Possible Answer to the Question of the extent of the supposed “Book Burner in Chief”
There is an email going around supposedly listing books Sarah Palin demanded the librarian of g-danged Wasilla, Alaska to ban. The list is blatantly false; somebody tossed up a compilation of commonly “Challenged” books and stuck Sarah Palin’s name to it. This is a habit that annoys me, and — well, I think it annoys everybody, actually — even when it is something as innocous as sticking “Jay Leno”‘s name to a piece by an obscure author, or shuffling around George Carlin jokes and Dennis Miller jokes, though with political candidates they end up with the “ring of truth” that lodges into the populace’s mind by exploiting their political prejudices — re: Obama is a Muslim, and Palin thinks Harry Potter is the tool of the Devil. The McCain / Palin ticket has responded to the email rumors with a bit of dishonesty in completely dismissing the idea that anything happened here — clearly not the case; we have newspaper accounts.
If you google “Sarah Palin” and librarian, you will see that the Anchorage Daily News has made available Palin – related news articles from the late 1990s (such as this and this), related to her tumultuous first year in office which the Librarian fiasco was something of a side-story in a larger story. But the likely explanation for what was happening — tacking to her strong support from the local Church’s desire to battle The Gay.:
Ross emphasized an angle I previously hadn’t heard much about. Palin was elected mayor thanks in large part to the strong backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, which, right around the time Palin took office, “began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called ‘Go Ask Alice,’ and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called ‘Pastor, I am Gay.'”
That does have the ring of truth, and doesn’t go overboard in Sarah Palin’s role as “Book Burner in Chief” — the limit is maybe that.