25 Things You Need to Know About Joe McGinniss’ Book “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin”
Joe McGinniss’ book, “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin”, is a poorly written collection of lies and ramblings of a very strange man who spent a summer stalking the Palin family and their friends in Wasilla, Alaska (often incorporating the squirrels and waterfowl of the area into the book as characters, like the author was some sort of bitter, agenda-driven, drag-king version of Beatrix Potter). Kevin DuJan of HillBuzz.org read Joe McGinniss’ book so you never have to — and has collected the only 25 things you ever need to know about “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin” as a public service below.
What follows is an exhaustive attempt to tell you absolutely and definitively EVERYTHING you need to know about this book (so no complaining that it’s a long essay, all Ye of the Twitter and the 140-character maximums; this is meant as a resource for those who want to counter the vile things said about Governor Palin in this book without having to further line McGinniss’ coffers by actually buying a copy of his mutterings…as told to him by geese or squirrels). The book is 300+ pages of craziness that I’ve distilled into 25 sections for you, which also amounts to an identification of the Left’s 25 most common attacks on Governor Palin, since nothing in The Rogue is original. If you’ve been following Governor Palin’s political career with any interest, then you’ve heard almost all of this garbage before (and probably told better by the likes of Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and others in the lamestream media). The Rogue honestly amounts to several days of my life that I will never get back, having to slog through this dreck so I’d know what the Governor’s most mentally unstable detractors continue to say about her, so terrified by the clear and obvious realization that Sarah Palin is indeed the woman who’s going to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 and become the 45th President of the United States.
25. The book is written at an almost grade school level and often resembles something that would cross the desk in the Principal’s office, where a deliberately unidentified someone reports on someone else thinking he heard another person talk about something a friend’s friend’s neighbor told him that girl with the pigtails and googly eye said before third period lunch on a Tuesday, but no one can remember which Tuesday. Maybe it was a Wednesday, on second or third thought. Or maybe a squirrel actually said it and the geese just transcribed it inaccurately, as geese often do.
Apparently, Joe McGinniss lived in Alaska many years ago, before — I presume — being driven from the state like the snakes from Ireland. It would be wonderful if Chuck and Sally Heath (Governor Sarah Palin’s parents) had something to do with that, as it would no doubt make them true Alaskan heroes in my eyes, but the author never specifies why he left Alaska in the first place (or who supplied the pitchforks to the righteous townspeople who sent him packing)…only that he left, and now that he’s back in the state stalking the Palin family, he reminisces awkwardly throughout The Rogue about what he remembers about Alaska in the 1970s (SPOILER: he was almost responsible for a bear mauling his youngest daughter when he foolishly left food outside overnight near the only path the girl could take to use an outhouse in the woods…just to give you a sense of the sort “big thinker” McGinniss admits himself to be in his own book).
McGinniss succeeds in not only making the most fascinating and awe-inspiring state in the Union seem dull as dirt (when not describing small children almost being eaten by wild animals he personally enticed into their general vicinity), but he depicts almost all of its residents as bitter, foul-mouthed, mentally unstable, agenda-driven kooks. Oddly enough, he does this while praising the oddballs who allegedly seek him out to “tell the truth about Sarah Palin”. These people — the majority of whom the author identifies only as “local handyman”, “a woman who used to know Sarah Palin’s cousin”, “a man who knows Todd Palin can’t really fish”, or “someone Sarah Palin crossed on her rise in the political world” — very quickly seem like the types who’d respond to an open casting call for extras if Bob Newhart ever decided to open a Wasilla branch of the Stratford Inn and mounted a remake of his eponymous 80s hit — but this time on HBO where everyone could use expletives every other word in casual conversation that more often than not centered around their irrational hatred of Governor Sarah Palin.
This is Larry, a guy who hates Sarah Palin, and this is his brother Darrel, who also hates Sarah Palin, and this is his other brother Darrel, who hates Sarah Palin too, and all of them showed up out of the blue at the house McGinniss rented to stalk the Palin family. They all brought either salmon, moose, yak, or bear meat and assorted guns McGinniss could borrow to “protect himself” from the people he moved next door to and harassed all summer. None of their last names are given, because even though these are rugged outdoorsmen, they are terrified that Governor Palin has magical powers and will know they betrayed her and they fear she will ruin their lives if they find out they’ve talked to McGinniss.
Repeatedly, McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of being both omnipotent and omniscient, which are words he learned from a dictionary he mistakenly opened once in the middle of the “Os”.
Every chapter of The Rogue has a half dozen either unnamed or first-name-only “locals” who hate Sarah Palin with such burning passion they drive up to McGinniss’ rented house in the middle of the night uninvited, to give him the “real scoop” on the Palins. And then offer him guns to protect himself from “those Palins” next door, with all their magical powers.
The net effect is that it seems McGinniss imagines these encounters entirely, or perhaps dreams them. If they “happened” at all.
While reading The Rogue, I actually kept looking over at a poster of Alaska I have hanging on my wall here at Buzzquarters, since I’ve never visited the state but have wanted to ever since Governor Palin emerged on the national scene and began telling Americans about its wonders. On a shelf near the poster I have a jar where I’m saving my spare change to apply to a trip up there, where I will make a point to visit Wasilla, so I can see the Alaskan town the next President of the United States called home before her move to Washington. Before Governor Palin, I can’t remember ever thinking about Alaska much, let alone wanting to go there, of my own volition, on what would amount to a very expensive trek from Chicago.
Watching Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC, I became even more enamored with the state and its people and even went so far as to look into how much apartments would rent for in Anchorage and whether I’d ever consider moving there. Governor Palin made the state seem that appealing.
McGinniss, however, depicts Alaska as a real viper pit, chock full of hateful, malicious, and jealous yokels who can’t speak for more than a sentence or two without degenerating into profanity. 90% of the people quoted by McGinniss in his book employ either “f***” or “s***” in the quotes he used from them. As a writer myself, who avoids profanities like this as much as possible since I believe they discredit those relying on them, I had a hard time finishing McGinniss’ book since the profanity was just so jarring. And I’ve dated sailors, so I’ve heard salty language before…but The Rogue was too much for me to take at times.
If I was just a casual reader, and not someone reading The Rogue because I felt I had to, I would have dropped the book back into the remainder bin at the first “f***” one of McGinniss’ disgruntled Alaskans uttered.
I also have no respect for an author of a “tell-all” book on a public figure who uses the excuse that “people are scared to identify themselves when discussing the Palins because they have magic and vengeance inside them”. This is very similar to the anonymous sniping that goes on every day on the Internet, where disgruntled, petty, and ridiculous people hide behind avatars and screen names to sully other people’s hard-won reputations. If you won’t use your real name when lobbing accusations at someone so your own personal motivations can be considered in the mix, you need to log-off or stop allegedly appearing at McGinniss’ rented house in the middle of the night to give the secret, “real scoop” on anyone like the Palins.
It’s shameful Random House printed a book that contains material statements provided by people identified by conventions like “a woman whose friend told her something bad Sarah Palin did before she became mayor twenty years ago”.
I’d call this book “amateur hour”, but I’d never want to insult amateurs in the process…and realize I need quotes around the word “book” while I’m at it, since The Rogue reads more like a collection of anonymous Internet postings than a printed work that actually survived the editing process at a major publishing company.
24. Around 70% of the material included in “The Rogue” is recycled from the Alaskan Leftist blogs that have been targeting and harassing the Palin family for several years now, with the bloggers who run these sites making personal guest appearances in chapter after chapter, like fifth-tier would-be “super” villains cameoing in comic books.
