“Supposedly In Labor”

I never thought I'd read that phrase in the New York Times but this morning, there it is:

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.

Even Janet Maslin, who appears to have read the book with a giant set of tweezers, is unable to dismiss the legitimate questions that Palin's story begs. But she insists that the book cannot be trusted because … well, its tone is harsh and unsparing:

The “Rogue”-related controversy has escalated this week with the news that some newspapers have declined to run installments of the comic strip that incorporate excerpts from the book. But what exactly is stopping them? Is it the book’s intrepid reporting, or its questionable tone? Mr. McGinniss’s most quotable, inflammatory lines call Ms. Palin a clown, a nitwit, a rabid wolf and a lap dancer — and those aren’t the parts that assail her as a wife and parent.

Well, the Doonesbury strip only included nuggets of reporting, the kind of thing that NYT reporters are above, i.e. reporting fully on the life and background of a former vice-presidential candidate. The only relevant question is: are these assertions true? Maslin offers no rebuttal to any of them. The raciest one so far – the one night stand with Glen Rice – is fully on the record. But Todd is mad as hell:

"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."

This has been the line from the Palins from the very beginning: that McGinniss is a pedophile/pervert who wanted to get his jollies from watching the Palin kids and his wife in the backyard. So it's ok to call someone a creepy stalker with no evidence at all, but not ok to have countless newly unafraid people on and off the record talking about who Sarah Palin really is?

Again: what matters is whether the book is accurate in its reporting. So far, no hits. Meanwhile, the Beast is serving up tidbits.

But it's not even formally released yet.