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

By Michael J.W. Stickings

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.