The Rogue: Sarah Palin or Joe McGinniss?

Posted on Sep 15, 2011

Flickr / sskennel (CC-BY)

It will be next week before Joe McGinniss, the author and so-called journalist who moved in next door to Sarah Palin and her family more than a year ago, will officially release his book about the former Alaska governor, and already his work has received scathing reviews.

Reviews of “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin” all seem to agree on one major point: that any revelations McGinniss made were undermined by his use of unnamed sources such as “a friend” and “one resident.”

And McGinniss has made many revelations, both serious and salacious, and most seemingly lean toward the latter. He suggested that Palin had snorted cocaine, had “a fetish for black guys for a while” during which she once slept with NBA star Glen Rice, and had an affair with husband Todd Palin’s business partner in retaliation for Todd’s own infidelity.

A review of the book in The New York Times said the most quotable lines call Palin “a clown, a nitwit, a rabid wolf and a lap dancer — and those aren’t the parts that assail her as a wife and parent.” —BF

The New York Times:

There is one area, and only one, in which “The Rogue” is dead-on. Mr. McGinniss knows how publicity works. He appreciates, not to say emulates, the way members of the Palin family cash in on celebrity and contradict themselves without penalty. He also denounces the press’s willingness to let this happen. How was it possible, he asks, for Ms. Palin’s daughter Bristol to assail Levi Johnston, the father of her son, as being “obsessed with the limelight,” then turn up herself on “Dancing With the Stars”?

Speaking of Mr. Johnston, Mr. McGinniss interviews his resentful mother, who was under house arrest on a drug charge at the time. He leaves her house “wanting to find Levi and give him a good hard shake and tell him to forget his sputtering career for half a second and go home, because his mother needs him.” Since absolutely nobody connected with “The Rogue” seems to lack ulterior motives, there is one here as well. Mr. Johnston’s sputtering career has produced a memoir, “Deer in the Headlights.” Next week it will compete for attention with “The Rogue,” when both are officially published on the same day.

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