Media Shocked To Learn Palin Can Read And Write

“It is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose.” — Dinesh D’Souza

After spending thousands and thousands of man-hours sorting through the much anticipated (only by the media) Sarah Palin e-mails nothing 'juicy' has been found. Not even close. The media fell flat on their face. Now the only thing they can do is apologize. Well, that's what any decent human being would do. What about the media? They've gone the 3rd grade route, expressing shock Palin that knows how to read and write.

"Reading was a special bond between my mother and me. Mom read aloud to me — poetry by Ogden Nash along with snippets of prose. My siblings were better athletes, cuter and more sociable than I, and the only thing they had to envy about me was the special passion for reading that I shared with our mother."

The last person you would expect to have written that is Sarah Palin, yet it's all there in black and white in her book "Going Rogue."

You might not have believed Palin about her "special passion" until this week. But the release of thousands of pages of surprisingly fluent e-mails she wrote while governor of Alaska - which are being pored over for any hint of stupidity or scandal are notable, at least thus far to me, for the quality of their prose.

The media haven‘t yet found the smoking gun they’ve been looking for in Sarah Palin’s e-mails. Overall, the messages have been benign, lacking the excitement and scandal some hoped they would contain. That said, at least one outlet has gone a different route, questioning the former vice-presidential candidate’s intelligence through the expertise of writing analysts. AOL Weird News has more:

AOL Weird News brought samples to two writing analysts who independently evaluated 24,000 pages of the former governor’s emails. They came back in agreement that Palin composed her messages at an eighth-grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive, they said.

“I’m a centrist Democrat, and would have loved to support my hunch that Ms. Palin is illiterate,” said 2tor Chief Executive Officer John Katzman.

However, the e-mails say something else. Ms. Palin writes e-mails on her Blackberry at a grade level of 8.5.

If she were a student and showing me her work, I‘d say ’It’s fine, clear writing,’” he said, admitting that e-mails he wrote scored lower than Palin’s on the widely used Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

While some would initially scoff or laugh at Palin’s grade-level assessment, past speakers and writers of note have scored comparably. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a 9.1 and Martin Luther King’s famed “I have a Dream” came in at 8.8. Remember, Palin’s results were based on e-mails, not riveting speeches, so the fact that they score remotely close to the aforementioned works is intriguing.

Overall, this is good news for Palin, as her writing was found to be better than some CEOs’. The New York Daily News sheds further light on her abilities:

“It turns out Palin’s writing skills are still better than most educated Americans. Global Language Monitor gave Palin’s emails a score of 8.2, which actually exceeds that of most chief executives.

She’s very concise. She gives clear orders. Her sentences and punctuations are logical,” said Paul Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. “She has much more of a disciplined mind than she’s given credit for.”

If she were a student and showing me her work, I'd say 'It's fine, clear writing,'" he said, admitting that emails he wrote scored lower than Palin's on the widely used Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

"She came in as a solid communicator," said Paul J.J. Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor. The emails registered as an 8.2 on his version of the test. "That's typical for a corporate executive."

An example of Palin's strongest writing came on Jul. 17, 2007 in an email to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell about the controversial Gravina Island Bridge, infamously called the "Bridge to Nowhere."

"We cant afford it, the Feds won't pay for it, the general populace isn't placing it as a high priority … can you diplomatically express that?! Of course we want infrastructure -- and this is NOT a "bridge to nowhere" (that is so offensive), but as it stands today with the highest-cost bridge design selected by the Ketchikan community, we need to find a lower-cost alternative [if] a bridge will be built."

"She's very concise. She gives clear orders. Her sentences and punctuations are logical," Payack said. "She has much more of a disciplined mind than she's given credit for."

Although it's like comparing apples to oranges, Payack said that famous speeches like Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was a 9.1 and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" oration rated a 8.8 on the scale.

The Palin e-mails offer a rare opportunity to see the digital internal communication of a public official. One of the few comparable scenarios was the release of the relatively slim 928-page assortment of former FEMA chief Michael Brown's e-mails from the days around the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.

When will the MSM finally give up their obsession with Sarah Palin? No politician in history has been forensically dissected like Palin. I wish the “brilliant and courageous journalists”, who comprise the MSM would have had so much passion to uncover the e-mails of Barack Obama. Perhaps we would have a different president today. To this day they still refuse to dig into Obama’s past writings on anything.

BTW, according to MS Word this post was written a Flesch-Kincaid scale at level 10 and a reading ease of 54.5