I’ll put it this way…if someone in Gotham City decided to write a “tell-all” book about Batman and lazily lifted verbatim most of what the rogue’s gallery of Batman’s usual attackers scrawl on bathroom walls about him, you’d essentially have the DC Comics version of The Rogue by Joe McGinniss.
Only, it wouldn’t be “The Joker”, “The Riddler”, “Catwoman”, “Two-Face”, or “The Penguin” cited as sources…and it wouldn’t be second-tier villains like “Egghead”, “Clock King”, “King Tut”, or “The Mad Hatter” either…it would be unaccomplished kooks dressed only in their underpants, running around their mothers’ basements with Hot Pockets stains on their jiggling bellies, calling themselves “The Spatula”, “Fruity Pebbles”, “Fart Fiend”, “Toilet Squirrel”, and “The Lemon”.
These are the sorts of fifth-tier, would-be “super” villains who believe they plague and bedraggle Governor Palin from the BBQ Beef and Pizza Supreme scented confines of their basement-located blogging operations. McGinniss treats all of them with more credence and deference than the lot of them deserve.
Andrew “The Spatula” Halcro was the “also-ran” who competed in the 2006 Alaskan gubernatorial race as a third party candidate. McGinniss doesn’t clearly identify which party he belongs to, so I assume it’s the Spatula Party. Halcro seemingly believes Governor Palin is evil because she won the gubernatorial race and not him, and has apparently now dedicated his life to trash-talking her on Internet blogs because “the spatula never rests!”.
Phil “Fruity Pebbles” Munger runs the “Progressive Alaska” blog, and is quoted by McGinniss extensively on how “Sarah Palin isn’t even a real rock climber because on that TV show she wore the wrong kind of boots and the wrong helmet”. This is treated with the same kind of seriousness I’d imagine a real author would use in a book where someone credible accused a public figure of murdering someone. Munger’s hatred of the Governor is actually rooted in the fact that he believes she “sullied the noble sport we love” and this has sent him on a quest to destroy her, because she wore pants on camera that were too tight for rock climbing when she filmed a segment for her TV show last summer. Seriously, this is Munger’s beef with Governor Palin: he doesn’t like the rock climbing abilities she demonstrated on television last year.
Shannyn “Fart Fiend” Moore, another blogger, apparently hates Governor Palin because she thinks she’s a better fisherwoman than the Governor will ever be, and is angry the Governor didn’t spend more time on fishing boats or at the summer fishing camp that Todd Palin’s family owns. McGinniss cites as evidence of her credibility that Moore gave him smoked salmon to take home with him when he finally left Alaska, so therefore she must be listened to and all her rantings and ravings taken as gospel — because she gave him fish, and claims she used to make a living fishing for halibut out of Homer, Alaska. Also, because she is a lesbian and has a partner named Kelly, so therefore, by implication, anyone challenging her assertions must be homophobic (or just really hate the salmon she smokes and gives to strangers).
Jeanne “Toilet Squirrel” Devon writes “The Mudflats” blog, if “writing” can be used loosely enough to also include what squirrels would accomplish if set loose on a keyboard coated with almond butter on random keys that encourage them to lick strategically. The evidence McGinniss provides attesting to her credibility is that her husband’s name is Ron and apparently she lives in a house with TWO toilets in it.
Jesse “The Lemon” Griffin is another blogger McGinniss relies upon consistently, who is author of The Immoral Minority blog and whose main beef in life is that no matter how much he wishes, or how much he pretends at Halloween, he will never be a foul-mouthed, talentless redhead named Kathy the way he secretly aspires to be.
Seriously.
These are the primary sources for 70% of the unfounded and often-ridiculous rumors and lies McGinniss recounts in The Rogue.
23. McGinniss has a bizarre, unnatural, and disturbing fascination with Governor Palin’s youngest daughter Piper.
Throughout the book, McGinniss bizarrely obsesses over Piper Palin — who, as of The Rogue’s writing, was a ten year old child.
McGinniss drifts into creepy territory when the talks about Piper; he’s clearly fascinated by the youngest Palin daughter and goes into strange detail about how he’d stage manage her at appearances the Governor makes where Piper’s included amongst the Palin family members supporting the Governor that day.
In doing this, McGinniss reminds me of the creeps who seem to hang around in the shadows on shows like Tantrums & Tiaras; these are older, awkward, men with no relation to any of these young girls who for no good reason attend beauty pageants for pre-teens and formulate opinions on how these prepubescents should better comport themselves.
Every sentence McGinniss writes that includes the word “Piper” is just icky.
We live in a world where Barack Obama received a Nobel Prize in 2009 for “being awesome” but where Todd Palin wasn’t given a medal in 2010 for having the restraint to never beat to a pulp the creepy man who moved in next door and spent a summer inappropriately fixated on the public appearances and private behavior of a ten year old girl. Todd Palin is a remarkable man for not allowing McGinniss to bait him, while I’ll let you fill in the blank for what you personally think McGinniss is for including so many references to Piper in his book.
22. McGinniss treats Trig Palin even worse, and speculates in the infamous “Chapter Nineteen” that Trig might actually be the unwanted child of an unnamed mystery women whom the Palins bribed to deliver a Down Syndrome baby to them at the orders of John McCain in 2008.
Wow. That’s the strangest sentence I’ve ever written, referring to the most bizarre chapter of McGinniss’ book — Chapter Nineteen — where the author actually claims that in February 2008 Senator John McCain held a secret meeting with Governor Sarah Palin and ordered her to somehow obtain a baby with Down Syndrome so that Christian and conservative voters would want to support a McCain-Palin ticket in the general election.
It’s Chapter Nineteen that I believe will ultimately cost Random House millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees and settlement to the Palin family. If you are at all curious about reading any of McGinniss’ book for yourself, just to see how bad it is, I’d advise you to read only Chapter Nineteen because it’s the absolute worst chapter in The Rogue, chock full of lies, defamation, and more conspiracy theories than a DVD box set of the collected works of David Duchovny.
It’s eighteen pages of pure, deranged, terrible.
In a nutshell, McGinniss attempts to blame Andrew Sullivan (whom he laughably calls “a conservative”) of The Atlantic for fostering the belief that Trig Palin is not Governor Palin’s son. Repeatedly, McGinniss injects, here and there, little disclaimers that insist, “I don’t believe this, but Andrew Sullivan does” and then goes on to present Sullivan’s fetishistic delusions as if they were scientific fact.
I believe Random House inserted those disclaimers on McGinniss’ behalf, in a shoddy attempt to deflect liability and responsibility for the many lawsuits that will result from Chapter Nineteen.
If you’ve read any of Sullivan’s diatribes on Trig, you’ll be familiar with half of Chapter Nineteen’s insanity, since McGinniss reprints whole sections of Sullivan’s conspiracy theories, rehashing all the discredited rumors and assorted falsehoods Sullivan’s been pushing for three years now.
The new material McGinniss introduces is his own personal belief that Trig Palin is not Bristol Palin’s son, as Sullivan contends, or Willow Palin’s child, as Sullivan has also speculated, but is instead a baby born to an unidentified mystery woman who unexpectedly went into labor in April 2008 when Governor Palin was attending a conference in Dallas, Texas.
McGinniss speculates that in February 2008 Senator John McCain met Governor Palin for a top-secret meeting in the Willard Hotel around the corner from the White House in which space aliens may or may not have been present. Apparently, the squirrels or geese living in the woods near his rental house in Wasilla confirmed all of this. McCain apparently told the Governor that if she wanted to become Vice President she had to somehow have a baby with Down Syndrome before the election, since McCain divined somehow this was the only way he could get Christian and conservative voters to support him in the general election.
