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Palin bans unpublished books?

We were just wondering what additional nutty accusations would come out about Governor Palin, and we didn’t have to wait long. There is a widely reported news story that begins: “Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.”

Instantly, several websites, including an official Obama campaign website, sported identical lists of the 90 books that Mayor Palin supposedly wanted banned. Here are a few examples of what the illiterate fascist mayor allegedly opposed:

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Pretty scary stuff, banning Chaucer, Faulkner and Shakespeare (though we recall wanting Silas Marner banned when we had to read it in high school). Palin sure seems like a right-wing nut. There’s only one little problem. It would have been somewhat difficult for the evil Mayor Palin to have carried out her plan, since a number of books on the list, notably the Harry Potter series, had not been published until years after 1996. Stay tuned for more adventures in PDS — no doubt we won’t have to wait too long.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, idiots!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Palin bans unpublished books?”

  1. gs Says:
    September 7th, 2008 at 5:23 am

    Would I work for the removal of ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’ (which is on the list) from my local library? Probably not. Would I joust with a conservative rural community that did not want the book in its library? Probably not.

    The Anchorage paper reports on Wasilla’s librarian:

    “Sarah said to Mary Ellen, ‘What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?” Kilkenny said.

    “I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, ‘The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.’”

    How are the ‘national selection criteria’ formulated? I suspect that librarians as a profession are as scrupulously apolitical as, say, teachers or social workers…

    This Volokh commenter asserts that librarians can and do ban books and it’s usually very easy: they don’t buy them. No one makes a fuss unless the book is a bestseller.

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