I don’t know about you, but I miss Sarah Palin. She’s still around, of course—on Tuesday she guest-hosted the Today show, and I assume she still has the Fox News show where she connects surviving childhood leukemia to free enterprise or whatever. But I miss Sarah Palin the awful thing that happened to American politics. Now that she’s an awful thing that happened to daytime television, my loathing lacks that tang of panic. Not that Sarah Palin is totally useless. She still serves as a valuable warning in both electoral politics and English usage. Lucky for us, she continues to pose as a competent practitioner of both—as she does in the subject of today’s close reading.

Let us take a moment to silently consider that Palin’s preferred medium of intellectual discourse is the Facebook note. Okay, that was bracing. This particular note is titled “We Remain Determined to Defeat Crony Capitalism,” and it’s about the STOCK Act, which prohibits members of Congress from trading on inside information. Palin likes the STOCK Act, because she dislikes that corruption in that Washington DC. More illustrative than her opinion, though, is how she qualifies it:

Though many of us feel that the bill was watered down and thus could have been much stronger, this is at least a small step in the right direction.

In the teaching of composition, certain common errors are regarded as symptoms of not just flaws in usage but flaws in thinking. Chief among them is a little number I call A Because A. Palin deploys a variation of A Because A in the introductory clause, though many of us feel that the bill was watered down and thus could have been much stronger… It’s a troubling construction, because it worries us. As a common error of style, this mistake crops up often. It’s a way of making a bare contention sound like an argument, because it phrases a claim like evidence.

See how annoying that is? Besides being bad usage, A Because A reveals a particular way of thinking—or simply an absence of thinking—about how argument works. Sarah Palin knows that words like thus and because are indispensable features of rhetoric, but she doesn’t use them quite right because she doesn’t reason quite right. She does not file statements of opinion and statements of fact in two different categories, and so she is likely to reach for one and grab the other. The equivalence is somewhat figurative, of course—Sarah Palin doesn’t know many facts. Statistically, she’s much more likely to produce an A Because A than a B Because B.

If she is a novice at constructing persuasive arguments, however, she is a master at taking credit for them. The most striking feature of “We Remain Determined to Defeat Crony Capitalism” is its use of the word we. In the first sentence, “we” see a step forward in reform. That’s a reasonable use of the pronoun, since we are presumably the people who observe what Congress does. Two sentences later, “there is still a lot more we need to do to combat government corruption.” This we is a little more questionable, since what Palin—or the reader—did to pass the STOCK Act is intangible at best. Sure, we could just be the people who need to do more about crony capitalism, but it sure sounds like we are also the people who just did something.

That’s no accident. Palin completes the subconscious transition from we who see to we who do in the last paragraph, when she starts thanking people. Any jerk can take credit for what others have done; it takes a real genius of credit theft to give other people credit for facilitating the thing you are taking credit for. That’s a real give-the-inheritance-to-the-orphans move, right there. “We should all applaud them,” Palin says of the people who actually did what “we” accomplished, “and look forward to the next steps in our movement to eradicate the cronyism and government corruption in DC.”

That’s the genius of Sarah Palin, and that’s why she will remain at least ostensibly relevant to American politics until a big snake gets her. Much like the way a black hole bends light, her narcissism is so massive as to warp any discussion until it appears to be about her. And she is about politics, she keeps insisting. Just as she described her paid hosting cameo as “going rogue” and “infiltrating” the Today show, she sees Congressional lawmaking as “our movement.” Which movement is that, specifically? And how is Sarah Palin involved, exactly? Clear writing is clear thinking. For certain people, clarity confers no advantage.

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