McGinniss claims Governor Palin agreed to this plan immediately, but realized at the Willard that she couldn’t possibly guarantee she’d become pregnant with a Down Syndrome baby; in McGinniss’ demented mind, McCain then hatched the plan whereby Governor and Todd Palin would find a mystery woman in Alaska who’d provide them with an unwanted Down Syndrome baby whom they would then raise as their own and be responsible for — for the rest of their natural lives — on the chance this baby could curry enough sympathy with Christian and conservative voters to make them forget how much they detested John McCain.
Years ago, when I had a grueling and long commute to and from college every day, I’d read Olivia Goldsmith novels on the train because I enjoyed the wild plot twists and unrealistic, fantastical schemes of her protagonists. This is the woman who wrote “The First Wives’ Club” and the even more ridiculous “Flavor of the Month”; the former was about a trio of Hollywood actresses who each had bizarre secrets a Kitty Kelly-esque gossip biographer revealed to a shocked public in a tell-all book. One of the women was really a man, another was a plastic surgery addict, and the third was secretly married to her brother, with all of Hollywood working overtime to keep their secrets from going public so their hit show would stay on the air.
Goldsmith’s conspiracy theories and “shocking secrets” were entertaining enough for fun train ride distraction; McGinniss’ demented theories are just sick…and I truly hope actionable in a Palin defamation suit against both the author and Random House.
Chapter Nineteen includes great speculation about Governor Palin’s flight from Dallas to Anchorage to deliver Trig in a hospital she trusted with medical personnel she cared about and who cared deeply about her — a concept McGinniss clearly doesn’t understand, since he spends whole pages pontificating that the Governor should have asked Governor of Texas Rick Perry to help her deliver Trig in a hospital she’d never been to with doctors she’d never met instead of flying home to have her son in Alaska, on her own terms, the way she’d planned.
McGinniss speculates the Governor was never really pregnant and this was just part of McCain’s plan to make her Vice President. According to him, the mystery woman in Alaska who was “really” pregnant with Trig went into labor early, necessitating the Governor’s sudden flight home so she’d be there when the baby was born and could “pretend” she’d delivered him.
Madness.
McGinniss is severely inconsistent in his craziness, too, because early in Chapter Nineteen he makes a big deal about Governor Palin flying to Dallas on that trip without her security detail (implying she didn’t want them around because she was going to fake having a baby during the trip), but then slips up by alleging the mystery woman supposedly pregnant with Trig “went into labor unexpectedly” while the Governor was in Texas.
Apparently, in addition to being the grand mistress of all conspiracies, Governor Palin is also a psychic, because she apparently foresaw the “unexpected early delivery” of Trig via the mystery pregnant woman…so she told her security detail to stay in Alaska…so she could go to Texas and then suddenly have to fly back to Alaska…so she could be there when the “unexpected early delivery” she predicted happened as she envisioned it with her magical powers.
Why didn’t she just stay in Alaska the whole time?
In novels, when a writer pens something this ridiculous, you can laugh it off, put the book back in your bag, and head home from the train station to get on with your life. When an author like McGinniss actually gets away with printing bizarre, delusional, tales like this in a work of supposedly “nonfiction” I’m appalled Random House signed off on the publication of this madness.
21. The only useful piece of information in the whole book appears on Page 10 — it’s a map of Governor Palin’s neighborhood surrounding Lake Lucille in Wasilla, which clearly shows the location of a Best Western that McGinniss could have stayed in while “researching” his book if all he was really interested in was a place to live in.
This is actually very important, because Joe McGinniss continues to claim he didn’t stalk the Palin family in the summer of 2010, and was only living next door to them because he found the house Catherine Taylor (who comes off as a real scumbag in this book) owned available. McGinniss depicts this house as the only living space he could have rented for miles and miles around Wasilla, using the first chapter of The Rogue to imply his only other option would have been an apartment in Anchorage that was filled with drug dealers and wife beating drunks (and that’s BEFORE Joe McGinniss even moved in!).
Actually, on page 10 of the book, McGinniss provides a map of the Lake Lucille area that shows Catherine Taylor’s rental property adjacent to the Palins’ home…but just a few parcels of land over, to the left, is the Best Western Lake Lucille Lodge — a hotel McGinniss could have easily stayed in last summer and been near the Palins’ property without harassing them in any way.
I put myself through college working in the hotel business; we frequently had guests book long-term stays at our properties where the Sales Department negotiated a discount rate because the rooms were occupied for several months at a time. This happens all the time at just about every hotel in the country. There is always a legal team in town for a long series of depositions, someone transferred to a new area for a job who is awaiting the closing paperwork or renovations on a new house, or an author in town to research material for a book.
Repeatedly in The Rogue McGinniss refers pejoratively to Lake Lucille as “nothing more than a landing strip for floater planes” and claims the lake is too polluted to fish or enjoy recreationally; McGinniss insists the lake is “just nice to look at”.
That makes me wonder just how jam-packed the Best Western Lake Lucille resort would be all summer, if Alaska possesses millions of lakes and other resorts would presumably offer better fishing for resort-goers to enjoy. The hotel’s website is sad, with none of the “Come here and stay for a month to enjoy the fishing and watersports!” I’d expect from a resort that’s highly in-demand and competing with the other world-class resorts in the state that enjoy intense tourist interest all summer.
Based on my experience working in the industry, I can’t imagine this Best Western wouldn’t have JUMPED at the chance to arrange a three-month stay for McGinniss in one of the 54 rooms the hotel offered that would have been less than the $1,500/month that McGinniss admits to paying Catherine Taylor for the three months he lived next door to the Palin family.
While this is probably obvious to you, Random House would never have bought McGinniss’ book if it was written while he stayed at the Best Western, however. McGinniss’ agent convinced the publishing house the book was worth buying because McGinniss would be renting the vacant home Catherine Taylor owned next door to the Palins (the one she repeatedly refused to sell to them, even though she never had any intention of living there herself, despite the Palins’ insistence they desperately wanted to protect their privacy by buying the house and shielding them from people like McGinniss forever).
So, in every chapter when McGinniss goes on about how he never had any intention of “peering over the fence or peeking in the windows” I just don’t believe him.
The only thing, in fact, that kept him from peering and peeking was the 14-foot fence Todd Palin erected to protect his family, especially his young children, from the creepy man next door who only got a book deal by promising to be as much of a nuisance to the Palins as possible.
20. McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of neglecting her children, leaving them to fend for themselves and eat scraps while she slept all day and avoided doing any work as Mayor of Wasilla.
I watched every episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska in a marathon with friends on Labor Day this year.
A few friends brought their boyfriends, who aren’t Palin fans, but aren’t rabid Leftist loons either. They were guys who were indifferent to the Palins, didn’t know much about them, and didn’t have any preconceived notions about them one way or another. They were curious about the show and interested in learning more about Alaska, so they can to watch the marathon with my boyfriend Justin, our friends, and me.
Repeatedly, people remarked at how well-behaved and downright nice the Palin kids all are. Shy and unassuming is a good way to describe all of them.
When I was growing up, I played soccer on a league far away from home and often had to wait for my father to pick me up after practice…and the only place I could wait safely for him was at the home of some of my teammates, who were all brothers, and whose parents left them feral and to their own devices. There must have been seven kids in that family. Their house was always filthy, with so many newspapers and so much junk strewn about the floor that it always reminded me of the trash compactor on the Death Star with that dianoga monster lurking beneath the refuse. I was afraid to go inside their house, was stunned these kids were always dirty (even when we weren’t out playing soccer in the mud), and could just see in their faces and general behavior they were neglected and abused on a regular basis. It was sad, and via Facebook I can see these guys still look like they grew up in a house with dianogas scurrying beneath the garbage in their living room.
