Illustration by Edward Sorel.

It has been only a few days since the appearance of my Vanity Fair article “Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury,” and the response, to put it mildly, has been considerable. I won’t address simple differences of opinion about Sarah Palin (or my take on her) in this short dispatch—Palin is a subject on which people have strong views, and often complicated reactions, and I’ll respond to some of the more thoughtful commentary at another time. But meanwhile there has also been a considerable amount of misinformation put about concerning the article and my work. It’s important to address this now.

Before I do, one quick note. In briefly describing a scene in which I saw members of the Palin family (Sarah, Todd, Piper) just before Sarah Palin spoke at an event in Independence, Missouri, I assumed that the child with Down syndrome who was among the Palins was their son Trig. This was a mistake, and I regret the error. The child turns out to be Samuel Loudon, the son of Gina Loudon, an acquaintance of Palin’s. I’ll come back to Ms. Loudon in a moment.

Now, on to a few matters of substance.

Ben Smith wrote in a blog post on Politico that a former McCain campaign aide got in touch with him “to cop to being the half-serious progenitor of a story which, embellished almost beyond recognition,” appeared in my piece. The story involves a conversation that Palin had had with campaign aides in which Palin brought up the subject of the possible marriage of her daughter Bristol to Levi Johnston, and wondered what the best political timing for a wedding would be. “Would it be good for the campaign if they got married before the election?” she asked. Smith went on to suggest that the story originated in an old British newspaper report. For the record, neither that newspaper report nor the campaign adviser who spoke to Smith was a source for my article, and in any case the British newspaper report did not contain the pertinent quotation from Sarah Palin. The story in my article and the quotation from Palin come from a senior campaign aide, who was recounting firsthand experience—something said to this person by Palin—not hearsay.

A second blog post by Smith on Politico contained a complaint by Karladine Graves, the president of Preserving American Liberty (PAL-PAC), the organization that sponsored the event at which Palin spoke in Independence. I had written that the organization seemed to exist mainly for the purpose of putting on this one event, but Graves maintained that (in Smith’s words) it “continues to put on its regular slate of smaller local events.” Graves’s contention is not true—there is no “regular slate of smaller local events.” Before the Palin event, PAL-PAC had produced exactly one event, a “Constitution class” at a local hotel.Graves would not speak with me about the group’s activities—as noted in my article, she quickly got off the phone—but in the course of my reporting I did speak with the group’s treasurer, Elizabeth Anderson. Anderson said that PAL-PAC has been involved in only one other activity in the four months since the Palin event: a few of its members attended a speech by Missouri lieutenant governor Peter Kinder, where they passed out flyers promoting a state ballot proposition. When I asked Anderson how many PAL-PAC members had attended this event and whether the group had helped to organize it, she answered that only a few people had attended, and that they had not helped to organize it. She added that PAL-PAC hopes to hold some kind of event this fall to educate the public about health-care reform, but she said that no date had been set, and no firm plans existed.(PAL-PAC’s Web site suggests that some in the group may have also helped organize an immigration rally and marched in a parade in July, but Anderson did not mention these events when we spoke on August 3. According to the “Events” section of PAL-PAC’s Web site, as of this morning, “[t]here are no upcoming events.”)