For a woman who the normally sharp and relatively sober Christopher Hitchens recently claimed sunk the McCain Campaign, she sure can sell a book. Although Going Rogue doesn’t hit the shelves for another 7 Tuesdays, as of 1456-CST, it sits at numero dos on Amazon’s top sellers, nestled in-between Dan Brown’s latest howler and Glenn Beck’s latest screed.

It’s rather refreshing, especially considering the carping that is still going on about Palin and her lack of intellectual heft. The New York Post ran a hit-piece in C-minor today quoting, as always “sources from inside of somewhere” that Palin’s $100,000 lecture fee is hard sell because, and I quote, “…basically, they think she’s a blithering idiot.” [New York Magazine, per HotAir, is already call bull on the story]. Ah, the power of unnamed sources.  

What are we to think of people who still think Palin is a “blithering idiot?” Frankly, I think they’re few and far-between, but this meme will not die. Just as its much easier to call the 56 percent of Americans racist who don’t support Obamacare, so too is it easier to call Sarah Palin stupid than admit regret over having an abortion in one’s twenties while regretting never getting married when one is in their forties. It’s easier to think of Palin as an idiot than search one’s soul for a moment while asking ‘how the hell did this woman accomplish all that she has … before 50?

But the slander lives on, carried on the backs of anonymous sources, insiders close to everything but reality and in the roach motel of cable networks that talk about the unfortunate incivility of political debate out of one side of the mouth while referring to people protesting the current administration as “teabaggers” out of the other. 

The slander wouldn’t die after Palin mopped the floor with the current Veep during the Great Veep Debate of Oh-Eight, another one of those heralded geniuses the Donkeys trot out every four years to bray about GOPers wanting to kill old people, place illegals in internment camps while returning the fairer sex back to the barefoot-preggo paradigm of the domestic sciences racket. The meme didn’t die after Palin published an op-ed in WaPo talking about energy policy, and it didn’t die during her late summer Facebooking that did what The Smartest People in the Room could not: she defined the debate by writing language Americans can understand. For a blithering idiot, she sure does seem to have the pulse of vox populi, at least the part that doesn’t show up to protests in waves of matching outfits, pre-printed signs and bloodlust.

Palin, whether speaking or writing, does not come off as a blithering idiot, nor does she come off as a stuffy academic type who has to double-qualify everything she says. She speaks and writes her mind, which is why she is so popular with so much of the country. While TDL’s spoken, unscripted words are jammed with more uhs, ums and ahs than a doped-out rube appearing on Cops, Palin’s speech is smooth, rarely qualified and not migraine-inducing to listen to. The objective listener, agreeing with her or not, will at least understand where she stands, and it doesn’t take nine months of wrecking the economy while making American Foreign Policy (FoPo) into a global laughing stock to get an idea of how she views the world.

Unlike The Dear Leader (TDL), she didn’t have to create straw men to make her case, she wrote what she believed which is part of the reason why her unreleased book is already taking its stairway to publishing heaven. The Straw Man has become TDL’s favorite rhetorical device, and one feels for Sasha and Mahlia as they go to get ice cream with the Public Appearance Maker in Chief. I eagerly anticipate the post-Hagen-Daaz presser from hell after one of these events:

Reporter: Mr. President, what did you and the girls decide on?

TDL: Well, Malia wanted chocolate and insisted that was the only flavor that’s right for the Obamas, but Sasha wanted vanilla and insisted there’d be no other flavor on the table. Let me be clear: I’m not about these old partisan divides where some people want vanilla and others want chocolate, that’s why it was imperative that we bought a quart of orange sherbert.

Reporter: But nobody wanted orange sherbert-

TDL: Exactly. Next question…

Part of the Mainstream Media’s (The Medea) loss of credibility owes to this penchant of using unnamed sources to tear down people the reporter/ed board/publisher doesn’t like, while conversely using the same sources to build up people they slobber over. Like Pavlovian canines with reporter’s notebooks, the idea of “unnamed” or – more properly – “insider” sources bashing Palin, her family and her devotees is as tasty as kibble wrapped in Prime Rib; newspapers, magazines and the like cannot resist the glee with which those presumably close to Palin relish tearing her down so long as they don’t have to own the statement.

One imagines the pornographic slobber dripping from David Shuster’s lower slack jaw as “source close to Palin” Nicolle Wallace insists that Palin was unaware that humans are now capable of space travel, or “unnamed source” Steve Schmidt insisted on background that the rowdy Palin clan tried to steal the towels, sheets and pillows from every hotel they stayed at during the campaign (so far as I know, these are the only slanders those two haven’t thrown against the Medea wall to see if it’ll stick).

As I made my way through journalism school in the 1990s, I repeatedly asked why hard news reporters didn’t have to put an –R, -D, or -I after their byline so the reader would know, politically and philosophically, where the scribe is coming from. Curiously, I never got a straight answer, but I didn’t need one: most Medea journalists are weasels, and the few honest ones no doubt sleep at night with a quart-of-Jack-and-Lithium cocktail. Happily, The Medea’s own excess has made this simple idea unnecessary: with very few exceptions, if it’s news and you’re reading it on paper, it was written by someone situated just to the left of TDL on the political landscape.

Palin’s rise in the Amazon charts serves several purposes for people like me, the unsophisticated trogolodytes of the world who have the hopeful audacity to not rely on the government for anything other than pothole-riddled roads and a drastically weakened national defense while we go about working, paying our taxes and contributing to what’s left of the American economy.

First, it’s a simple matter of vindication, not that any was needed. The continued mockery of Palin was just the beginning – like the hills of fire ants that seem to spread overnight in my neck of the woods, the wholesale smearing of Palin spread to Joe the Plumber; then to the April 15 tea party protesters; then to the “angry mobs” of people attending town hall events where they were insulted, berated and talked-down to by entitled elected leaders; and finally, to all of us who don’t agree with the rapid injection of the Nationalization Virus into sector after sector of our private economy. Palin, whether she chose it or not, is the only symbol of Fed Up willing to take on TDL head on, even if she has to do it from a social networking site. I suspect that at the recent mother of all Tea Parties on the Washington Mall, only Sarah Palin could have addressed the crowd as a unifying voice of sanity.

Second, most of Palin’s followers are like me: we can’t afford to send her $2,300 for her PAC and we don’t have the media access to have her on our syndicated radio/television show, but we will damn sure come out in earnest and drop the $30 on her book, and after we read it, if we like it, we’ll buy more copies to properly places under the Christmas tree for friends and family who haven’t read it but just might take a shine to it. Individually, we cannot do much monetarily, but we continue to write, to blog and support the woman to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for speaking for Conservatives and our values when all others were abandoning ship like drowning rats and prison escapees.

Finally, it is the ‘hope springs eternal’ nature of the people who are likely to be Palin supporters, and the potential supporters out there. While TDL goes about the world apologizing for an American he had no hand in making great, some of us aren’t quite ready to ditch the shining city while welcoming the despots of the world with open arms. Instead, we open our arms to Palin, respecting whatever choices she makes, while hoping like hell she spends the 11 months after her book is released rhetorically pounding the bloodly daylights out of the Obama Administration and its reprehensible behavior.