The Palin kids, on the contrary, look like they grew up in a house where their parents loved them, fed them well, and taught them to take care of themselves.
I can’t imagine Governor Palin “sleeping all day”, but I can imagine her waking up incredibly early in the morning and then going to sleep early in the evening, since apparently she’s been doing this for years and it’s what people who grow up hunting are accustomed to.
I can also see her never coddling her children and telling them, when they were old enough to use the stove, to make something for themselves if they are hungry. That’s called parenting, where the mother teaches her brood to fend for themselves instead of catering to their every whim.
The Palin kids were not left feral to their own devices, but were seemingly given loose reins to learn, grow, and mature under the Governor’s and Todd’s guidance so they could become well-rounded and successful adults when the time comes.
Admittedly, all the hunting and fishing and rock-climbing and all-terrain-vehicle-riding exhibited on Sarah Palin’s Alaska is alien to someone like McGinniss (who admits in The Rogue, I state again, that he almost triggered the mauling of his daughter because he foolishly left food out that attracted a large, hungry bear…which even I, who has never been camping in my life, would not have done). I think it’s alien for him to imagine a fridge full of moose or elk meat and a kitchen where children are empowered to cook meals for themselves so they learn how to do it.
I think it’s shameful for anyone to criticize how another person raises her children, especially if the critic is a parent himself and should know better. Things get taken to a whole other level when the critic admits to foolishly endangering the lives of his children by not paying the least bit attention to repeated bear warnings while in the woods.
Honestly, if you’d ever read The Rogue, you’d be shocked by the nerve McGinniss displays by shamefully reveling in hypocrisies like this.
19. McGinniss simultaneously accuses Governor Palin of having sex with a black basketball player while at the same time calling her a racist…and insisting that any criticism of Barack Obama is racist too!
In Chapter Two of The Rogue, McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of sleeping with future NBA player Glen Rice while she was a sports reporter before her marriage to Todd and Rice was a college basketball star in Alaska for a Thanksgiving tournament in the 80s.
Rice, to his credit, insists to this day that Governor Palin was a wonderful woman he met while in Alaska and does not in fact claim he slept with her, only that she interviewed him during his trip and became a friend that stayed in touch with him afterwards.
McGinniss makes a big deal about Rice being black and invents stories from “people who refused to go on record” claiming Governor Palin was traumatized for life for having sex with a black man.
It’s disgusting. Chapter Two is probably the most revolting chapter in the book after Chapter Nineteen’s attacks on little Trig.
After going on about Rice and how allegedly sleeping with him (according to only McGinniss) is proof that Governor Palin is a racist, he then insists the Governor left her first college in Hawaii because she was too racist to live around “so many brown people”.
I’ve never heard the Governor talk about why she changed colleges, but I can conjecture as well as McGinniss can…and my belief is that moving from Alaska to Hawaii “for a change” is something that a great many Alaskans seem to do at least once in their lives. In The Rogue McGinniss notes several of his sources who had lived in, just got back from visiting, or were planning to move to Hawaii at the time he talked to them. Evidently, the 49th and 50th states have a one-way psychic connection where Alaskans are drawn to the islands after suffering through so many harsh winters.
I can picture Governor Palin, at age 18 or 19, thinking a four year stint in Hawaii would be a grand adventure…but then when she got there she evidently missed her family so much that the novelty of the extreme climate change wore off and she changed schools to one in Idaho, where her father grew up apparently…which was away from home but much more familiar to her climate-wise.
I left Cleveland at 18 for school in New York, but transferred after two years to a school in Ohio because I didn’t like the dreary, alien, environment I found myself in. So I can relate to Governor Palin and understand how it took her a few tries to find a college she liked. Thinking about all of my friends, I believe only one of us spent four years at the same school. My boyfriend Justin went to FIVE different schools and took eight years to graduate, with stops and starts along the way.
None of this is because any of us “didn’t like brown people we encountered” the way McGinniss claims about Governor Palin in The Rogue.
This is another chapter I hope lands both McGinniss and Random House in court for defamation.
18. In Chapter Three, McGinniss mainly complains about Governor Palin calling him out on Facebook for stalking her family and whines about Glenn Beck and others making him look foolish for moving in next door to the Palins.
I’ve always loved and supported political figures who have absolutely no fear of speaking their minds and calling people out, regardless of what the media will say about them doing that.
I think that’s what initially drew me to support Governor Palin in the first place. She says and does the things I would personally say and do if I was her. And man alive, she makes me laugh and laugh sometimes, especially when she uses Facebook to really sock it to people who tick her off.
I just love that.
So, reading Chapter Three of The Rogue — in which author McGinniss complains about Governor Palin expertly using social networking and her command of media outlets in her orbit to tell the world what a weird, creepy, nuisance Joe McGinniss was to her family in the summer of 2010 — I laughed out loud repeatedly remembering just how effective Governor Palin was, with just one Facebook post, in turning the tables on this creep.
I have to admit I’m a big fan of writer Charlaine Harris and her Sookie Stackhouse books, because Sookie’s forever telling it like it is and saying things in those books that are so spot-on and amusingly adroit at flooring her opponents…but in the most cheery, positive-sounding ways imaginable. Sometimes I have to wonder if Harris ghost writes some of the Governor’s Facebook entries and Twitter tweets…or if the Governor is just the next best thing to a real-life Sookie herself.
McGinniss whines and whines about people coast to coast thinking he’s a pedophile for trying to peep into Piper Palin’s windows or trying to take pictures of her and her siblings while they were swimming in the lake, but I’m left wondering what McGinniss expected people to think when instead of moving into the Best Western located about a block away from the Palins he decided to spend three months right next door, sitting outside on a deck that faced the side of the house where Piper’s windows are located.
A normal man would be horrified that he’d done anything, even inadvertently, that made neighbors think they couldn’t keep their windows open in the hot, sweltering summer for fear he’d peek at their children.
If McGinniss was a decent human being he would have realized his mistake and decamped from Catherine Taylor’s house to that Best Western where he could have done his book research somewhere that a set of parents didn’t have to worry about him bothering their children.
Creepy!
17. In Chapter Four, McGinniss accuses the Governor of enlisting a magical woman named Mary Glazier (who once used prayer to give someone cancer and drive her from Alaska) to help her become Mayor of Wasilla…through magic!
One of the weirdest aspects of The Rogue is how often McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of having magical powers.
It’s weird, for me on a personal level, because my boyfriend Justin’s parents think the same thing about Hillary Clinton and are always going on with him about how she has these powers — including “a heart attack ray she took from NASA on a trip she and Chelsea made there in the 90s” — that she routinely uses to destroy people who oppose her.
Justin’s mom and dad are very nice people, but they suffer from a condition known as Hillary Derangement Syndrome, where they believe Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton possesses magical abilities beyond those of ordinary women and uses them to terrorize people on her enemies’ list.
Surprisingly, a similar Derangement Syndrome exists amongst people like McGinniss who believe Governor Sarah Louise Heath Palin also has these magical powers…and surrounds herself with women such as Mary Glazier, who have these powers too.
McGinniss stops just short of shouting WITCH! WITCH! BURN THE WITCH! at either Palin or Glazier (a woman involved in Wasilla’s Christian community), but he does accuse Glazier of “praying” for a political opponent to get eye cancer, to have her car engine explode in her face, and then using magic to force the woman to move out of Alaska.
And Random House randomly published this as a “nonfiction” book, with accusations like this in Chapter Four.
Go ahead and catch your breath if you need to, from laughing so hard at this point, the way I am.
