Though I am not quite finished, I have formulated several different opinions about Sarah Palin while reading Going Rogue.

One is this: I like Sarah Palin.

But I also judge people by the company they keep and Sarah Palin was too quickly co-opted by the Republican machine. She would have been much better off had she chosen to serve our country as a leader like Ralph Nader or Ron Paul. Maybe it’s not too late.

Another snap judgment: Sarah Palin is naive. Hopefully, was. She reacts to every negative experience with shock and disappointment. Again, I like Sarah Palin. She is gritty and real. She is experienced and successful. She is practical and endearing. But what kind of magical world is Alaska? Do the bears snuggle with the salmon? Do oilmen scrub themselves clean after a hard day’s work with the exfoliating effervescence of North Slope clouds?

Yes, politics is dirty. There is media distortion. Special interest spin. Government lies. People are selfish. There is abuse, collusion, and manipulation. Going Rogue grows quite tiresome as Sarah Palin spends paragraph after paragraph expressing passive-aggressive surprise at the culture around her but acknowledging none of the valid inquiry into her own behavior.

And then there are the parts in Going Rogue that make it even easier to dislike Sarah Palin:

“In Alaska, we view change a bit differently. For example, wildfires in the Lower 48 are often treated as natural disasters. Up here, we often let them burn, knowing that from fire-blackened lands new growth will spring.”

You’ll have to excuse us, Sarah, but yes, we pretentious, out-of-touch, pinko-commie-hippies down here in the Lower 48 prefer to have our fires extinguished. Because we have something down here that we don’t want to burn:

OUR HOUSES!

It’s where we keep our stuff.

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