Some critics are calling this characterization of Laura a "liberal fantasy." But why do we cling to the fantasy even when Real First Lady Laura Bush totally hung out with Sarah Palin just the other day? Because she actually has very little in common with Sarah Palin, which is why we're all pondering working on our painkiller addictions right about now! The evidence.

1. Laura Bush is a librarian and Sarah Palin bans books.(Sort of in the way Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor!) Which brings me to the funniest thing about the story of how Sarah Palin, upon becoming mayor of Wasilla, called up the local librarian to inquire about banning books: the idea never went anywhere because she didn't seem to know what books she'd ban. Sarah Palin doesn't read! Duh. Neither, probably, does Cindy McCain. Laura Bush's favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov, a fact that I still find sort of mindblowing, but anyway, that is what makes this sort of shit so funny.

2. Laura Bush is pro-choice. When Cindy McCain found herself in that messy conundrum over whether Roe v. Wade ought to be overturned earlier this week, to whom did she turn for guidance? According to Katie Couric, Cindy's spokespeople said that she, like Laura Bush, did not want Roe overturned. Who knows why Laura Bush is pro-choice; maybe she read American Tragedy, maybe it's just because she killed someone herself and the law had gone easy on her; maybe she's just a rational person, but whatever the case, women like Laura Bush — not Northeastern Marxists like me or "I Choose Life For My Daughter And Everyone Else In America" Alaskan prophets like Sarah Palin— are ones who live in those crazy states that are always trying to add little "abortion banning" amendments to transportation bills and such, the ones who actually live in states where this stuff comes up on the ballot every November. And as such, women like Laura Bush are the only reason Roe has yet to go back before the Supreme Court.

3. Laura Bush raised Jenna Bush. Laura Bush's other vocation besides library science was being a mother, and even that Communist organ Us Weekly agrees that Jenna Bush turned out pretty good. Laura Bush raised a fun underage-drinking socially-conscious charter school teacher who spent months in the ghettos of that little country her granddaddy invaded learning about the tragic life of a teenage mom with AIDS for the purpose of writing a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms. Sarah Palin raised a fun underage-drinking cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms.

4. Laura Bush is a walking living and in some ways tragic symbol of the emotional core of liberalism, which is to say, our bottomless capacity to forgive. She had a tragedy in her early life and for that reason alone most of us will forgive her unwillingness to try and make herself into some sort of internal dissident in the Cheney White House. She reads Russian lit, she knows how it goes for dissidents. She forgives her ignorant husband the way we all forgive our ignorant racist grandmas. She accepts his differences and we preach acceptance. She is from a Red State and married to a red meat Republican but she defies all the usual pithy pollster cartoonology; she has never had big hair even though she's from Texas, she has never been blonde even though that is a major rule for Republicans in DC; she has never seemed Stepfordy, she smokes cigarettes. And like with Laura, said sentimentality can lead us to be forgiving to a fault! Remember how we hated Clinton for his triangulation and his beholdenness to Wall Street and his generalized moral turpitude? Ha ha ha, yeah. Don't let's let this become the election that gets us all misty-eyed for the Bush years in a couple years time, Laura Bushes of the world! (God did you ever think that would even be a possibility? Christ.)

OH AND BONUS EXTRA THING I FORGOT: She defended Michelle Obama against those ridiculous attacks on her patriotism that both Cindy and Sarah Palin have milked well into elementary school at this point. Thanks for pointing out, readers!

Clever tag coined yesterday by Gawker friend Brian Gallagher. Submissions to this category welcome!

An editor's note informs us that "the editor of the Sunday Business section is under contract to Random House and did not edit this article," which maybe explains sentences like "Based on those figures and some analysis—about the popularity of the genre, the likely audience, the possible newsworthiness of the topic of the economy—they work up profit and loss projections." It kind of seems like no one edited this puppy.

For starters, what kind of article sets out to explicate a mystery—in this case, the mystery of why some books sell a lot of copies and others sell very few, and how indirectly these sales typically correlate with the size of authors' advances and publishers' predictions—without even attempting to define the term that the article is purportedly about. Is "making a best seller" really so mysterious that no one can even begin to know what a "best seller" is?

It isn't until almost three quarters of the way through the article that we get anything resembling answers. "There are two ways for a book to become a best seller. One is to make it on to a best-seller list by selling many copies in a week. Other books sell steadily over months and years, eventually outselling many official best sellers," reporter Shira Boss informs us. (Say it with us, Shira: "backlist.") So! There are best sellers on "best-seller" lists and then there are 'unofficial' best sellers? How many copies does a book have to sell to be considered in any way "best?"

Maybe the Times is being cagey because they don't want to publicize how ultimately non-authoritative their bestseller list's rankings really are. The methodology behind the list is a "trade secret," based not on plain vanilla sales figures, as this article seems to imply, but on sales figures from "a selected sample of independent and chain bookstores."

The article's ostensible point—that publishers base their acquisitions too much on authors' sales track records and too little on anything resembling reader feedback—is a good one, of course. But how on earth are publishers or readers meant to get a sense of the book sales landscape if everyone is confused about what kind of numbers they're meant to be chasing?

Is poor Curtis Sittenfeld a failure because her second novel sold "only" 42,000 copies? Is Charles Frazier a failure because his follow-up to Cold Mountain, in spite of its 8 million advance, "only" sold 240,000? Or are the real failures the people who write about this stuff and can't seem to wrap their heads around the seemingly illogical but ultimately sort of inevitable way that book publishing actually works—that is to say, differently than every other industry, especially those in which people actually make lots of money? —Emily

The Greatest Mystery: Making A Best Seller [NYT]
NYT Bestseller List [Wikipedia]