Mr. McGinnis, who has been writing best sellers since “The Selling of the President” in 1969, starts this book by affecting a gee-whiz attitude about his amazing new digs. (“Forty years in the business and I’ve never had a piece of luck like this.”) But he doesn’t get far with that attitude. Ten pages into “The Rogue” he has already blown his cover, printing a map to the Palins’ isolated house. He describes having gone to the Palin door with a signed copy of his book about Alaska, “Going to Extremes,” and exploiting this encounter to engage the family’s older son, Track, in conversation. But had Mr. McGinniss been a good neighbor, he would have delivered that book without showing up unannounced.
Mr. McGinniss explains that he was shocked, just shocked, at the angry response his presence in Wasilla provoked. But “The Rogue” makes the Palins’ widely publicized anger understandable, even to readers who might have defended his right to set up shop in their neighborhood and soak up the local color. Although most of “The Rogue” is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, Mr. McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident” and “a friend.”
And these stories need not be consistent. “The Rogue” suggests that Todd Palin and the young Sarah Heath took drugs. It also says that she lacked boyfriends and was a racist. And it includes this: “A friend says, ‘Sarah and her sisters had a fetish for black guys for a while.’ ” Mr. McGinniss did in 2011 make a phone call to the former N.B.A. basketball player Glen Rice, who is black, and prompted him to acknowledge having fond memories of Sarah Heath. While Mr. Rice avoids specifics and uses the words “respectful” and “a sweetheart,” Mr. McGinniss eggs him on with the kind of flagrantly leading question he seems to have habitually asked. In Mr. Rice’s case: “So you never had the feeling she felt bad about having sex with a black guy?”
So much for the soft sell. Soon Mr. McGinniss is settling in to enjoy the fuss his mere presence has created. “Normally, for a news story to continue beyond the first 24-hour news cycle, something newsworthy must occur,” he writes loftily, but “The Rogue” is filled with proof to the contrary. What was his hate mail like? He quotes it. What did Glenn Beck call him? That’s here too. Who took umbrage at this venom and chose to help him? One man offered him a hideout, despite Mr. McGinniss’s slight skepticism about his motives. “But you don’t know me,” Mr. McGinnis protested.
“Hell, I’ve even got an AK-47 you might like,” the man volunteered.
Yes, McGinniss's publisher was so lacking in ethics and simple human decency that he allowed this creep to publish a detailed map to Governor Palin's home, for all the deranged wanna-be Jared Loughners of the world to see. And remember, this is a mother with small kids at home.
Kudos to the Times, but let's nor forget that it was just a short while ago that the New York Times posted an appeal on their website openly soliciting the assistance of any and every sleaze merchant they could coax out of the woodwork to please help them dig up dirt about Sarah Palin by reading through that trove of just-released emails from Sarah Palin’s tenure as Alaska's governor the Times and the Washington Post had posted online.
As an interesting sidelight to this, Armando Salguero, a reporter on the Left-leaning Miami Herald was so disgusted that the paper ran McGinniss's sleazy and thus far unproven account of Palin's supposed short term affair before she was married with NBA Basketball player Glen Rice as 'news' that he took the unusual step of writing an open e-mail letter to all his colleagues. Both Salguero's letter and the responses he got say quite a bit about the state of what passes for journalism nowadays.
I have absolutely no doubt that there's no coincidence about McGinnis's book and Levi Johnson's 'Deer In The Headlights' being publish concurrently. It was probably coordinated between Lefties in the media and the White House several months ago, because they expected Governor Palin to be a presidential candidate by now.
The funny thing is, this kind of sleaze is so over the top and indecent that it tends to backfire...and Governor Palin is going to end up strengthened by it, just as she was by the e-mail 'scandal'.
I'm surprised Todd didn't beat the crap out of him. No jury would have convicted him.
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