Chapter Four deals with Governor Palin’s first race for Mayor of Wasilla, in which McGinniss interviews John Stein, the man Palin beat like a rented mule in the election after Stein underestimated her as “just some young housewife” and essentially didn’t bother to mount much of a campaign against her.
Instead of accepting his loss and moving on with his life, Stein seems permanently vexed that a woman beat him at something and has forever eclipsed him in the history books.
There are numerous characters like Stein who appear in The Rogue who were defeated by Palin in the political arena in one way or the other and who now, to this day, obsess over losing to “some housewife and hockey mom”.
Before reading this book I never realized Wasilla grew so many grapes…or that bushels of them seem so sour all of a sudden.
16. McGinniss repeatedly attacks Christians in the way all Leftists in the media routinely do.
Throughout the book, McGinniss employs a particular tactic in attempting to make Governor Palin seem crazy by attacking her Christian beliefs and implying she’s some sort of fringe, apocalyptic, zealot.
Which she never has been.
What’s interesting about this is just how inconsistent McGinniss is with this, because in chapters where he needs to insist the Governor is a bad mother, with a filthy house, who is sleeping all day, McGinniss writes that there are no crosses or other religious paraphernalia in her home as proof that she’s not creating a stable environment to raise her children. In other chapters, where McGinniss insists Governor Palin must be a fundamentalist crusader with magical powers to destroy her enemies, the author forgets he’s already claimed the Palins have none of the tell-tale signs of religious fixation that would accompany such fundamentalism.
So, which is it, Joe McGinniss? Is Governor Palin a bad mother who can’t be bothered to put a cross up in her home or is she the religious zealot you describe who is so obsessed with being anointed by God on her political mission that she forgets to display any of this in her own home?
McGinniss devotes a whole page to noting all the many churches that exist around Wasilla, in a way that’s intended to make the town seem like it’s the absolute epicenter of fundamentalism…yet, in most chapters, McGinnisss also goes on for pages about how much drinking, drug use, petty theft, burglary, domestic violence, and other sins go on in the environs of Wasilla.
Now, I’m not a Random House published author like McGinniss, but I can’t imagine all the churches he painstakingly noted cause the crimes and social problems he harps on…but I bet a town with so many churches has them because its residents are reacting to the many problems in the area by turning to God and religion to help create a more moral social fabric they believe will eliminate some of these ills.
The same thing happens here in Chicago, on the south side, in neighborhoods Barack Obama neglected first as a community organizer, then as a state senator, followed by a short stint in the US Senate, and now his presidency. There are churches everywhere, in a part of town riddled with crime, because the good people of the South Side are trying desperately to alleviate the crime by making God a more complete and resounding part of their lives.
Somehow, McGinniss misses this, and just insists, essentially, that all the churches are proof of how stupid the people of Wasilla must be, and since Governor Palin attended services at several of the most moderate of these churches — unlike, say, Barack Obama who spent 20 years listening exclusively to the racist and paranoid delusions of Reverend Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United in Chicago — she is stupid too.
McGinniss indicts Governor Palin for receiving the religious vote consistently during her political career, because clearly if there is something wrong with Christians, there must be something very wrong with a candidate Christians mobilize to vote for.
15. McGinniss repeatedly criticizes Governor Palin for dismissing public officials she inherited from previous administrations and replacing them with people she felt better suited the jobs.
Honestly, all I have to say on this one is where is the similar criticism for Barack Obama replacing George W. Bush’s Cabinet.
Or, is he just allowed to do that because he’s a black man, while Governor Palin is a woman so she needs to keep in place all the people that her predecessor hired, just because they had been working in those positions “for a long time”, just as the man the Governor defeated had been “Mayor for a long time”.
Ridiculous.
And, I will add, racist and sexist on McGinniss’ part because it’s always fun to use the Left’s Alinsky Rules against them.
14. McGinniss exploits Alaskans like Catherine Mormile and twists their stories to depict Governor Palin as an evil woman who turns on people.
One of the most shameful things McGinniss does in The Rogue is when he consistently spotlights Alaskans here and there whom he concludes Governor Palin wronged in some way by not paying enough personal attention to.
One of these people is Catherine Mormile, who became brain damaged in an accident involving carbon monoxide poisoning while competing in the Iditarod. I’m going to extend Mormile the benefit of the doubt and assume she didn’t really know what she was doing when speaking to McGinniss, because anyone who competes in the Iditarod is someone I’d love to meet and get to know…so even though she comes off as petty and stalkerish towards Governor Palin in The Rogue, I’m going to assume that’s just because McGinniss either wrote her that way on purpose or she’s still so addled from her injuries that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing.
Essentially, what McGinniss wrote about Mormile is that many years ago Governor Palin saw her wandering around a supermarket, confused and lost, not long after her accident, and the Governor approached her with great kindness and told her that Mormile was a personal hero of hers for competing in the race and enduring such physical hardship.
This is something I can clearly see Governor Palin doing, since anyone who’s ever watched her work a rope line knows that unlike most politicians, Governor Palin genuinely enjoys meeting the people she encounters and would love to have more time in her life to get to know all of them…but it’s just not possible for politicians to become friends with everyone they ever talk to.
Well, McGinniss drags this story out over several chapters but eventually concludes that Mormile felt slighted years later when she came up to Governor Palin at her inaugural ball in 2007 and started giving her advice on how she should run the Department of Health in Alaska. The Governor was kind to Mormile, but told her that she’s got things under control and that she didn’t need Mormile’s help in running the Department…and that Mormile should focus on her own small business since she was not elected Governor, Palin was.
I read this part of the book several times and I still don’t understand what’s wrong with Governor Palin’s response to Mormile — am I missing something? An unelected member of the public interrupts the celebrations at the inaugural ball to tell the newly-elected Governor how she should run the Department of Health?
Really?
Why couldn’t Mormile have made an appointment, written a letter, or waited until after the ball was over to start in on criticizing Governor Palin before she’d even had the chance to staff a single meeting of the Department of Health?
For Palin supporters who are reading this, I really urge you to keep a lookout for people like Mormile in the years ahead…because they will come out of the woodwork. There are people out there who have encounters with political figures where just because someone like Governor Sarah Palin says something nice to them, they then believe they have a personal relationship with that person If a fan like Mormile meets a politician more than once, she may assume they are now friends, and could possibly concoct a whole imaginary relationship with that person.
The bubble bursts with an instance like the inaugural ball where reality confronts the fantasy and Mormile types leave the scene bitter and disgruntled because the politician they convinced themselves they had a personal friendship with really are just good politicians who have a way of making people feel this way, but in reality are not their personal friends.
I think Governor Palin is the right woman to become President and lead our country in 2012. I admire her greatly. I’ve met her in person and look forward to meeting her again. I am not her friend and she’s not my friend. We’ll, in fact, never be friends and I doubt she’ll ever know my name and use it to me in person. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to continue supporting her as long as I think she’s the best person on the scene to provide the leadership we need.
I have a lot of friends. I don’t need politicians to be my imaginary friends. I also don’t think people in movies or on the TV can see me when I’m watching them. From what I’ve gathered about Catherine Mormile from McGinniss’ book and ramblings I’ve read online attributed to her, I suspect she has trouble with a lot of these concepts, possibly due to the brain damage she suffered in her accident. Which is sad, and downright pathetic when someone like McGinniss uses Mormile as a vessel of attack against the Governor.
13. Chapter Seven of “The Rogue” is mostly more nonsense where McGinniss either faults Governor Palin for not preventing others from speaking their minds or he lambasts her for firing people she had every right to fire, like John Bitney. Oh, and then he accuses Governor Palin of using her influence to get Willow Palin out of vandalism charges.
