Growing up in Alaska: The Saga of Sarah Palin

Sally Jenkins has written a must-read story in today’s Washington Post about Sarah Palin’s upbringing in Wasilla, Alaska.

In his response to the media’s unrelenting assault on Sarah, her father Chuck Heath no doubt has in mind the abusive, misogynous trash published relentlessly on the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, two liberal Web sites who feature psychotically aggressive smears against anyone perceived as a threat to left-wing darling, Barack Obama.

Accordingly, Chuck says, "I can take anything but the blogs.”


“But, Jenkins reports, "Chuck has seen his daughter handle herself in other perilous situations and come out all right. A few years ago, he watched her pilot husband Todd Palin's commercial fishing boat in a storm. Todd was working at his oil-field job on the North Slope, and Palin and her father had been fishing on Bristol Bay. "It was the toughest work I've ever done, and it wasn't only hard, it was dangerous," Chuck says. At the end of the run, they had to get the boat on a trailer amid crashing surf. As cold, metallic-sheened waves tossed the trawler around, Chuck quailed.

‘“I'm not doing that,’ he said.”’

““Get out of the way,’ Palin said. ‘I'll do it.”’

“She did.”

Read Jenkins’ story in its entirety here.