JOE McGINNISS

THE ROGUE will be number 10 on The New York Times Best-Seller list this Sunday.

Even better, it’s number 7 on the e-book list.

Best of all, New York Times Book Review editors have selected it as an “Editor’s Choice,” a distinction reserved for “Recent Books of Particular Interest.”

No other book about Sarah Palin has received this accolade.

My thanks to so many readers of this blog, who I know have purchased the book, and who are telling their friends about it.

And my thanks to all those at Crown Publishing who have done so much to make THE ROGUE a success.

Just yesterday, Andrew Sullivan praised THE ROGUE as “devastating and exhaustively reported.”

And NEWSWEEK today highlights this paragraph from my Daily Beast article, entitled, “Arrivederci, Sarah!”

“In our 235 years as a nation, [Sarah Palin] might have been—other than the Civil War—the gravest threat our republic has ever faced. Not only was she the most unqualified candidate in our history, she might have been the most mentally fragile, and she was certainly the only one ever who flirted openly with the notion of ending the separation of church and state.”

It was almost three years ago that I flew to Anchorage to be there for election day.  Almost all my working hours since then have been spent researching, writing, and now promoting THE ROGUE.

Ever since its publication on Sept. 20, I’ve been reading that THE ROGUE might have been the decisive factor in Sarah Palin’s decision not to run for president.

Personally, I don’t give myself that much credit.

I think it was her lack of mental and emotional cohesion, her unwillingness to tackle a hard task, and her fear of future disclosures that made her pass up her one God-given opportunity to try to become the most powerful person on earth.

Let’s remember:  in the early 1990’s, Sarah Palin applied for a job as dispatcher with the Palmer, Alaska, police department.

She didn’t get that job.

And then she thought she could be president?

After Sarah’s announcement yesterday that she didn’t have the guts to fight for what she says she believes in, Andrew Sullivan called her “a nasty, callow, delusional, vicious know-​nothing, brewed in resentment… whose accomplishments could fit on a postage stamp.”

On a three-cent stamp, I would add.

But our long national nightmare is over now.

And as I told Dave Weigel of Slate, last night:

“Whew.  The country didn’t need to dodge a second bullet.  She’ll always be relevant as an example of how close an utterly unqualified individual came to being only a heartbeat away from the presidency. I’ll gladly sacrifice a few sales to have the country rid of Sarah Palin forevermore.”

Amen.