John Bitney is a disgruntled former state employee who accuses Governor Palin of having him fired because Todd Palin told her to do that. It’s strange, and similar to Hillary Derangement Syndrome, but McGinniss really seems to believe Governor Palin and her husband Todd spend the majority of their time plotting and scheming against people who’ve wronged them.
McGinniss accuses the Governor of enjoying firing people, like she’s played a real life version of “The Apprentice: Alaska” and gleefully shouts “You’re Fired!” before commercial breaks, during which she fires more people she had every right to fire because that’s what a Governor can do to people whose performance she does not wish to tolerate.
That’s the whole point of having a chief executive…to make tough decisions and be responsible for deciding who does and does not get fired.
McGinniss is a real sexist because he writes with an assumption that a female Governor should be all touchy-feely, loving, and nurturing…never firing anyone and always deferring to the decisions made by her MALE predecessors in terms of who should have which positions.
Ridiculous.
In this chapter, McGinniss also faults the Governor for not telling radio talk show hosts to stop being mean to people who’ve opposed Governor Palin in the past. In one instance, a radio host called an Alaskan political figure a cancer upon the state, and McGinniss excoriated Governor Palin for not scolding him because that political figure had once had cancer and McGinniss feels “Palin should have known!”.
I assume that’s because Sarah Palin is magically both omnipotent and omniscient and must be held accountable for anything anyone even remotely associated with her ever does…while, meanwhile, Barack Obama is never to be blamed for anything because he is a black man!
One of Governor Palin’s magical powers is apparently her ability to control and be responsible for everything other people say, and McGinniss cites her for not using that power to control the speech of radio hosts.
The nerve of her!
And then, of course, the Governor got Willow out of vandalism charges when Willow attended a party that got out of hand and some foolish boys who were showing off for the girls caused damage to the house by jumping around and acting like foolish boys trying to impress girls. The boys were charged for the bad behavior and the girls were all cited as witnesses…which sounds like what typically happens in this situation, but because Governor Palin’s daughter is involved, McGinniss fantasizes about her and Todd taking a brief break from trying to have people they don’t like fired to intervene to save Willow from vandalism charges that none of the girls she was with were subjected to either.
The nerve of all of those Palins!
12. McGinniss claims Track Palin only joined the military because he was busted for vandalizing school buses and a judge secretly told him he had to either join the military or go to jail.Then the judge expunged himself from all physical records and erased his own existence, since no one has ever been able to identify who he was.
This is garbage that’s been recycled for years on the petty blogs in Alaska, but even McGinniss has to note that Track Palin was never charged with any vandalism of school buses and that one of the boys who was prosecuted in that particular case testified that Track was not involved in the incident.
McGinniss alleges a cover up and cloaks himself in the excuse that he can’t produce any evidence related to his assertions because a mystery judge — whose name he doesn’t know — sealed Track’s file because Governor Palin either used her magical powers again or she had that woman who can cause cancer in people’s eyes “pray” for the judge to protect Track.
And then, that woman made the judge disappear. Maybe, like the magical boy in that old Twilight Zone episode with Billy Mumy, she just wished him into an old cartoon!
And then, to punish Track and to help her own image, McGinniss claims the Governor ordered Track to join the military on the “seventh anniversary of 9/11″…only McGinniss can’t do basic math because Track enlisted on 9/11/07, the sixth anniversary of Islam’s assault on America. The seventh anniversary was 9/11/08, which was the day Track deployed to Iraq.
McGinniss claims this is all because the Governor wanted to be a “combat vet mom”, or because a judge ordered this to happen before disappearing into mystery forever, McGinniss characteristically never really bothers to decide which.
11. Possibly hoping to get the attention of Matt Damon, McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of believing people and dinosaurs lived together in Chapter Eight.
McGinniss repeats a lot of lies he’s heard various celebrities say about Governor Palin, and in Chapter Eight he channels Matt Damon and claims Governor Palin “told a man, who told another man, who told me” that “she once saw a photo of a dinosaur footprint with a man’s footprint inside it” and that this is proof that Governor Palin believes dinosaurs and people lived together like in the Flintstones. Or, maybe the old cartoon “Dino Riders”, McGinniss is once again not exactly clear which.
While I can readily imagine McGinniss possessing a deep and driving desire to sit around on Saturday mornings eating Fruity Pebbles and watching the Flintstones with Matt Damon (while possibly only wearing jockstraps and throwing Play-Doh at one another), I know there’s no evidence other than what’s in McGinniss’ warped imagination that Governor Palin ever said anything like this about dinosaurs, footprints, or people being taken on walks with dinosaurs inside their footprints.
Later in the book, McGinniss also repeats the Tina Fey line that “Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house”, which she also never said.
McGinniss and Random House clearly had no interest in the truth in any of this. Matt Damon, meanwhile, remains a beautiful idiot.
10. McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of screaming at Todd, constantly threatening to divorce him, and not eating for days (and instead drinking only Diet Pepsi but lying about it and telling people it was really Diet Dr. Pepper).
I had to tell my boyfriend Justin this about four times before he understood it, it’s that ridiculous.
But, essentially McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of constantly berating and screaming at her husband Todd, who takes it because contrary to his clear physical appearance as a stone-cold fox of a rugged outdoorsman, he’s apparently terrified of Governor Palin’s magical powers and lets her scream at him whenever he’s home. When she’s done screaming, McGinniss claims she threatens to divorce him and then he cries.
During all of this, Governor Palin somehow tricks people into believing she’s drinking Diet Dr. Pepper when she’s really drinking Diet Pepsi. How she achieves this isn’t ever clear. Justin thinks McGinniss means the Governor pours Diet Pepsi into empty Diet Dr. Pepper cans and walks around smiling all day, laughing inside because “those fools think I’m drinking Diet Dr. Pepper, but I’m really drinking Diet Pepsi!”. I think McGinniss is implying the Governor uses more of her magic to glamor people into thinking the can says “Diet Dr. Pepper” when it really says “Diet Pepsi”.
Seriously.
I estimate 12 pages in the book are spent, spread over several chapters, insisting Governor Palin lies about the brand of diet soda she drinks. McGinniss really wastes his time and yours going on about this at great length.
Clearly, Governor Palin’s engaged in one of her patented triple-crosses and she’s gulping Diet Coke.
Fools!
9. In Chapter Nine, McGinniss claims handymen and locksmiths in Alaska are afraid Governor Palin can read their license plates from inside her house, so they have to drive around with cardboard and tinfoil taped over their license plates to block her.
McGinniss gets crazier the deeper into the book I read…like the author character in Stephen King’s “The Shining”, Jack Torrance, as he goes increasingly more insane while living out in the woods in the Overlook Inn.
At roughly the midpoint in the book, McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of being able to read people’s license plates from inside her house, even though they’re driving on a road obscured by trees a great distance from any of the windows of her home. She can, according to McGinniss, possibly even see your license plates now, wherever you live, because this is just one of her magical, magical powers.
To block her license plate vision, handymen and locksmiths in Alaska — according to McGinniss — need to put cardboard and tinfoil over their license plates so Governor Palin can’t see them. Apparently, just as lead is to Superman, cardboard and tinfoil can block Governor Palin’s magical license-plate detecting vision.
It’s implied by McGinniss that if Sarah Palin sees your license plate, she and her husband Todd will probably have you fired from your jobs and then the Governor will shout expletives at you while trying to convince you she’s really drinking Diet Dr. Pepper.
And just think….I still had about 150 pages left to go of this nonsense when I read about the magical license plate vision.
8. When dealing with Governor Palin’s takedown of the Cocktail Party GOP establishment in Alaska, McGinniss tries to portray Governor Palin as being duplicitous or mean-spirited, but I think she comes off as endearing and likable no matter how hard McGinniss tries to malign her.
