Palin Editor's Double Life

By GottaLaff

First things first:

Penquin Books announced that it is moving up the publication date of The Persecution of Sarah Palin by Matthew Continetti from next February to November 12, 2009 to coincide with the publication of Palin's controversial memoir.

The book is subtitled: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star.

Aw, man, poor Barbie McLipschmutz! The elite media is apparently trying to do what she herself already succeeded at doing: Looking like a dumbed down version of a box of professionally highlighted hair. Good thing Penguin's rushing to defend her honor before it's too...

Never mind.

Now then. On to more exciting, heart-stopping Barbie news:

The Daily Beast has learned that a top HarperCollins editor who worked on Sarah Palin's new memoir helped write another book about her: sophomoric send-up Terminatrix.

Yes. Yes, it's true. Her own editor is making her look like a dumbed down version of a box of professionally highlighted hair... in skin-tight leather:

Last October, at the height of Palin’s memorable vice-presidential run, Bellow was the anonymous co-author of a quickie paperback satire of the then-governor of Alaska.

Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles—which has a cover featuring a Photoshopped governor in skin-tight leather and brandishing an automatic weapon—is a sophomoric send-up of Palin and her family, featuring digitally altered images and derisive captions, and packaged in a 5-by-7-inch, 96-page trade paperback. A representative gag: Palin’s face superimposed on a painting of Joan of Arc, with the mocking commentary: “In between junior high and high school, Sarah heard God's call to save France.”

France? Did I just see that obscene 4-, er, 6-letter word "France" juxtaposed next to the name "Sarah"? Sacre bleu! Zut alors!

Twenty thousand copies of Terminatrix were shipped by the now-defunct Collins Books, a HarperCollins imprint for which Bellow worked as executive editor. The book carries the humorous credit line, “Compiled by the Editors of the Wasilla Iron Dog Gazette.”

Informed sources tell me that the mysterious Wasilla compilers are actually the fortysomething Bellow, son of the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, and his former HarperCollins colleague Bruce Nichols, who today is editor-in-chief of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

I bet Barbie's agent had a thing or two to say about these things or two:

Palin’s literary agent, high-powered Washington attorney Robert Barnett, offered a terse “no comment” and Lee Hough, the Colorado Springs-based agent who represents Palin’s collaborator on the biography, Lynn Vincent, emailed me : “Lynn is under a very strick [sic] confidentiality agreement and cannot engage on this. Sorry about that.”

And that's all they're going to say about that, thank you very much. They're professionals, after all... strickly speaking.