Palin's America By Heart largely breaks down along two themes: Ronald Reagan, freedom, Constitution = good; Barack Obama, “socialism,” Hollywood elites = bad. It's not a hard-and-fast rule -- Palin, for example, devotes many, many, many words to praising the films of six-time Academy Award winner Frank Capra; and at one point she brags about accepting federal stimulus dollars for Alaska that “would go to create real private-sector jobs through construction projects and provide needed medical care to the disadvantaged” (this was before she quit as governor).

But, for the most part, Hollywood elites take it on the chin for not being “commonsense constitutional conservatives,” including a few you weren't expecting, largely because you haven't thought about them in years.

Case in point: Candice Bergen and Murphy Brown:

Standing up for the family wasn't fashionable then and it is even less fashionable now. Many of us remember one of the early and epic clashes of the American heartland versus Hollywood over the role of the American family.

It was May 1992, and thirty-eight million Americans watched as a fictional television journalist named Murphy Brown, finding herself over forty, divorced, and pregnant, decided to have the child alone. Without the baby's father. On prime-time television. [Page 116]

The nerve! An actress expressing herself in a manner incongruent with the beliefs of a narrow slice of the country? Unacceptable!

Palin spends the next several pages defending then-vice president Dan Quayle for blaming the moral decay of American society on the actions of a fictional unmarried pregnant woman. She also claims that the only way to raise “good citizens” is with one mother and one father, and attacks “the left” for having us “believe that any grouping we choose to call a family is worthy of the name.”

I'd point out that the current President of the United States was raised by a single mother, but in her twisted worldview that might actually be seen as reinforcing her point, so instead I'll just thank her for reminding us that there was once a show called Murphy Brown and there was once a vice president named Dan Quayle, and together they cause some controversy once.