Most of the middle of the book is devoted to Governor Palin’s battles with the Murkowski Dynasty and how she “tricked” the corrupt cronies of that administration to incriminate themselves so Sarah Palin could look good when they were indicted.
I’d advise you to buy a copy of “The Undefeated” on DVD or watch it On-Demand for the real story.
But, to be honest, try as he might to make Governor Palin seem duplicitous or self-serving in all this, I still can’t help seeing her as either Jennifer Hart from Hart to Hart or one of Charlie’s Angels undercover in Murkowski’s administration when she was on the Oil and Gas Commission, gathering evidence and cracking computer codes to score enough evidence to bring down the bad guys around her.
I think what she did going up against the Cocktail Party establishment and taking down the self-styled “Corrupt Bastards Club” was heroic, and even reading McGinniss’ stilted account of what happened I just don’t see how anyone can make the Governor look bad for what she did.
McGinniss tries to claim it was all just a publicity stunt used to catapult her to higher office…but once again he’s alleging Governor Palin possesses psychic powers that allow her to see far into the future to know that’s what would happen.
In reality, this is a woman who stood up against the Cocktail Party elite when these men had the power to destroy her future and prevent her from ever working in the state again, when her family desperately needed the money. So it took a lot of guts to take Murkowski’s dynasty down and the Governor put herself at great risk doing it.
Nothing McGinniss can say will ever take that away from her.
7. Chapter Eleven is all about Troopergate, where McGinniss claims the only reason Governor Palin wanted to become Governor was to screw with the life of her sister’s ex-husband.
If you watch “The Undefeated”, you’ll have a better sense of what really happened in “Troopergate” than I can recount here.
McGinniss seems to believe the only reason Governor Palin even wanted to be Governor in the first place is because she wanted to use her office to screw with her former brother-in-law, her sister Molly’s ex-husband.
McGinniss claims the entire Palin and Heath family got together — including Bristol, Track, Willow, and Piper — and all the family members from oldest to youngest would come up with things they could do to terrorize Mike Wooten, the ex-husband in question.
This is truly absurd if you’ve seen Sarah Palin’s Alaska and have watched these Palin and Heath family members interact with themselves and others engaged in various activities across the state of Alaska. I just can’t picture any of them spending their time plotting and scheming against Wooten when they have an enormous state full of adventure and incredibly fun things that could be occupying their time.
Oddly, McGinniss never claims Molly Heath McCann Wooten, Governor Palin’s youngest sister, was involved in these plots. If she was married to this man, and then divorced him, and even SHE didn’t choose to spend her days and nights plotting against him, then why would the rest of the Palin family — including Piper, who was probably five at the time?
If the Palins had a dog, McGinniss would accuse the dog of being in on it too!
6. McGinniss accuses Governor Palin of not letting the Palins have a dog because she hates them.
As his mental illness progressed while writing this book, McGinniss got to a point where he rambled about someone giving Governor Palin a puppy – but her being so mean, terrible, and evil that she wouldn’t let her kids keep the dog because she didn’t believe they were ready to care for it.
So she gave it to someone else.
My question is: who gives anyone a puppy without asking them if they want to have a dog first? I’m impressed Governor Palin was kind enough to not embarrass the gifter and tell this person how rude he or she was for presenting someone with a puppy — in front of children no less — and then making the parent a bad guy for having to be responsible enough to acknowledge the family couldn’t care for a dog properly because of their crazy personal schedules.
5. McGinniss blames Andrew Breitbart for allowing commenters on his sites to post “mean-spirited” comments about McGinniss.
I just have to say again how much I have always liked and appreciated all Andrew Breitbart does on a daily basis to drive the Left bonkers.
4. Chapter Fifteen is all about McGinniss complaining because Governor Palin criticizes Barack Obama.
McGinniss insists Governor Palin is wrong to criticize Barack Obama and that she should not usurp his “historic” role as president by ever getting more attention that he does in the media…and it makes her a racist because she does not “respect” him and go along with what he says.
Speaking of respect, McGinniss then launches into a chapter full of digs directed at Bristol Palin, who is not a politician but is instead a private citizen whom McGinniss and others on the Left would howl and wail about if her name was Sasha or Malia Obama and someone conservative in another book was writing about either of them.
3. McGinniss repeatedly calls Governor Palin stupid. But stupidly, he never cites any examples of her being wrong on anything.
McGinniss claims Governor Palin is stupid. But, he stupidly cites Tina Fey’s “Alaska from my house” line and apocryphally attributes it to the Governor when she never said that. No mention is made of Barack Obama getting all Ds and Fs while in college and in law school (produce his transcripts if you want to argue he got better grades than that, or explain why his transcripts are hidden in the first place if his grades were so great). McGinniss ignores Obama saying there are 57 states in the Union, that Austrian is a language, or that Americans built a railroad across the Atlantic that only he apparently knows about.
Because she’s an attractive woman, the Left’s Alinsky Rules playbook says Leftists like McGinniss must repeatedly call Governor Palin stupid.
Because he’s a black man, the Left’s rules dictate no stupid thing Barack Obama ever does can be criticized lest the critic be branded a racist.
Get used to this dynamic because it will repeat endlessly all through 2012 with talentless hacks like McGinniss saturating the media with it.
2. Kathleen Gustafson’s sign in Homer makes the book…you remember her…the crackpot teacher that Governor Palin schooled while she was out filming an episode of her TV show.
This was another instance where McGinniss tried to make Governor Palin look bad, when on page 239 he prints the exchange Governor Palin had with disgruntled teacher Kathleen Gustafson in Homer, Alaska, where Gustafson unfurled a banner declaring Governor Palin WORST GOVERNOR EVER and Palin made a fool of her by being kind to her and asking her why she was so upset that Palin resigned when she claims she didn’t want her as her governor.
I loved how Governor Palin handled this at the time, and enjoyed reading about it again, even with McGinniss trying to make Governor Palin seem like the bad guy for confronting the obnoxious Gustafson.
I also loved that Willow jumped in to defend her mom against Gustafson…which yet again contradicts the lies McGinniss told earlier about the Governor not having a real relationship with her kids, when it seemed pretty real and genuine to me how much Willow loves her mom when she goes on the attack against hecklers on her mom’s behalf.
I don’t think a daughter who was left to fend for herself without a mom’s guidance, as McGinniss claimed earlier in his book, would have done that.
1. The absolute most important thing you need to know about Joe McGinniss’ book is that this is just the tip of the 2012 iceberg folks.
Joe McGinniss’ book The Rogue is terrible — poorly written, with few actual identified sources, and heavy reliance on gossip, innuendo, outright lies, and the recycling of garbage strewn about by bloggers for the last three years.
But many of the lies he tells will be repeated throughout 2012, since the Left is highly unoriginal and Alinsky Rules dictate that once a meme has been decided upon, the attack machine must stick to it so that the public can continuously absorb the lies and eventually accept them as truth.
In Governor Palin’s case, the lies are that she is stupid, that she is a quitter, and that she’s some sort of a religious zealot who hates gay people, is racist, believes people used to ride dinosaurs like on the Flintstones, and that she is not really Trig Palin’s mother.
That’s pretty much the extent of what the Left’s got in terms of attacks on Governor Palin, because anything related to her actual accomplishments while in office is “boring” to the Left’s intended audience and these other lies that people like McGinniss are charged with propagating are far more interesting for the late night comedians to seize upon and foster.
Expect just about everything in McGinniss’ book to recycle into the 2012 campaign, even though the book itself will fall into obscurity quickly, where it belongs, because it’s just that badly written and forgettable on its own.
