Sad Sarah at it Again – Palin Attacks Neighbor!

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Sarah Palin’s next-door neighbor sought out author Joe McGinniss as a tenant, McGinniss’s son said.

“No one is stalking anyone,” Joe McGinniss, Jr., a novelist whose father is the non-fiction writer, wrote in response to an email from a Palin supporter who confused his email address and his father’s. (He shared the email with me.) “A woman was renting her house and sought out the author because the Palins had crossed her (owed her money for renovations she had done at their request and never paid her for). So she knew McGinniss was writing the book and found him and offered him the house.”

The neighbor “turned down more lucrative offers from the National Enquirer who wanted the house so they could ‘stalk’ and take pictures, etc… She said no,” he wrote.

McGinniss, Jr. wrote that Palin is “inspiring a lot of hate in people, appealing to so many of people’s worst instincts. Sad and scary.” And he defended his father’s decision to rent the house:

[I]f you were writing a biography of Tiger Woods and had the chance to move in with him, or his pool house, or rent next door or down the street from him — it would be journalistic malpractice not to. As a writer, you go where the story is, get as close as you can to it. People who write about politics, campaigns, they travel with the candidates, stay in the same motels, ride the bus, eat breakfast, hang out any and everywhere they can to get access. It’s pretty basic. We want to read the work of someone who is as close to their subject as possible. That’s called reporting. And when it’s for a book about someone, all the more important to be close….

He’s not stalking or peeping or peering or meddling. He’s simply fulfilling his obligations to his publisher and his readers and himself — to get as close to the subject of his book as possible. You’ll never see tabloid photos or depictions of backyard activities. He’s a professional writer with great integrity and an amazing sense of fairness.

The Tennessee woman to whom he responded, whom McGinniss, Jr. said was “the most rational-sounding” one, called the journalist a “leech” and wrote that, if a reporter moved in next to her, “ I can only imagine how outraged and invaded I would feel.”

McGinniss, Jr. added, “Sarah Palin’s middle-school style reaction to an author renting next door is quite something. But maybe my father’s grandchildren, when they fly up to visit, can make some new friends. They’d probably have a lot of fun together actually.”

UPDATE: Palin told Glenn Beck yesterday that her husband had been “trying to get hold of [the neighbor] all winter long” to ask about renting or buying the place, in part “for fear of something like this happening.”