those “as told to” stories, although it’s doubtless not being billed as such.

I’m gonna go wayyyyy out on a limb here and say that judging from the overall pattern of things, the “collaborator” did the grunt work, transcribing the Paliness’s semi-coherent burblings into some semblance of a readable narrative. I do hope she’s being paid well for her time and efforts, although I suspect she’s probably not being paid nearly as well as the woman for whom she’s ghosting.

But meanwhile, t
here is the question of whether this book will even earn out that very fat advance. The lecture circuit thing’s early flop is, along with all those other plot twists, something of a foreshadowing. I’m an English major, as well as having studied journalism; in six years, I earned two degrees from just two schools. I know how to recognize familiar patterns and well-worn storylines. I already know how this will go:

First, I see bookstore clerks grumbling over having to stock this parvum opus front and centre, at the expense of real literature. Sales will seem brisk at first, then drop off dramatically as word goes out that it’s a damp squib, rather than the firecracker the media hype has led us to expect.

Then, to save face, there will come a last-minute bulk buy order from a certain familiar Mr. Mellon Scaife, who has so kindly subsidized the wingnut-welfare cottage industry lo these many years.

And soon after that, the Conservative Book Club (!) will be making this one of their featured “3 for $1” introductory offerings. The chattering classes will chatter away, and so, alas, will Sarah–doing the talk-show circuit in lieu of lectures, and carefully skirting the hard questioners, of course. FUX Snooze will talk her up, and everyone else will courteously pretend neutrality and wish her well, while cringing inwardly at having to go through the whole Palin rigamarole yet again.

Meanwhile, cheaply-purchased but unread copies of The Book will be propping doors open and gathering dust on coffee tables before making their shambling way to the used-book market, along with the various tomes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Jonah Goldberg.

Finally, remainder tables will be groaning under the weight of hundreds of unsold copies of Going Rogue, deeply discounted. After even that fails to unload very many of them, the covers will be torn off all the unsold copies, and the remainder returned to sender to be pulped. The rest, as they say, is toilet paper.

Et voilà! Another Great American Mavericky Success Story (TM) is born. You betcha!