Book excerpt: In The Lies of Sarah Palin, Geoffrey Dunn provides the first full-scale and in-depth political biography of the controversial Republican vice-presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska. Based on more than two-hundred interviews---many of them with Republican colleagues and one-time political allies of Palin's---and more than forty-thousand pages of uncovered documents, Dunn chronicles Palin's troubling penchant for duplicity in grim detail, from her dysfunctional childhood in Wasilla through her contentious run for mayor and her failed governorship of Alaska. He also provides the shocking inside story of her betrayal of running mate John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign and her self-serving resignation as governor in July of the following year. Dunn deftly places Palin in the American tradition of right-wing demagogues---from Huey Long to Joe McCarthy---and details her troubling obsession with Barack Obama as it fuels her own political ambitions and a potential run for the presidency in 2012. The Lies of Sarah Palin is a journalistic tour de force that vividly reveals the Queen of the Tea Party movement as a vengeful and manipulative empress without clothes. This is the definitive book on Sarah Palin.