There's a show on NPR over the weekend--"Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me"?--in which contestants are read three "news" stories and have to identify the one that's real. Since Sarah Palin has published Going Rogue, and Slate has challenged its readers to submit a single sentence in a "Write Like Palin" contest, I thought I might challenge my hordes of readers to distinguish entries in the contest from sentences in the book. So here goes! Of the following four sentences, two are quoted from Going Rogue, and the other two are entrants in the "Write Like Palin" contest.
1. As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.
2. The minute I was on that stage in Florida with all those lights in my eyes and the smell of Alaska still on my fingertips and my family, too, all around out there, I was where I dreamed of all those years on the basketball court and in Alaskas's God given beauty which we must cherish and use as God gave it us to use and in honor of the troops, also.
3. Reaching the peak of Igikpak, that majestic mount, feeling the smooth Alaskan wind rustle against my cheeks, watching over this vast yet tender land that epitomized so much of America's resplendent pulchritude, and slowly squeezing the trigger on the wolf cub I'd been tracking through my crosshairs, I suddenly felt in my heart something I had always known to be true: the capital-gains tax must be eliminated.
4. I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.
Spoiler alert: the solution is in the last paragraph.
This is all a lot of fun but we should remember that Sarah Palin, a manifest dope, is a leading figure in the Republican party and could become president if Obama fails, which he might. It's hard to overstate the irresponsibility exhibited by John McCain in selecting her. On the other hand, given the composition of the modern Republican party, the odds were against the selection of a serious person. Had McCain picked at random a Republican member of Congress there would have been a high likelihood of a real crackpot--though, I have to admit, a relative few are in Palin's class.
Sentences (2) and (3) are entrants in the contest. The first and fourth are from Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin. Via Andrew Sullivan. Here is the winner in the contest: "One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd’s eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn’t seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic." (You have to love "blue as the stripes on Old Glory.")
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