Despite Being Awful, New Palin Book Will Only Help Her Career

An advance review of Joe McGinniss’s The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin has accomplished the seemingly impossible: making me want to read Levi Johnston’s memoir.

Janet Maslin of the Times delivers a scathing critique of the book, which we already know includes claims that Sarah Palin snorted coke off an oil drum and had a “fetish” for black men. Other revelations:

Palin “lacked boyfriends and was a racist.”
A guy offered to give McGinniss an AK-47, possibly for nefarious anti-Palin purposes.
Palin is a zealot, and also not a zealot.
She is “a clown, a nitwit, a rabid wolf and a lap dancer.”
There is something wrong with her toilet, but — maddeningly — Maslin won’t tell us what it is. You’ll have to read to find out.

Not that you’d necessarily want to. Maslin makes the book sound like an unprincipled hatchet job, exactly the kind of thing that the Palin camp expects from the left, and exactly the kind of thing that they want. The Rogue seems poised to prove Palin’s point that the “lamestream” media hates her and is willing to resort to sexism and ad hominem attacks in order to bring her down. It can only help her, and make McGinniss and other left-wing journalists look bad into the bargain. Writes Maslin,

[Levi] 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.