JOE McGINNISS

Hey, nobody is more sorry than I am that the National Enquirer snagged a copy of THE ROGUE before publication and trumpeted a few “sensational” stories from it.

That led the New York Times to break their agreement to run a review the day before the Sept. 20 publication, and instead run it on Sept. 15.

That one review was blistering. Maybe the worst I’ve ever had, going back twelve books and forty-two years. (Don’t have time to pull out my scrapbooks and check.)

But National Enquirer + that one review gave MSM an excuse to dismiss THE ROGUE, rather than consider my criticisms of mainstream lack of coverage of the real Sarah Palin.

Suckups to power such as Howie Kurtz of Daily Beast and CNN pontificated on panel shows a week ago that THE ROGUE was not worth reading. Not that he’d read it.

By the time I started doing interviews last week, the MSM had its meme: THE ROGUE is tabloid trash that relies on anonymous sources who tell salacious stories about Sarah.

Nobody pointed out that if all the items National Enquirer turned into headlines were put together, they would take up only about three pages in a 320-page book.

All in all, it made for a long week as Piers Morgan, the women of The View, Joy Behar, Martin Bashir, etc. etc. came at me with fangs bared.

That was fine. I’ve been dealing with hostile interviewers since 1969, when many in the MSM of the time attacked me for having had the gall to write disparaging things about the man who was then President: Richard Nixon.

I was slightly annoyed that the cowardly lion Keith Olbermann, after bashing my book and me on the Bill Maher show–even while admitting that he hadn’t read it–canceled my scheduled appearance with him last week, apparently afraid to confront me face to face.

Rachel Maddow and Terry Gross of Fresh Air wouldn’t even schedule me.

“Morning Joe” also canceled.

I must have committed a truly egregious crime in order to turn MSNBC hosts into clones of those at Fox News.

What do they have in common?

Fear of Sarah Palin.

And need of Sarah Palin

Even though she holds no office, nor ever will again, MSM cowers in anticipation of her lash.

But they also know she still drives ratings.

This combination of fear and perceived necessity has caused MSM to give Sarah a free pass from the start. And apparently it’s automatically renewable as long as her presence on the political scene draws viewers and readers.

She has succeeded in bringing out the worst in MSM: both their cravenness and their greed.

The consummate hypocrite herself, she also encourages MSM hypocrisy. (i.e. They’re just too “high-minded” to investigate the myriad contradictions surrounding the birth of Trig.)

And they don’t like being told they didn’t do their job in 2008 and haven’t done it since, having made no effort to see the grotesque face that lies behind the snazzy mask.

I got behind the mask. I did find the real Sarah Palin.

But it’s a whole lot easier to try to kill the messenger than it is to read the message.

Nonetheless, ebb is turning to flow as reviewers beyond the beltway/NYTimes axis read the book.

This, for example, from Toronto.

And from Seattle, today, we have this.

Two more weeks of publicity coming up.

Unfortunately, given threats I’ve recently received, I’ve been advised not to announce in advance where I’ll be appearing, or when.

The attempts at intimidation go on, from the bilious slurs of Breitbart to the crazed rantings of a blogger soliciting donations to SarahPAC for “Todd’s legal defense fund” to pay his lawyers after he gets arrested for assaulting me so badly that I am hospitalized because of the injuries he will inflict.

I’m serious. There are people out there spewing stuff like that.

Especially after Tucson, they can’t be ignored.

But if you’d like to get a longer view and larger perspective, please read this Sam Tanenhaus story
in last Sunday’s NYTimes Sunday Review section. (Note, although Mr. Tanenhaus is the editor in chief of the New York Times Book Review, this piece ran on the front page of the separate Sunday Review section, which treats matters and people of cultural, social and political importance, going well beyond books and authors.)

“The Political Provocateur?”

To that, I gladly plead guilty.

UPDATE: MORE REVIEWS–

Associated Press

And I’ll close with the estimable Andrew Sullivan in the Murdoch-owned Times of London:

The next two weeks will determine the future of Sarah Palin. She has promised to make her mind up on whether she will run for the Republican nomination by the end of this month, and this week Joe McGinniss’s devastating portrait of the politician, The Rogue, will be published. That’s quite a combination — and could lead to either the end of the phenomenon or the beginning of its next, more lethal stage.

The initial reaction of Palin’s husband Todd to nuggets of the book leaked to the National Enquirer suggests that, whatever happens, there will be fireworks.

Of McGinniss, he said: “This is a man who has been relentlessly stalking my family to the point of moving in right next door to us to harass us and spy on us to satisfy his creepy obsession with my wife. His book is full of disgusting lies, innuendo and smears.”

