JOE McGINNISS

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.

The one thing Sarah has insisted on over the past few months was that she would announce her decision about running for president by the end of September.

Well, guess what?

Here we are.

And only silence from Sarah.

Finally, even her longtime supporters have had enough. See this.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time…

But now even the some who have been fooled by Sarah until now have had enough.

Looks like Janet Maslin of the New York Times might be her last fan standing.

Last Friday, I did a radio satellite tour of the USA.

For two hours, nonstop, I did a series of six to ten-minute interviews with radio shows, either live or taped, on thirteen different stations.

It was like the old country music song “I’ve Been Everywhere.”

I was on in:

Tampa
Las Vegas
Pittsburgh
New York (Sirius, which means nationwide)
Cleveland
Chicago
Miami
Washington
Minneapolis/St. Paul
Denver
St. Louis
Grand Rapids
Davenport

On Tuesday morning, I did it again, for two and a half hours, appearing on fifteen different shows in:

Asheville
Baltimore
San Francisco
Miami
Dallas
Houston
Kansas City
Tucson
Philadelphia
Charlotte
Norfolk
Salt Lake City
Billings
Grand Rapids
Detroit

And on Wednesday morning, I’ll do it yet again, for two hours, on at least a dozen different shows.

As soon as I finish, I run outside, jump in a car, travel to Boston and fly to Toronto, where on Thursday I’ll do interviews from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. before flying back to either Boston, New York, or Los Angeles, depending on arrangements and scheduling still not finalized.

Radio satellite is crazy: instead of visiting forty different cities for interviews and signings, I sit at home and do interviews in forty cities by telephone.

What’s wild is that each different show in each different city presents a different format and different
hosts. I never know if I’ll be facing someone who’s read THE ROGUE and has intelligent questions, or, to go to the opposite extreme, the host at WLAV-WMMQ in Grand Rapids today, who had no questions for me, but who said, “I’d love to put you in a boxing ring with Sarah Palin. She’d kick your ass.”

And then he kept repeating it, as some strange mantra of sick fantasy: “She’d kick your ass…She’d kick your ass…She’d kick your ass…”

I finally said, “Do you have a question to ask me about my book?”

He said, “No. But she’d kick your ass…she’d kick your ass…And I hope Todd kicks your ass…”

I said, “So you don’t have any questions to ask me? You just want to blather on like that?”

He said, “I have a question: ‘How could you write in your book that Todd Palin had sex with prostitutes?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “That’s not in my book.”

“You wrote that Todd Palin slept with prostitutes! I hope he kicks your ass. And Sarah Palin could kick your ass.”

“I didn’t write that. Apparently, you haven’t read my book.”

“No! I haven’t! And I don’t intend to!”

At that point, I ended the call.

Sixty seconds later, I was talking to a delightful woman in Little Rock, or Louisville, or Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Radio Satellite is like playing poker: you never know what cards you’ll be dealt, but you’ve got to play them as well as you can.

I don’t know where I’ll be between 9 and 11 a.m. on Wednesday morning.

But I look forward to being in Toronto, one of my favorite cites, Wednesday night and all day Thursday.

Oh, yes: in regard to Sarah’s lawyer writing a letter to my publisher threatening a lawsuit, Random House/Crown issued a statement this afternoon:

“ We are confident that the reporting in THE ROGUE is solid, reliable, and well-substantiated. We stand by our publication and our author.”

Here’s another dose of reality.

“Blood in the Snow”.

And this from a man who wrote a competing book about Sarah.

A fair-minded article about me today in the Globe. Read it here.

As some of the prepublication vitriol subsides and more people read THE ROGUE, and not merely the National Enquirer, more are viewing it as the serious work it is.

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.

I’ve never had two hours fly by so fast. It was a lot of fun, and I answered as many questions and responded to as many comments as time allowed.

You can find it all here

My thanks to Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska for a great job of hosting and moderating.