“I think that she’s not anywhere near the person that sometimes she’s been portrayed to be –- as completely lacking of any intellectual capacity.”

–Mike Huckabee, subtly putting the stress on the word “completely.”

Is this emerging as the new party line on Palin among other top Republican politicians? Last week, Haley Barbour told Chris Matthews that Palin is “a lot brighter than she gets credit for,” and on yesterday’s @katiecouric, Fox News Channel host and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee trotted out a similar-sounding soundbite.

Huckabee did go with the ‘Palin has more executive experience than Obama’ line, which was defensible on some grounds during the 2008 election, but sounds increasingly like a stretch now that Obama has been president for almost a year. He said definitively that he’d vote for her over Obama in 2012 — though declined to say who he’d pick for the Republican primary, which may have something to do with the fact that he’s a frontrunner for the party nomination at this admittedly very early date. Elsewhere in the interview, Huckabee said that he was offended by Obama’s bow to the emperor of Japan.

Republicans who are not Sarah Palin are currently in the tricky position of not wanting to come across as either too critical of or too enthusiastic about her. Huckabee largely pulled it off, though the soundbite came across as an obvious hedge. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Huckabee and Palin are frenemies in book sales?

From the Birmingham News:

About 500 people packed the Books-A-Million store at Colonial Brookwood Village this afternoon to get an autographed copy of 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s book, “A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories that Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit.”

Some in the crowd had been to the store earlier to get wristbands to get a place in line for Monday’s book signing by Sarah Palin for her book, “Going Rogue.”

More than 1,800 people showed up to try to get one of the 1,000 wristbands to meet Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

(via Breitbart.tv)

From The Daily Dish:

[Palin] is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true…

…And we have had the book for less than a day. We feel we owe it to you to get it right – or as right as we can – until we post or publish anything.

Palin recently called Sullivan out via Facebook for his Trig birtherism. Sullivan claims to have “simply asked” Palin to provide proof that she was really Trig’s biological mother, but he did also blog about it relentlessly for more than a year.

As Ben Smith points out, Sullivan is a hugely influential political blogger and may have had a large role in “creating the Obama narrative.” His embrace of a relatively fringy position is all the more important, then, for keeping it alive.

Sullivan’s dramatic proclamation opens him up to ridicule, and it’s highly unlikely that he’ll find a smoking gun. More likely, tomorrow he’ll turn out an AP-like fact check that picks at inaccuracies real and perceived.

Still, Sullivan and his crew deserve a little credit for pausing to actually read Going Rogue, which is something that many bloggers — and straight reporters — didn’t bother to do.

(h/t Wonkette)