Suffer The Little Children; Let Them Come To Sarah

Ruth Graham reviews Speaking Up: The Sarah Palin Story, an upcoming children's book by Christian publisher Zondervan:

At one point, within the space of three paragraphs, Palin is compared favorably to Taylor Swift, the apostle Paul, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Eunice Kennedy Shriverin that order. (It's a rare passage that can make evangelicals, music fans, sports nuts, and policy wonks all cry "blasphemy.") ... Palin's 2002 loss in the race for Alaska lieutenant governor is chalked up to the fact that "during this run for office, her passion was surprisingly thin"in other words, she never wanted to win that stupid election anyway. Bristol's unexpected pregnancy is not mentioned at all; a Zondervan acquisitions editor told the AP that, "We tried to stay away from the super-heavy stuff." ...

Just as many critics and journalists pointed out that Going Rogue had some glaring inaccuracies, Speaking Up also plays loosely with the facts.

It includes Palin's preferred accounts of selling the Alaska governor's jet (at a loss to the state, as it turned out) and of stepping down halfway through her term as governor. Washburn writes that the "teleprompter failed" during Palin's 2008 convention speech, an account that has long been debunked. Her account of Palin's controversial firing of the head of a Wasilla museum is drawn entirely from a Web site called conservatives4palin.com. She writes that Barack Obama received 51 percent of the popular vote based on information on the wiki site Answers.com; the actual tally was 53 percent.

Is it any surprise that Zondervan is a division of HarperCollins?