Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.

Dick Cheney’s memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post’s nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn’t mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:

Noticeably missing from the pages of Cheney’s memoir are references to books examining the big issues of our day — issues of crucial importance during his tenure with the Bush administration. From his memoir, it is impossible to know if he took any counsel at all from the estimable books of the past decade on national security, terrorism, torture, Islam, domestic surveillance. He remains opaque to the end.

This seems sort of like a defensible version of the weird criticism Troy leveled at President Obama, right? (As Troy wrote of Obama: “the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.”) So does Troy agree with the Post on Cheney? No. No, he does not:

When it comes to the books Cheney read as vice president, though, Cheney is indeed less forthcoming about the titles. He does, however, list a variety of thinkers and writers with whom he met while in office, including Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Nathaniel Philbrick, Jay Winik, Edmund Morris, David McCullough, Charles Krauthammer, and Victor Davis Hanson. In addition, while Cheney was vice president, there were public reports that Cheney read a number of books with contemporary policy implications, including Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy, Elliott Cohen’s [sic] Supreme Command, and Winik’s April 1865 (interestingly, President Bush was reported to have read all three of those as well). I am sure that neither of these lists depicts the totality of what Cheney was reading and to whom he was speaking, so I guess by some measure he does remain “opaque.” But the list of at least some of the outside influences Cheney looked to during his vice presidency was available and out there, both within and outside Cheney’s memoir, if one had chosen to look for them.

He may not have been reading serious nonfiction about contemporary issues, but he met with Charles Krauthammer! That is basically the same thing, right? Reading an “estimable book” on Islam is surely a waste of time when you can just call up Victor Davis Hanson for a chat.

So for Cheney’s reading list we’ve got those all-important “meetings” plus two historical war books and one foreign policy manifesto that plainly reinforced Cheney’s already extant biases. I can see why self-proclaimed presidential reading expert Troy was “somewhat bothered” by that Post piece that made the same argument he made about Obama two weeks ago except not as stupidly.

Turns out this Troy character may not actually be a serious scholar of the history and meaning of presidential reading, and may, in fact, just be some random shameless right-wing think tank hack!

We are talking only about newsstand sales, not total circulation, but this does mean that Bachmann’s incredibly controversial and very buzzy crazy eyes did not “move the needle,” as annoying people say. Of course, the actual article about Bachmann, inside of the eye-grabbing cover, was pretty bland. But since when does the quality of the journalism have anything to do with newsstand sales?

(Ad pages are also down, but that doesn’t have much to do with Bachmann.)

Meanwhile, Christine O’Donnell, the famous non-witch who lost a Senate race after improbably winning a GOP primary, is traveling the country promoting her inevitable book about the time she didn’t win an election. According to Fort Myers News Press (via Wonkette) the tour is not drawing massive crowds, even in conservative Naples, Florida.

Still, O’Donnell took the turnout of five people — members of the media outnumbered customers — at Barnes & Noble in stride.

“God bless you, Tom,” she told Tom Bruzzesi of Fort Myers, who said he’s launching his own presidential campaign.

“I like her,” Bruzzesi said. “She’s kind of a rogue like me.”

“Thank you for coming out today,” O’Donnell said to Louise Campo of Naples. “She interests me. She’s very conservative,” Campo said.

O’Donnell, a Christian, then politely turned down a request from a young man who asked her to sign his book on demonology instead of a copy of her book.

Well, that’ll happen. As Keith Olbermann reported last night, the book as thus far sold 2,200 copies, 1,500 of which went to O’Donnell supporters in Delaware:

This after a publicity blitz that notably included kicking herself off of Piers Morgan’s CNN show. (And now O’Donnell’s been disinvited, again, from a Tea Party Rally that is supposed to feature Sarah Palin.)

All this after Sarah Palin — the barometer of how America is receiving vacuous avatars of cultural resentment masquerading as Republican politicians — saw her much ballyhooed documentary open to weak numbers and quickly end up on DVD.

The last use any of these people have is as boogeymen with which to terrify liberals.

(Except for Rick Perry. That crazy corrupt jerk could end up president if we’re not careful.)

