Over on Evangel, philosopher John Mark Reynolds live-blogged his reaction to reading Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. Although a fan and defender of Palin, JMR has become decidedly less enthused after reading her tome:
Practical wisdom is guided not just by common sense, but by reason and the experiences of generations of wise people from ages past. Palin knows this is true, but shows no knowledge of it.
Don’t tell me a plain speaking book has to be this devoid of ideas. Read Lincoln. He could get big ideas across in simple ways to farmers with primary school educations. Read Reagan. He was not Lincoln, but he did the same thing in a television age. When I was a kid, I read Conscience of a Conservative in some yellowing paperback and it made sense to me. For heaven’s sake, read William Jennings Bryan who sent the Grange through the roof with prose that sounds positively dialogicala compared to this book!
Teddy Roosevelt could thunder and denounce with the best of them, but he could write a book. Dwight Eisenhower won a war and then had someone ghost an awesome account of that win. If Palin is running for President, we needed more.
We don’t need a philosopher president, but we do need someone who can make our cause appear plausible to the half persuaded.
I want to like Palin. I love many things about her politics, but where oh where oh where are the ideas?
I hope I am wrong.
Read the rest and then check-out Reynolds’ ten final thoughts.
November 30th, 2009 | 10:06 am
Agreed.
November 30th, 2009 | 10:53 am
I believe that you may have forgotten why she wrote this book. It was a chance to refute or set the record straight on events that were reported on by the MSM that were not only inaccurate but malicious. This was not a policy book or a political map of her future. She was using this book to have a say in the details of her short time as the VP candidate for the Republican party. Lincoln never had a similar chore to write about at the same point in his career. Good God man, let her have one book about her experience with the vicious sharks circling her entire family without scolding her for not throwing in a road map for the future of mankind!
November 30th, 2009 | 11:46 am
I don’t believe the review is charitable at all. inspectorudy is quite right – it is not a policy book, nor a philosophy book, nor a book on her top ten favorite professors. The reviewer complains he can’t find a quote, then assumes the quote was fabricated. Because the reviewer can’t find a list of favorite teachers or classes, he assumes she learned little. (As a note, I went to Berkeley and had few memorable teachers. One was irritated he didn’t get his sabbatical so he showed us videos, in class, of his lectures on advanced digital signal processing from previous years. What an education!) The reviewer complains he gets no political philosophy, though he could have read her Hong Kong speech from earlier in the year. He imputes that Palin is always for Big Business, while ignoring her statements during the debate with Biden, where she talked about lenders taking advantage of common people. Many of his complaints are truly trivial. In the end, Palin is much like a Rorschach test – you see or don’t see your own predilections, and take it from there. For the reviewer, and for many in the ruling class, she’s not an intellectual, which appears to be one of the greatest sins of all.
November 30th, 2009 | 12:58 pm
Absent form this discussion is God’s perspective. Why has the Lord raised her up? For what good purpose?
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