Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Going rogue with quotations: Sarah Palin, John Wooden (Legs), and land redistribution for Native Americans


This. Is. Hilarious. Allow me to post extensively from Geoffrey Dunn's HuffPo post on one of the more awful errors in Sarah Palin's Going Rogue:

There have been so many lies and distortions pointed out in Sarah Palin's Going Rogue since it was released last week that her memoir has already become something of a gag line.

But perhaps the most embarrassing gaffe so far is her mis-attributed quote to UCLA basketball legend John Wooden.

As the epigram to Chapter Three, "Drill, Baby, Drill," Palin assigns the following remarks to the Hall of Fame hoops coach:

Our land is everything to us... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it -- with their lives.

Only the quote wasn't by John Wooden. It was written by a Native American activist named John Wooden Legs in an essay entitled "Back on the War Ponies," which appeared in a left-wing anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen.

Here's the full quote:

Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it -- with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated General Custer at the Little Big Horn.

Oops! That's not quite the sentiment that Sister Sarah was trying to convey as she guzzled down sugar-free Red Bull and cranked up Toby Keith's "How Do You Like Me Now?" while jumping on her patriotic high horse at the opening of the third chapter.

There's also no small amount of irony in the quote, given Palin's abysmal record on Alaska Native issues during her truncated term as governor.

I was a huge UCLA basketball fan as a kid. Whenever the Bruins came to the Bay Area, I did whatever I could do to snag a ticket. I loved to watch Wooden coach. But I never figured the Wizard of Westwood as an advocate for radical land distribution.

Obviously this one slipped by Sister Sarah and her crack team of investigative journalists Lynn Vincent, Meg Stapleton and Ivy Frye, as well as all those dutiful fact checkers at HarperCollins. Obviously, they didn't get the quote from anything Wooden ever wrote, but from a cute little web site called The Quote Garden. Isn't that sweet?

Okay, I was a little leery reading Palin's book and wondering if she really had read Aristotle and Plato. Somehow I didn't think so. But I thought, maybe, just maybe, she might have read Sir John. Apparently not.

No, she probably didn't read Aristotle or Plato, or any of the other authors "she" quotes -- "she" because she didn't write the book, a ghostwriter did -- and what's embarrassing here is that "she" evidently took this quote from one of many online quotation sites. (I did a quick check of some of them yesterday, initially by doing a Google search for the truncated version of the quote "she" uses in her book, and at some sites the quote, with the references to Cheyennes removed, is indeed attributed to John Wooden, not John Wooden Legs. So we are left to conclude that "she" probably didn't know what she was doing, that "she" didn't intentionally remove the Native American context, and yet that "she" got what she deserved, which is a quote that, taken in its true context, hardly means what "she" meant it to say and in fact undermines the point "she" was trying to make by directly opposing that point.

And, come on, it's really funny that her book, a reflection of her own arrogant yet clueless self-righteousness, includes a quote advocating land distribution by a Native American activist published in a left-wing anthology.

Sarah Palin, a fraud? Yeah, that's about right. The evidence keeps piling up.

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7 Comments:

  • I wonder when Sarah will sue her ghostwriter for all the inaccuracies in this book. Now there's a great news story...

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:21 AM  

  • And the Quote Garden has now fixed the attribution. See: http://www.quotegarden.com/grandparents.html

    By Blogger Cherie, at 6:50 PM  

  • I got the book and I see the quote is in the lead in to the chapter and attributed to John Wooden.

    But NOT JOHN WOODEN the basketball as the LYING Huffington Post states. It simply is signed John Wooden which would be correct.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:51 AM  

  • I think that you people are scared to death of Sarah and that you will try and find anything you can,no matter how trifle to degrade her.She is responsible for fixing Alaska's problems and she may just be able to fix the one's that Obama's destroying!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7:51 PM  

  • Alaska and their native population was being taken advantage of by big oil and corrupt Alaskan leadership. The quote illustrates her understanding that while no natives were being driven from the land, the Alaskan People were in fact being taken advantage of....an experience that John Wooden(legs) would have sympathized with I am sure. And I am also sure he would have approved of Sarah's fight to see that Alaskans received the fruits of their land

    The saddest part to me, is that you are incapable of seeing the link between the quote and the intent. I can only assume that is because you haven't actually read the book, and are relying on others for your information and only repeat it here with your spin......or....that you simply refuse to see the link. She is married to a native Alaskan. Someone whose connection to the land is integral to their very soul. She "feels" this connection, as though she was born a native herself. She sympathises with any native culture who feels this same connection to the land. The quote was correct, in context and the intent was clear to anyone who had eyes not clouded with hate.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:20 PM  

  • "She is responsible for fixing Alaska's problems and she may just be able to fix the one's that Obama's destroying!"


    haha. She probably could "fix" the problems Obama is destroying. Learn to write before you try to make a point.

    By Anonymous VicariousTarHeel.com, at 7:30 PM  

  • Almost 3 years later, the people who saw through Sarah at the RNC convention in 2008 have been vindicated. She's proven to be a divisive, hateful woman who is petty and vengeful. Her list of enemies grows almost daily due to the most ridiculous of reasons. She will hold a grudge until the day she dies and will do whatever she can to get back at those she feels may have wronged her yet not once, NEVER, has Palin apologized for any of her mistakes.

    The supporters in these posts are the ones who are misleading others. Todd is 1/8th Alaskan native and when Sarah was Governor, she ignored their problems concerning lack of food and heating oil until bloggers in and out of Alaska managed to send food and money in efforts to help them, showing Sarah to be out of touch.

    Almost 3 years later, her vendetta against President Obama remains as strong, if not stronger, as it was a couple months after taking office. Poor thing, she tries so desperately to get him to pay attention to her but she's just not on his radar. In fact, she's finally off almost everybody's radar.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 6:00 AM  

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