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Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter raises questions
Her collaborator isn’t just a creationist. There’s the white supremacy issue, too
The memoir of Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life, is not due to be released for another six weeks and already it is outselling Dan Brown's latest blockbuster, The Lost Symbol. But that isn't the reason Palin's book is the talk of New York publishing circles: what's getting tongues wagging is the publisher's choice of ghostwriter, a San Diego-based journalist called Lynn Vincent.
For the past 10 years, Vincent has been working for the Christian-based World magazine, from which she took time off to work on Palin's book. She is a creationist and strongly anti-abortion, the subject of many of her World columns.
She is also staunchly anti-gay, backing the controversial vote to re-criminalise gay marriage in California, and - this is where Palin and her publishers might have drawn the line, but didn't - she is closely associated with a well-known white supremacist.
He is Robert Stacey McCain (no relation to John McCain), a former editor at the Washington Times, a paper he left two years ago after a steaming row with a colleague.
For a taste of McCain's politics, this is him on the subject of interracial marriage: "[The] media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us."
Before he left the Washington Times, he and Lynn Vincent collaborated on a book called Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party - a chronicle, so it boasted, of "shameless bribery, illicit sex, sweeping corruption".
Further promotional material for the book posted by Lynn Vincent's magazine promised the following: How Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F Kennedy were elected with the help of the Mob; What two eyewitnesses said about JFK's obsession with hookers; and Why Democrats ignore crime victims and take the side of rapists, robbers, and cop-killers - then stump for the right of felons to vote!
Another Vincent collaboration was with a retired general, William Boykin, former head of the US Army's Special Forces Command. He described his career mission as to defeat Satan in order to save America as a Christian country. "We are hated because we are a nation of believers," he said.
But it is Vincent's apparent homophobia - or, at least, her phobia of gay marriage - that has raised eyebrows among the publishing fraternity and led to a nasty spat between two of New York's most high-profile expat gay Englishmen.
Andrew Sullivan used his Daily Dish blog last Thursday to question how Jonathan Burnham, the man who commissioned Palin's book for HarperCollins, could bring himself to appoint Vincent, "a fanatical homophobe", as Palin's ghostwriter.
He answered his own question like this: "Hey, if it makes a buck, and advances his career, Burnham will do it. As gay people prepare to march for their civil rights, Burnham, one of the more powerful gay men in New York, is preparing to capitalise on their avowed enemies. It's just money, after all. And buzz. Always buzz." ·
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I like the nose
Perfect fit for the spects
Firozali A.Mulla
I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.
Margaret Fuller
I thank you
Firozali A.Mulla
It is funny that people care about an association Palin's ghost writer may or may not have but could care less about the many associations of President Obama. Who is an elected official? Which of these two people can actually form and change policy? Instead of playing "6 degrees of Seperation" with Palin we could report on personal associations of the President. Those actually have a bearing on the American people.
That Sarah Palin is happy to use a ghostwriter who is homophobic, racist, xenophobic, and extreme-evangelical should come as no surprise. Both Vincent and Palin appeal to a pathetic and crumbling minority of uneducated, uninterested-in-education, fringe Americans. Yes, they are loud, but the world, the US, is moving rapidly past them, and they are getting louder because they are afraid to acknowledge that no one is really listening to them. Nonetheless, as an American, I am embarrassed that too often they are the face that the rest of the world thinks is ours.
If being a big money-hungry phony is rogue, then there are a lot of self-centered career women out there with whipped husbands and neglected kids that think this is how to be a REAL WOMAN and they are the only ones who would even give a hoot what this silly bimbo has to say. 30% is a dream... try 18%, the same ones who think Bush is still a "Great American".
Still attacking Sarah! Nothing new about that.. You are trying to make your attacks worse by including the supposed "ghost writer". They have a saying in the Caribbean that if you cant catch pickney, you catch him shirt - translated "if you cant catch the child you catch his shirt". That is exactly what you are doing, if you can figure it out. You are just envious, too bad!
These types of people are frightening, truly frightening.
She's anything but a nobody to at least 30 per cent of Americans, more's the pity.
The First Post seems to be obsessed with this nutjob wolf murdering fascist. Someone obviously fancies pigs in lipstick. Why else would such a nobody feature almost daily along with vacuous idiot grin?