I won't be buying The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, the new book by Joe McGinniss about you-know-who and what a dreadful person she supposedly is. I have no idea how much of it is true and insofar as my purchasing goes, it wouldn't matter either way. No interest in it if it's accurate. No interest in it if it isn't.
The portrait of Palin as hypocrite, phony and shallow opportunist is not inconsistent with what I see when I look at and listen to the actual person…but that, of course, doesn't mean any given anecdote in the book that reflects that image is true. At best, it may mean that someone who's had contact with Palin claimed to McGinniss that it was true. I read a lot of things about myself that aren't true and there's a lot less money to be made or political yardage to be scored by lying about me than there is from lying about her.
Palin, I suspect, will exploit this book for all its worth, playing the victim card as she always does with her supporters. She's really good at extracting moral and financial support from a small group of loyalists by doing that. She's even convinced a lot of them that anytime she says something stupid or inaccurate, it's not her. It's those mean ol' biased reporters who tricked her into saying that.
Her popularity is plunging. I saw a figure the other day that something like 74% of voters don't want her to enter the presidential race and I thought, "Jeez, that's a campaign killer. I wonder what the percentage is like just among Republicans." Then I looked again and saw that was the number among Republicans. So my next thought was, "Well, that's probably one of those polls the Fox News crowd will claim is biased and rigged." Then I looked again and saw it was the Fox News Poll. You know: Fox News, the company that employs Sarah Palin.
I can't wait to see how she explains that one as Liberal Treachery. She'll probably wait a few months until the timeline has blurred in folks' minds and then claim her popularity took a hit because of the lies in that Joe McGinniss book.
Anyway, my sense of fairness tells me not to believe anything's so just because it's in this book…but I have to tell you something else about my sense of fairness. It sometimes feels like a chump these days because so many politicians and political operatives either don't have a sense of fairness or don't let one stop them from repeating any story, true or not, that can be of use to them. If it harms your enemies these days, it's true enough to use. Sarah Palin, her supporters and most of the folks at Fox News wouldn't hesitate to endorse every word of a nasty, inaccurate book trashing Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. I was pleased to see Keith Olbermann saying he doesn't believe a lot of the McGinniss book about Sarah Palin. That kind of unwillingness to use every available bludgeon against your opponents is rare in the political marketplace these days. Too rare.