Sarah Palin's 'America By Heart': 4 takeaways
The Alaskan conservative's new book won't be released until Tuesday, but here are the parts already making news
Although Sarah Palin's second book, America By Heart, won't be officially released until Tuesday, excerpts have already leaked out, most famously through the gossip site Gawker. A federal judge has ordered Gawker to take down a dozen-plus scanned pages of America By Heart, but other tidbits from the inevitable bestseller can be found in early reviews. Here are four of the book's most-talked-about revelations:
1. Palin apparently only likes reality-TV shows featuring her daughter, Bristol
One thing Palin dislikes are "talentless wannabes" on reality TV, say Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger in The Washington Post. Palin singles out "American Idol" contestants who are "deluded enough to get up in front of a national television audience and screech out a song," adding that the only good thing about "Idol" was judge Simon Cowell's "willingness to tell hard truths" to the "seemingly endless supply of people who can't sing." Dancing is another thing, though, and Palin loves that her daughter Bristol decided "to challenge herself in a new, fun way" on "Dancing With the Stars."
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2. Mitt Romney is a better leader than JFK
Palin "compares Mitt Romney to John F. Kennedy and finds the former president wanting," says Brad Knickerbocker in The Christian Science Monitor. Specifically, says the AP's Jocelyn Noveck, she devotes several pages to JFK's famous 1960 campaign speech on religion, in which he said, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president," but "the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic." Kennedy "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are," Palin writes, and lauds potential 2012 GOP rival Mitt Romney for not "doing a JFK" in his 2008 speech on being a Mormon.
3. American Beauty is bad; Juno is good
Much of Palin's book is cultural criticism, say Sam Stein and Lila Shapiro in The Huffington Post. She trashes the movie American Beauty for idolizing apathy, but praises Juno's pro-life message as quintessentially American: "A European movie might have had Juno get her abortion in the opening scene," Palin writes, "and then spend the next hour and fifteen minutes smoking cigarettes and pondering the meaning of life... Not here. Americans want to be entertained, but we also want to see people do the right thing, even when it's hard...."
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4. Neither the president nor Michelle Obama is sufficiently patriotic
Palin questions the First Couple's love of America, says Sean Alfano in the New York Daily News, zeroing in on Michelle Obama's 2008 comment about being proud of the nation "for the first time in my adult life" — a remark which really shouldn't surprise us, says Palin, given the time the First Couple spent "in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church." Palin's "highly personal" attack, says Shushannah Walshe in The Daily Beast, is a clear early warning that a Palin 2012 campaign would likely hit this note hard.
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