"Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama."

Watch it, here. It's a "Funny or Die" production, which you can tell Obama was advised to do to reach the young folks on the subject of HealthCare.gov, which he does pretty well. We watched at Meadhouse, which looked like this:



Dialogue:

MEADE: You can tell he's reading the lines.

ME: Yeah, well, he's a pretty good actor. You have to give him credit for that.

MEADE, perceiving that there are 2 men on the screen: Who?

ME, resisting adding "not Zach Galiwhatever, I have no idea if he's a good actor": Obama.

MEADE: Yeah, he's a big actor. That's what he is. An actor. [Referencing today's McGinniss obit:] The Selling of the President.

Joe McGinniss, the journalist who harassed Sarah Palin, dead at 71.

Too bad to put in a life's work and have something creepy that you did be the #1 thing many or most people attach to your name when they see that you died.

"The Selling of the President" was a great exposé of the what it takes to run for President. As the NYT puts it in the obituary (linked above):

When Mr. McGinniss published “The Selling of the President,” his famous account of Richard M. Nixon’s television-centered campaign in 1969, he was only 26. The book went behind the scenes with President Nixon’s consultants and became a model for political reporting.

1969, eh? Come on NYT! How hard is it to get the presidential election years right? Especially 1968. 1968 was by far the most dramatic election year of the 13 presidential election years I've watched personally. (I lived through 2 others, but I paid zero attention.) [ADDED: Alternatively, "in 1969" is a the old "misplaced modifier" error.]

Here's the image of Nixon on a pack of cigarettes I've been looking at on the paperback book that's been on my bookshelf for 4 decades:



1968 — the year was even in the title (at the time, not now). Back then, the year made the title funnier, because we understood that the book was a cheeky departure from the sober observations of Theodore H. White in his "The Making of the President 1960" and "The Making of the President 1964." In more noble times, Presidents were made, but the message was the times are now debased, and some imposter, undeserving of the presidency, posed for a bunch of ads. Advertising — !!!! — is used to sell the President and this — this! — is what we got stuck with. Blech! Ashtray mouth!!!

McGinnis also wrote "Fatal Vision," about "the murder trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, an Army doctor and a Green Beret accused of killing his pregnant wife and 2 daughters."

Mr. McGinniss lived with Dr. MacDonald’s defense team during the trial and eventually decided that the jury’s guilty verdict was correct.

One of my favorite books ever, "The Journalist and the Murderer," by Janet Malcolm, examines the relationship between a journalist (McGinniss) and his subject (MacDonald). The subject imagines the journalist will be his friend and mouthpiece, getting his story out, and the journalist has every reason to help him think that — every reason if you don't count honesty, decency, and true friendship... and how much honesty, decency, and true friendship is deserved by a man who has killed his pregnant wife and 2 daughters?

So... farewell to Joe McGinniss, who rode the pop culture end of journalism for a good long time.

Sarah Palin threatens to sue Random House over "Rogue."

Ha. I said it the other day: "Let's focus on Random House, the venerable publishing house."

"Was Random House aware that [Joe McGinniss] was making a desperate overtime bid to save face?"

"And if so, why did it allow him to come forth with most of those tawdry accusations without proof or proper sourcing?"

McGinniss's sleaziness has been well understood. Let's focus on Random House, the venerable publishing house.

In the email [at the link], McGinniss reveals that his manuscript, then under legal review at Crown/Random House, could not prove its most headline-grabbing allegations. And yet, many of these “salacious stories” that lacked “proof” (in McGinniss’s own words) ended up in the book, and on televisions everywhere during the author’s current media tour … without proper sourcing, and without any apparent new evidence to support them.

It's hard for a public figure to sue for defamation in the United States, but this email may be the proof of reckless disregard for the truth that Sarah/Todd/Bristol Palin would need.

That doesn't mean they should sue. It would boost the profile of McGinniss and his book and shine a spotlight on his various allegations.

"This is a man who has been relentlessly stalking my family to the point of moving in right next door to us..."

"... to harass us and spy on us to satisfy his creepy obsession with my wife... His book is full of disgusting lies, innuendo, and smears. Even The New York Times called this book 'dated, petty,' and that it 'chases caustic, unsubstantiated gossip."

Says Todd Palin, disgusted that Joe McGinniss is getting attention after putting adequately juicy nuggets in his book about Sarah Palin.

The referenced NYT review is by Janet Maslin, who exposes McGinniss's execrable ethics:

“The Rogue” ... includes this: “A friend says, ‘Sarah and her sisters had a fetish for black guys for a while.’  ” Mr. McGinniss did in 2011 make a phone call to the former N.B.A. basketball player Glen Rice, who is black, and prompted him to acknowledge having fond memories of Sarah Heath. While Mr. Rice avoids specifics and uses the words “respectful” and “a sweetheart,” Mr. McGinniss eggs him on with the kind of flagrantly leading question he seems to have habitually asked. In Mr. Rice’s case: “So you never had the feeling she felt bad about having sex with a black guy?”...

[McGinniss] even finds a species of Alaska yenta willing to remark on the condition of the Palins’ toilet...

... Mr. McGinniss suggests both that Ms. Palin is committed to stealth religious control of government, and that she is not sufficiently devout.

With the same imprecise aim he cites conspiracy theories that Ms. Palin may not be the mother of her youngest son, Trig, and questions the circumstances under which he was born. Mr. McGinniss puts forth a provocative case for doubting Ms. Palin’s account of Trig’s birth, which involved a round trip between Alaska and Texas while she was supposedly in labor. But then he comes to an indefensibly reckless conclusion: “It is perhaps the most blistering assessment of her character possible that many Wasillans who’d known Sarah from high school onward told me that even if she had not faked the entire story of her pregnancy and Trig’s birth, it was something she was eminently capable of doing.”

That last quote might be the most embarrassing sentence written by a journalist that I have ever read.

ADDED: Here's Filip Bondy in the NY Daily News:

The next time Sarah Palin complains about her treatment by any media member, that reporter might want to inform her that at least he or she is not literally sleeping with sources. Because according to a new book, Palin violated the most basic of journalistic tenets, bedding college basketball star Glen Rice in 1987 when she was a young TV sports reporter for KTUU in Anchorage....

This is the stuff that drives legitimate women reporters nuts, makes members of AWSM (Association for Women in Sports Media) furious because it tears at credibility and plays to false stereotypes. ..