The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

This “may constitute the oddest assortment of presidential reading material ever disclosed,” according to Troy. Because Woodrell’s books may be almost universally praised, but they are genre fiction, and genre fiction is too trashy for presidents to read. “Bill Clinton, for example, used to love mysteries, but he did not advertise the titles of what he once called ‘my little cheap thrills outlet.’” Even Bill Clinton knew better than to tell people he read books with crimes in them! (Can you imagine if Barack Obama was found to be hiding the fact that he read crime fiction? IMPEACHMENT.)

Also one of the novels is by an Israeli author, but it is by an Israeli author who criticizes Israeli policy, proving once again that Obama is no friend of Israel. “[R]eading this novel will likely not assuage those concerned about Obama’s views on the Middle East,” says Troy, and he should know, because he is the one using it to attempt to score an insane political point.

The best part (noted by Matt Yglesias) is when Troy asks why this bookstore’s online store doesn’t list horrible books written by National Review contributors as “in stock.”

Obama, like other Democratic presidents, has tended to read mainly liberal books, although he could stand to gain some insight from conservative ones. There could be many reasons for his selection bias, but buying his books at the “legendary” Bunch of Grapes probably is not helping matters. While I have never had the pleasure of shopping there, the store’s website highlights a variety of its offerings, with nary a conservative work. There may be some on the shelves there somewhere, but they are probably not staring Obama in the face when he visits the store.

According to the results of my completely unscientific survey of Bunch of Grapes’s website, Laura Ingraham’s Of Thee I Zing, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, and Mark Steyn’s After America were listed as available for online ordering. Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which appeared as an Obama book selection twice, in 2008 and 2009, was listed as “In Stock.” This is not meant as a criticism of the bookseller; Bunch of Grapes is running a business, and they need to cater to the liberal crowd at Martha’s Vineyard in order to bring in customers. At the same time, if Obama wants to diversify his reading selections, Bunch of Grapes may not be the place to go.

Why would Bunch of Grapes stock Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” a novel Aimee Bender called “truly memorable” and “remarkable,” when they could stock Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” a book that the American Conservative says “reads less like an extended argument than as a catalogue of conservative intellectual clichés, often irrelevant to the supposed point of the book”? Liberal bias, that’s why. Liberal fascist bias.

Anyway, the president is “out of touch” and “in a bubble” because he can read, according to a conservative intellectual, at a “think tank.”

That’s what she told the crowd assembled at Women’s National Republican Club in New York, where she was apparently booked to speak at the same time that she was booked to be interviewed on cable news by that guy from “The Apprentice.” The New York Observer was there:

“I want to apologize for being so late, I know that’s not respectful of your time, so please accept my apology,” Ms. O’Donnell began. “We started out at about five o’clock in the morning at Fox and Friends and we’ve gone nonstop until the final stop at CNN a few minutes ago.” No mention was made of the walk-out that Mr. Morgan was hyping on Twitter.

O’Donnell was even asked about the unfairness of the liberal media, and she declined to bring up any sort of ill treatment she may have suffered at the hands of Larry King’s replacement.

I think O’Donnell was probably just nervous about being late for this other thing, and so she came up with an excuse to bolt early. As someone who is chronically late and frequently anxious, I can relate! Speaking to an Observer reporter after her talk, O’Donnell made her abrupt departure sound like a scheduling issue.

“We were late for this, and he wasn’t ending, and we were going, ‘Wrap up, wrap up!’ He was late and he wasn’t ending. He’s looking for ratings. He’s looking for ratings. He was being rude, and I said, ‘Piers, I gotta go!’ You know, I’m late already! He’s looking for ratings, and trying to stir up a controversy.”

Of course, then O’Donnell said other, weirder things:

There is a double standard at work for women candidates, Ms. O’Donnell told The Observer: “In the 2008 campaign, no one would have dared ask Barack Obama, ‘How are you going to control your libido. You’re a strapping young man. What are you going to do around all those interns?’ But people can ask Michele Bachmann about her migraines.”

Yes, right, of course. It is a double standard that the press would be interested in Michele Bachmann’s chronic migraines but not in Barack Obama’s strappingness and heretofore unnoticed out-of-control libido.

I understand that O’Donnell meant to call the media’s prurient-seeming interest in her past romantic escapades hypocritical, without drawing attention to That One Thing With the Ladybug Costume, but perhaps she should have come up with an actual example of a double standard, instead of just saying things that make no sense and that also could be … taken the wrong way. (“Strapping!” Is that the word you think of when you think of Barack Obama?)