The media response to Sarah Palin's Going Rogue has been nothing short of bizarre. You read the stories and watch the broadcasts, and it's like War of the Worlds: The Martians have landed, and there's a full-on panic. The AP assigned 11 reporters to "fact check" Palin's book and discovered that-this is not a joke-Palin is ambitious. Don't worry if you can't recall the AP fact check of Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. None exists.

For a cover story on Palin, the editors at Newsweek scoured thousands of images of the governor and decided that the one that best captured her record, personality, and appeal was a shot of her in running shorts. "We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover," editor Jon Meacham said in a statement. We think Palin looks great, too, Jon, but none of the several attacks on her included in the cover package focused on her athletic gear.

Meanwhile, CNN's Wolf Blitzer revealed more about himself than any news anchor should, with this Twitter post: "CNN Jessica Yellin did a very good report in SitRoom on Sarah Palin and her sexuality-the fact that she's good looking. Did you see it?" The liberal blogger assigned to review Going Rogue for the Washington Post admitted that she hadn't read the book. In the New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that Palin was being "ungrateful" to the McCain aides who slandered her anonymously and tried to blame her for McCain's defeat. If Palin hadn't told her side of the story, no doubt these same critics would be attacking her for "covering up" what really happened during the 2008 campaign.

Over at David Bradley's Atlantic, the biggest one-man political blogger in captivity, a man who has been uniquely obsessed for the past year over the details of Palin's pregnancy while carrying her youngest child, suspended publication of his website for 12 hours because "there is a possibility here of such a huge scandal that we would be crazy not to take our time either to debunk it or move it forward for further examination." Andrew Sullivan has since returned, but there's been no further mention of the "huge scandal." He must still be waiting for the post office to deliver Palin's medical records.

Reporting live from the real America on MSNBC, Norah O'Donnell belittled and condescended to a teenage Palin fan who didn't realize that Palin had supported John McCain's pro-TARP position. Later, in an appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews, O'Donnell informed Matthews of her incredible discovery that-wait for it-Grand Rapids Republicans tend to be people of pallor. "This is a largely white-almost no minorities in this crowd" lining up to have Palin sign their books, O'Donnell reported.

"They look like a white crowd to me," Matthews agreed. Then he added, "Not that there's anything wrong with it." Good to know! Later, though, Matthews seemed to imply that there was something "wrong with it" when he said, "I think there is a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, white vs. other people." We disagree. The real divide is between the folks whom Sarah Palin drives absolutely bonkers .  .  . and -everybody else.

First 'Pacific President'?

For those who believe that President Obama is unusually self-absorbed, or suffers from an acute case of narcissism-even by the standards of a successful politician-his claim last week in Tokyo to be "America's first Pacific president" must have left them breathless with wonderment. It certainly left THE SCRAPBOOK nearly speechless.

Sure, Barack Obama is the first president born in Hawaii (1961), and he lived in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather during 1967-71. But he is not the first president born along the Pacific Ocean (that would be Richard Nixon, 1913) and there's a very long list of American presidents with intimate experience of the Pacific side of the planet, including long residence-even longer than Barack Obama's!-and as adults as well.

Just take our 20th century chief executives as an example. Herbert Hoover lived for years in Australia and China as a mining engineer, spoke Mandarin Chinese, and, based on his intimate knowledge of the city, guided U.S. Marines around Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. William Howard Taft was the first civilian -governor-general of the Philippines, resident in Manila, during 1900-04. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush all served in the Pacific as naval officers during World War II. Dwight Eisenhower lived in the Philippines for four years in the 1930s while serving as chief aide to General Douglas MacArthur.

Then there are those presidents with what we might call second hand Pacific experience. Franklin Roosevelt's mother, for example, lived for years in Canton while her father made his fortune in the China trade. William McKinley sent the U.S. fleet into Pacific waters to defeat the Spanish in 1898, acquiring Guam and the Philippines (and Puerto Rico) in the process. McKinley also annexed Obama's birthplace in 1898. Andrew Johnson purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867, Millard Fillmore sent Commodore Perry to "open" Japan in 1854, John Tyler sent the first American ambassador to China in 1843-and the list goes on.

None of which is to suggest that Barack Obama's boyhood tenure in the Aloha State or the old Dutch East Indies doesn't count, or that he isn't free to anoint himself a "Pacific president" when seeking to impress his Asian hosts. But despite what you may read in the media, or hear whenever the president discusses the past, our nation's history did not begin on an August day in Honolulu in 1961, and Obama is not the first president to look eastward and see America.

'Judaism, Straight Up'

Contributing editor David Gelernter's new book, Judaism: A Way of Being, is available this week, from Yale University Press. THE SCRAPBOOK, not being expert on things Jewish, asked our colleague in the next cubicle over, William Kristol, to say a word about it.

He said, "A word about it."

We kid. Here's Kristol:

"David has written a spectacular book. It's at once short and deep; it's a fun and easy read with many stop-let-me-think-about-that moments; it's both scholarly and inspiring. David's exploration of the role of images, or what he calls 'image-themes,' in Judaism is fascinating, and his explanation of how Judaism's 'multi-layered images' reveal and explain 'the unique beauty and truth of the Jewish worldview' is extraordinary.

"Gelernter writes that his is a book primarily for Jews, and I'd think that will prove to be the case. But his account of 'Judaism at full strength, straight up; no water, no soda, aged in oak for three thousand years' will I suspect prove fascinating to many serious people of other faiths, especially Judaism's little brother or cousin, Christianity. For David has written a book that, in its exploration of Judaism, tells us something-tells us a lot-about the human condition."

Hot, Bothered, and Flat Wrong

When last we checked in on the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, he was singing the praises of that "reasonably enlightened group of people"-aka the Communist Chinese politburo-whose "one-party autocracy" in Beijing has "great advantages" over America's democracy.

The primary advantage, it emerged, is that dictators can get their way without opposition. In our democracy, unfortunately by Friedman's lights, Republicans are resisting "national health care" and "climate/energy" legislation. In the one-party system he admires, those GOP obstructionists would presumably be working on their tans in reeducation camps, while the tenets of Barack Hussein Obama thought guided the enlightened nomen-klatura in Washington.

We were prepared to believe that this was an ideological hiccup from the usually liberal (if often lame) columnist. But his latest effort seems to be an audition by Friedman for the role of demonizing the enemies of the one-party state:

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can't afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax. But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050.

Seriously? This is a malevolent hallucination. There are people who fantasize about a depopulated earth, but they're lunatic-left greens, not climate-change skeptics. Good thing we have a system that keeps the likes of Friedman from exercising the power enjoyed by the despots of Beijing.

Palin Postscript

Our account of the media's reaction to Sarah Palin's book would not be complete if we were to neglect those who ostentatiously advertised their being above it all. It took blogger Damon Linker 412 words to conclude that all Palin "deserves is silence." Time's Joe Klein blogged that he's engaged in a "continuing effort to not write a word-to not give any additional publicity-to a certain former vice presidential candidate who has 'written' a 'book' this week." Klein's colleague Amy Sullivan chimed in, "I'm joining Joe as a conscientious objector to Palinmania. (Did anyone else start twitching less than a minute into the Barbara Walters interview?)"

Even in pretending to ignore Palin, they betray their obsession.