JOE McGINNISS

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Verne Rupright easily won re-election to a second term as Wasilla mayor. Verne stood up for me against the Palin-inspired haters when I lived in his town last year, and I’m happy to see that Wasillans have expressed satisfaction with his leadership.

This weekend, Sarah will speak at the Extraordinary Women Conference of Christian zealot right-wing women in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The conference motto is from Isaiah 40:31.
Those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Hey, Sarah, if you can scam 100K from this gullible herd of sheep for doing no more than regurgitating “Christian”/Tea Party talking points, more power to you.

But with Chris Christie’s statement that he will not enter the race for the Republican nomination in 2012, and with the collapse of Tea Party alternatives such as Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry, it is as if Moses really has parted the Red Sea as an invitation to you.

You’ve always said that your God tells you what to do, and opens doors for you.

Sarah, the door will never be open wider, nor the sea more parted, than it is right now.

Will you have the courage to walk through it, and enter the race?

I don’t think so.

And it’s not because The Big Guy in The Sky is telling you not to.

It’s because you can’t face the scrutiny.

As vice presidential nominee, you got a free pass in 2008 from mainstream media.

And MSM has allowed you to become a multi-millionaire celebrity ever since.
They are complicit, tacitly agreeing not to show you up as a fraud as long as you give them
ratings, web hits, and newspaper circulation.

But too many eyes are now watching, and MSM won’t be able to do it again.

Sarah, the road show is over. I know you’ll quit while you’re ahead.

To enter the race for the Republican nomination would not merely invite, but demand scrutiny
that you could not withstand: about Trig, about your extremist religious beliefs, about your phony
image as a “hockey Mom,” about your vindictiveness, about the disparity between how you tell others to conduct their lives and the way you’ve conducted your own, about the lies you’ve told as a public figure, about your ignorance, your shallowness, and your hysteria whenever you don’t get your own way immediately.

I don’t feel you owe your followers anything. They’re the ones who took the sucker’s bait.

You’ve been a talented entertainer these past few years.

Even I have found you amusing, on occasion.

But the show is over.

Arrivederci, Sarah.

Please see this from Vancouver today.

Andrew Sullivan this morning provides a link to Liz Trotta and an excerpt from the wonderful comments from the novelist Stephen Amidon (Security, Human Capital, The New City) who has his own fine new book out:  The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart, written in conjunction with his brother, a cardiologist.

I’m looking forward to appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show this Friday night.

Sarah continues her attempt to stay relevant to fundamentalist Christian extremists with an appearance at cult-college Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, on October 8.

Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr., son of founder Jerry Falwell, has ordered the decks–or at least the dormitories–cleared, in advance of Sarah’s arrival.

From a “boots on the ground” source in Virginia, I’m hearing:

“a whole dorm full of students were told to go home for the weekend so that her entourage could stay there. Some of them were pretty bent out of shape.”

That’s our Sarah: making new friends wherever she goes.

UPDATE: The Christian Dominionists-in-Training at Liberty U are not the students being evicted.  It’s actually students at the nearby University of Virginia at Lynchburg.

As reported by local television station WSET, students living in TravelLodge motel rooms converted for use as dorm rooms have been told they have to clear out by Thursday and stay away until Sunday, because Sarah Palin is coming to town.

“We have to get everything up out of here, like we’re going home for good,” said student Antwan Jenkins.  Incidentally, many of the evicted students are African-Americans.  As I report in THE ROGUE, proximity to people of color makes Sarah uncomfortable.

Ralph Reavis, president of University of Virginia-Lynchburg, is unapologetic.  “Sarah Palin is coming to town,” he said.

Long Live The Queen!

A lot of Beltway/Mainstream media tried to kill it at birth–I think largely because I call them out on their ongoing failure to investigate Sarah Palin–but THE ROGUE survives.

The generally acerbic Jack Shafer is somewhat acerbic in this Sunday’s NYTBR, but his fair-minded review is far different from Janet Maslin’s pre-publication kamikaze attack.

Here’s a quote from Shafer:

If God is the doorman, think of Joe McGinniss as the bouncer, doing his best to oust Palin from the political club and boot her back to Wasilla. Drawing on scores of interviews and voluminous readings of contemporary Alaskan history and journalism, he assembles a portrait of Palin as a daffy but savvy megalomaniac who excels at keeping herself in the public eye — the Christ-drunk Paris Hilton of politics, if you will. He concludes his book by comparing Palin’s political gyrations to a “lap dance” and her career to “a freaky sideshow performed on a carnival midway” until John McCain transformed her “into what many still seem to see as the greatest show on earth” by choosing her as a running mate.

THE ROGUE is selected as an “Editor’s Choice” in the October 9 edition of the New York Times Book Review. That is a distinction not carelessly awarded.

It also debuts on the New York Times Best-Seller list on October 9, as #7 on the e-book nonfiction list, and as #10 on the hard-cover list.

And that’s on the basis of only the first six days of sales, not even a full week.

Some hostile Beltway sites gleefully pointed to the fact that THE ROGUE had sold “only” six thousand copies, as recorded by Bookscan.

As if 1,000 copies a day was a poor rate of sale.

In fact, the Bookscan number of 6,000 represents only 75 percent of hard-cover sales.

So make the six thousand 8,000.

And Bookscan does not include e-book sales, so nobody buying for a Kindle or Nook gets counted.
Given that the NYTimes list ranks the book even higher on its e-book best seller list than on its hard-cover list, we can add another 8,000.

And then there’s Canada, whose sales are not included, and which average up to ten percent of U.S. sales. Ten percent of 16,000=1,600.

So a more realistic count of sales over the first six days would be at least 17,500.

Hey, the numbers will be what they will be.

But the MSM attempt to spin the first six days into evidence of “lukewarm” reception is dishonest.

In any case, having first made the New York Times Best-Seller List top ten in 1969, and having made it again in 2011, that gives me best-sellers written over a span of 42 years, which my publisher believes to be a record.

And let’s not forget that four of the books I wrote within that span were also NYT Top Ten Best-Sellers.

I don’t say this to brag, but to point out how pathetic it is for Sarah and her dwindling band of zealots to refer to me as a “so-called journalist,” in quotes, as if I’ve been some sort of fringe figure all my life.

I’ll see you on the Bill Maher show on HBO next Friday night, and many of you might hear my upcoming radio interviews before that.

Thanks for continuing to check in.

I hope that all of you, having seen the maelstrom into which I’ve plunged, can understand why I’ve had to suspend comments for a while.