There’s actually a nice picture of a squirrel on one of the pages, and a map of where the Best Western on Lake Lucille sits, but that’s about it. The rest is essentially toilet paper worthy.
McGinniss had his fifteen minutes and should be ignored from here on out….but don’t make the mistake of ignoring what he tried to do with this book and the message he intended to send, because he is just the first of many on the Left who are geared up to repeat everything in this book again and again in the Left’s last ditch effort to give Barack Obama a second term and deny Governor Palin the presidency.
© 2011, Kevin DuJan. All rights reserved.
Also Recommended:
- Some first impressions on Joe McGinniss’ poorly written documentation of mental illness that is “Searching for the Real Sarah Palin”
- STRATEGY NEEDED: How to help Sarah Palin and her family with their stalker, and new neighbor, Creepy McGinniss
- Super creepy Joe McGinniss on Today Show promoting his slimey “book”
- If you are going to Palin book signings, be sure to make friends with the people in line, get their emails, and start Sarah Palin Support Clubs in your communities
- 5 Things to Tell Your Leftist Relatives at Christmas When They Start Attacking Governor Sarah Palin
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Oh Kevin, you made me want to witness the crazy firsthand myself.
The palins did have a dog and I think it had puppies. She wasn’t thrilled because of their schedules I think. It was when she was governor I thought. It’s in going rogue.
WOW! And I bet you had to condense your notes. You could write your own book on what a cull that guy is. I hope someone gives me a copy of his book; I have a shelf in the barn that needs to be leveled.
Great analysis and writing, as usual, Kevin. I enjoyed it so much.
Thank you for taking on this burden for us.
The Palins' attorney has indeed been in touch with Random House:
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/09/27/palins-enemi…
– Sarah Palin will be the 44th President of the United States!
"Obama" was never Constitutionally eligible and he is NOT "President".
Bless You, Kevin, for reading this for us so that we don't have to!!!! And, Bless you ever more for giving us such a thorough review. Wow. Is all I can say, as to your review. Pretty much feel like I've read the book now, and also that I need to take a shower. You are right. That this was published as non-fiction?! Again, thank you for your lengthy commentary. As to your notes at the end, that this is what we can expect from the left [no matter WHO the candidate is], I suspect our next election is going to be one that is full of lying, cheating, and violence. As much as I am looking forward to it – I'm not. Again, thank you so much Kevin for reading the drivel Joe McGinniss wrote. Thankfully you didn't have to pay for the book. I know I certainly won't be paying for a copy. Don't have to. Read YOUR review!!!
Great report, Kevin, thanks! Re the rock climbing criticism, Sarah never claimed to be an expert rock climber. Unless I'm misremembering, in the rock climbing segment of the show she was scared out of her wits, but soldiered on & made it to the top only with great difficulty. Todd is the climber, but someone thought it would be a cute idea for her to climb instead, so Todd stood below lending moral support (and grinning). BTW, I like Sookie Stackhouse too.
Thanks for reading it so we don't have to, Kevin! About "Troopergate," (or as they call it in Alaska, "Tasergate") I just read Bristol's book. She was there when it happened; she saw it. She was terrified at what happened. It had everything to do with exposing a crooked cop and protecting innocent people, not throwing around muscle.
Kevin, give me your address so I can send you a magnificent 'THANK YOU' gift for this incredible sacrifice you made reading this gigantic piece of garbage just so we wouldn't have to. Bless you. I was thinking Veuve Clicquot (okay, it's my favorite so I just assume it's everyone else's), See's Candy or maybe some Starbucks gift cards. Come ON, dude! You deserve a reward for sacrificing several days of your life which you'll never get back again.
You are sweet. I gave up drinking for good in April for health reasons, so no champagne for me ever again (unless it is a grapefruit/champagn sorbet that I used to like to make back in the day…have to break out the ice cream maker and do a batch in your honor).
Honestly, the book is terrible, but I felt it’s important for people to know about the attacks in it…because we will see all these again and again in 2012.
Here’s what I would like from you — shoot me some ideas on how we can start refuting, point by point, the garbage in this book.
I am terrible at organizing and tend to go off wherever the direction of the day sends me…so I really need help from anyone reading this in systematically taking apart the attacks that are done on Governor Palin.
I really need prayers for Wisdom and Guidance in this realm, since it’s a skillset I naturally lack.
Can you pray for me to be given the Wisdom and Guidance to better organize every day and dismantle these attacks from McGinniss in a better way? That would be such a HUGE help, you have no idea.
What a pleasure it was to read this. You are such a blessing Kevin and I will continue to pray for you. God has given you wisdom and it's obvious to me that He is guiding your hand as you write. I look forward to meeting you at Sarah's inauguration.
You can fight Justin for a dance.
I'm not a fighter, I'll ask Justin for a dance as well.
DONE, Kevin! I say the Rosary every day as I trundle towards St. Ignatius to listen to some truly awesome Jesuits (yep! that's redundant) give their sermons. From now on, the Rosary is being said for you.
As for the refutation of McGinniss – I am getting on it. I will get back to as soon as I am done with it. Glad to be of assistance. But – trust me – your dissection of McGinniss was stunning. You're way too unappreciative of on your abilities – trust me, they're awesome.
Thank you kevin – (all the way from New Zealand) I am constantly reassured by the excellent work that is done of behalf of Sarah Palin by those with the talent, knowledge, energy and sheer determination to establish truth.
The more the left hates someone, the better they will be for the country. By this measure Palin is the best possible candidate, H Cain the best Veep
When Palin is elected Palin Derangement Syndrome will be something to behold.
Thanks for sparing us the pain of having to read Joe's drivel
Greetings from Philippines! I’m a great fan of Gov. Palin. Thank you for relentlessly defending Gov. Palin against the slanders and vilifications from the left and right establishments. She is a brilliant and smart lady. Hoping forward for her victory as the first woman and 45th President of the US. Mabuhay!
Kevin, if you'd like, I can e-mail you the link to the photos for my FB page & you can look at the pics I've posted from my Alaska cruise I took in May. I also have some from the Ronald Reagan library.
I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THEM!
I am a big fan of planning trips. I use binders and start collecting facts on things I want to see. I have a binder for Alaska and another one for the Reagan Library. I MIGHT get the chance to see the Reagan Library in November (fingers crossed!). Alaska will probably have to wait until 2012 or 2013.
I want to take Justin and go camping, go to some of the places on Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and really do a lot of off the beaten path stuff I can write about and maybe do a little travelogue E-book on…maybe I could even reimburse myself for the trip if I’d do a little book and sell it on Ebay all about the trip. Then I could have another adventure with Justin after that.
I’m enjoying having a live-in travel buddy in him.
I just sent an e-mail using the contact us link at the top of the page (if the link doesn't work, let me know). I'm still getting used to posting pics on FB, so if you have any questions about any of them, let me know.
Melp,
Got the link…but no pics of Alaska or Reagan Library…it was pics of a playground instead.
I think the wrong link got sent.
I was afraid something like that would happen (told you I was still working on figuring out FB.
Lets see if either of these work:
Up at the top, next to my name is (Albums), click on that & it should take you to the page with all the pics on them.
If that doesn't work, click on my name & see if the word Photos is on the left hand side & click on that. (I cheated on my brothers FB page & it did work that way).
Don’t think it’s just you. I have a hard time with Facebook. I still don’t “get” it. Justin on the other hand is Mr. Facebook. I will have him help me.
Here's a link to the Reagan Library:
http://www.reaganfoundation.org/default.aspx
Once again a wonderful post. I did not even bother to take the bookout of the library to read and I am glad that you made such a wonderful review.