Really? McGinniss, whom I’ve met once but emailed frequently on all things Palin, wrote the book because he believed the mainstream media didn’t ever get close to the true weirdness, extremism and instability of the former vice-presidential candidate. He also knew Alaska well, having written a bestseller, Going to Extremes, about it; and was steeped in political reporting, from 1969’s The Selling of the President to his brutal take-down of Ted Kennedy, The Last Brother. McGinniss is the last of a certain breed of aggressive reporter who knows how to get ordinary people to tell him things and is fearless about publishing what he finds out. And he smelt a story that the Washington press just didn’t want to touch.

By pure chance, when looking for a place to stay while researching the book in Palin’s home town of Wasilla, he was offered a rental property next door to her. Hardly believing his luck, he said yes — and got a blast of pre-publicity, courtesy of the Palins. Sarah accused McGinniss of wanting to spy on her and her kids; Todd built a wooden fence to obscure any view.

McGinniss was not there to spy on the Palins, even if his location obviously got under their skin. There’s no evidence he ever behaved in any manner but impeccably. But once the news spread, almost everyone he met in Wasilla offered him a gun for self-defence. He declined. As for the alleged threat to Palin’s children, the previous occupants of McGinniss’s house were people in drug rehab, and the basement had been burnt when a makeshift meth lab blew up. Todd Palin should have built that fence when it was really necessary.

And what did McGinniss find? What he found was a climate of fear in Alaska and especially Wasilla with respect to the Palins. The people he met were dozens of folk who had grown up with or worked for the Palins or knew them closely and were prepared to tell the actual story: a woman of no executive skills, bored with government, incapable of mothering, connected to the most extreme versions of evangelical Christianity, invariably in one mood swing or another and vicious and vindictive towards anyone who got in her way.

The gossipy bits of the book — including claims of a fling with a 6ft 8in black basketball star she was “covering” as a sports journalist; an affair with her husband’s business partner; experiments with cocaine and cannabis — will lead the news stories. But the heart of it is more revealing.

He found was a climate of fear in Alaska and especially Wasilla with respect to the Palins Palin seems consumed with ambition but strangely uninterested in the business of government, or indeed any deep knowledge of any difficult subject at hand. She never drops a grudge. She sees no distinction between public office and private gain. She has lived a lonely life as an adult teenager, coming straight from work to skulk in her room, taking trips to department stores rather than go to meetings, her children largely left to fend for themselves. It is, in fact, a pitiable profile of a lost soul — who combines white-knuckle delusions with the most bizarre practices and doctrines of the “dominionist” movement, seeking to expand Christian control over a secular society. Yes, she believes in witches — she had herself protected from them by a minister in her old church.

And, yes, the story of her last pregnancy is so bizarre it deserves a full chapter. She declared it at seven months, to universal disbelief from everyone, including her own staff. It is rare that a governor’s pregnancy is immediately dismissed as impossible on the record in the local paper by her political colleagues. Photos of her in this period are rare (a handful exist and in some of them she barely looks three months pregnant).

At eight months she agreed to fly to Texas for a speech. At 4am in a Texas hotel her waters broke, she says. Nonetheless, she gave the speech at noon, full of jokes, writing in her book the unforgettable sentences: “Big laughs. More contractions.”

She then refused to go to the nearby children’s hospital to deliver a child who was already diagnosed with Down’s syndrome but travelled all the way back to Alaska to her local hospital, on two long-distance flights. The flight attendants are on record as having no idea she was close to giving birth. Two days later she was back at work. Months later she was holding up this precious child, Trig, at the Republican convention like a scene from The Lion King.

I’ve never believed this story. But the real one remains a mystery. What we do know is that refusing an abortion with a Down’s syndrome child was critical to her gaining political altitude with the Tea Party base. Maybe McGinniss’s book will finally force Palin to produce the medical records to prove her maternity. I first asked for them in September 2008. So far, nothing.

Does this mean she truly is over, as the somewhat embarrassed Beltway has long insisted? It’s possible, but she must know that if she doesn’t run, her 15 minutes are up. And Palin tends to want every second of them. In my judgment she could well use the McGinniss book as classic jujitsu: she’ll claim she is being attacked again by the liberal elites and turn that to her advantage by declaring she’s running to defeat them. That’s a message the base adores.

As the shine comes off Rick Perry a little, as Mitt Romney treads water and as Michele Bachmann appears to be fading fast, Palin has an opening. One reason I suspect she’ll take it is that she recently joined the growing attacks on Perry, one of her closest political allies in the past (that was his conference when her waters broke), calling him a purveyor of “crony capitalism”. If she were to pole-vault off the new book to run as a candidate-as-victim, Republican politics could be hopelessly scrambled.

Stay tuned. Turbulence ahead.