Counting the cheap shots in Portfolio's Palin piece

There are indisputable facts within Joe McGinniss' new Portfolio piece on Sarah Palin, and there are indefensible taunts and brazen editorializing.

Sarah Palin may indeed be a wishful thinker, but all successful people are.

You can read McGinniss and judge for yourself, and you can read Palin's statement about McGinniss' statement, and do some more judging.

But let's take a look at the descending ladder of cheap-shottery McGinniss resorts to.

And remember, these are chronological. They start with a whimper and end with a bang.

Cheap Shot #1: Mocking religion, then implying a Messiah complex.

She saw the launching of a natural-gas-pipeline project as a God-given opportunity to prove herself bigger than Big Oil.

Cheap Shot #2: Giving zero credit where even Oscar Wilde would mildly acknowledge it.

At a salary of $122,400 a year and with the commission’s offices less than an hour’s drive from her home in Wasilla, the position was a ripe plum for Palin. That her understanding of energy issues did not extend beyond being married to an oil-field worker and knowing how to fill the fuel tank of a snowmobile seemed not to matter.

Cheap Shot #3: Calling a spade a spade is "ratting". Cloaking her whistle-blowing in ambition's cheap coat.

She became instantly famous when she ratted him out and then resigned from her position, saying she couldn’t sleep at night because she was so upset by the breach of ethics.

Her insomnia didn’t keep her from routing Murkowski in the 2006 Republican primary.

Cheap Shot #4: Using excessive copy to emphasize her communication problems without actually naming them.

She put on her stiffest upper lip. “Good to be here!” she chirped. “Good to be here.” She waved and winked. “A lot to do, as every day is a full day here in the governor’s office, so, ah, anxious to get to talk to the folks who have been holdin’ down the fort and workin’ real hard also, but, ah, you know, it’s gonna be busy days here, just like it was busy days on the trail, ’cause bein’ the governor’s a full ti…a full time…in addition to bein’ a candidate. Now, of course, we get to concentrate just on...one of those.” The last three words—“one of those”—emerged with jaws so tightly clenched that it wouldn’t have been surprising to see a broken molar pop out.

Cheap Shot #5: Like you never doodled your name, Mr. McGinniss.

In the mid-1990s, when Palin was sitting at Wasilla city council meetings, doodling SARAH PALIN MAYOR on the back of a Wasilla budget.

Cheap Shot #6: Fuck it. I'm gonna write whatever the hell I feel about her.

Indeed, she seems to have a remarkable capacity for hearing only what she wants to hear. She may not be “a fucking psychopath,” as one very prominent Alaskan told me she was, but Palin does seem prone to what psychologists call magical thinking. At its most basic level, this is a tendency to believe that you exert more control over events than you actually do. It is the irrational belief that thinking is the same as doing, that you can actually cause a circumstance or an event to occur simply by wishing for it. It is common and natural in young children. Believing that you will become president of the United States someday simply because you want to would be an example of magical thinking. Another example would be believing that you can make a gas line happen, if only you want it badly enough and—as Palin has done—you ask schoolchildren to pray for it. Believing that as governor of Alaska you can bend Exxon Mobil to your will is magical thinking in the extreme.