Maggie's Farm

Have the rest of you been noticing the continuing harassment of Sarah Palin? I just found this story about Joe McGuinniss, the tell-all book author.

So who is Joe McGuinniss?

He’s a tell-all novelist/biographer who claims to be writing an unauthorized biography of Sarah Palin, evidently in hopes of cashing in on the “let’s all us Liberal Lefties find something real to hate Sarah Palin about,” In this activity he joins the raft of recent law graduates who were sent up to Wasilla, Alaska to dig the dirt about her during the last Presidential campaign. (They weren’t very successful because there is not much dirt to dig.) To accomplish this feat, he has rented the house next door to the Palin’s house in Wasilla for five months. He now has a panoramic “unauthorized” view of her little garden, her daughter’s bedroom window, and her kitchen windows. And this sets him up as the “Second Hand Rose,” type of biographer, getting his thrills by pawing through other people’s “second hand clothes.” And imaginary dirt.

There have always been literary biographers like McGuinniss., looking for the worst details of the lives of famous people, so that they can write a sensational, and inaccurate, shocker. It’s a tawdry way to make a living. Respectable biographers, like James Boswell, can do future generations a great favor by depicting honestly the lives of such world-altering great minds as Samuel Johnson. In modern times, such ‘ghost writers’ as Patrick Robinson have helped famous men like Marcus Luttrell, the Navy SEAL who wrote of his experiences in the Mid-East, to write the spell-binding book, Lone Survivor, that is well worth reading.

Don’t count on McGuinniss to do us a similar literary favor. Spying on your book’s subjects is not the way to get accurate information. But it’s a good way to pi$$ them off.

And after looking at, and reading much about Sarah’s formidable husband, and her close-knit family and friends, I marvel at McGuinniss’s foolish decision to do his book this way. I certainly wouldn’t set myself up for a hostile confrontation with them. Alaskans are a tough breed. Todd Palin is one of the toughest. He’s an oil rig roustabout, and a commercial fisherman in his off-rig months. He races in the state-wide snow-machine contests, and finished the entire last leg of one of them with a broken arm.

Only the tough survive in Alaska–- except for the occasional overweight lady with a grudge against Sarah. She files constant nuisance lawsuits against Sarah, all of which are dismissed for lack of evidence, but all of which have cost the Palins a lot of money to defend. Evidently, Alaska doesn't have a regulation that the loser in a court case pays the court costs.

Probably McGuinniss will rush to interview her for his tell-all book. Good luck with that, Joe. She’ll confirm all the prejudices you already have. She’s Second Hand Rose with bells on.

Marianne