Palin co-author Lynn Vincent's inflammatory record

On May 21, HarperCollins announced that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had chosen World magazine features editor Lynn Vincent to co-author Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. Palin's choice of Vincent, however, is not without controversy, as Vincent -- both in her writing for World and her other books -- has a record of false and inflammatory attacks on Democrats and liberals and has stridently attacked the gay community, likening gay people to communists and suggesting that homosexuality is a mental disorder.

Vincent's anti-gay attacks

In her many years writing for World, Vincent has authored several columns on gay rights issues, frequently deriding gay men and lesbians as abnormal and “devian[t],” often trafficking in hackneyed stereotypes of the gay community. Vincent even went so far as to lament the American Psychiatric Association's decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder, and she also wrote that the struggle for gay rights differs from that for African-American civil rights and women's suffrage, in that it will not “benefit[] society at large.”

Gay activists seeking to make “deviance” appear “normal.” From Vincent's April 25 World column:

Policy-wise, though, the impact of the same-sex marriage boom is more far-reaching than it may appear. As gay activists incrementally shatter their final barrier between deviance and “normal,” government bodies are institutionalizing viewpoint discrimination against employees who still object to homosexuality on moral grounds. For example, University of Toledo employee Crystal Dixon, an African-American, was fired in 2008 after she wrote a newspaper op-ed questioning whether homosexuality is a civil-rights issue.

American Psychiatric Association should still call homosexuality a disorder. From her June 15, 2002, World column:

But more than 80 years of clinical research and observation calls into question the notion that the troubles of gay youth are based in discrimination, says Yale psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth. The American Psychiatric Association, under political pressure from a vitriolic internal gay caucus, ignored that science and removed homosexuality from its list of disorders in 1973. But science just wouldn't go away: Researchers have since found causal links between homosexuality and a lack of male role models (Journal of Genetics and Psychology, 1983); parental emotional abandonment (Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1989); and child sexual abuse (Child Abuse and Neglect, 1992).

Gay people are like communists, seek “sexual gratification without responsibility,” wear dog collars. From Vincent's April 10, 1999, World column, headlined “How homosexuals fight”:

At the San Diego offices of Update, a newspaper serving Southern California homosexuals, a royal blue bumper sticker clinging to the lobby wall is both confessional and prophetic: “Having abandoned the search for truth, I'm now looking for a good fantasy.”

While the homosexual ethos depends on an abandonment of truth, the search for a good gay fantasy may not last much longer. After a week of demonstrations late last month, the fantasy nation long yearned for by American homosexuals may now be breaching the borders of reality.

With more than 300 pro-homosexual bills romping through state legislatures coast to coast, the potentially precedent-setting judicial assault on traditional marriage in Vermont, the growing fallacy-fueled drive for gay “civil rights,” and the tactical defamation of religious opposition, the homosexual offensive is poised to make a forward leap so large it may alter American culture radically-perhaps irrevocably.

[...]

The dim, bohemian office he shares with editor-in-chief Frederic Ball is revealing. The walls are decorated with bodies instead of, say, art. Mr. Ball's side of the room features a four-foot frontal nude poster of an unnamed platinum blond starlet. On Mr. Hurd's side, a black-and-white, 8-by-10 photo series marches across the wall: men, alone and in groups, absurdly muscular, nearly naked, and provocatively entwined. The decor betrays a subculture that, despite its own frantic claims to normality, is actually fixated on the promise of sexual gratification without responsibility.

[...]

His statement is in line with the openly propagandistic tactics preached by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in the activist primer After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90's. A chief strategy: Portray homosexuals as victims, an oppressed minority groaning under the yoke of heterosexist tyranny. But the gay quest for “civil rights” bears little resemblance to the struggles of blacks and suffragists, whose eventual liberation benefited society at large. Instead, it calls up the American communists of the '50s and '60s who, in order to advance the radical interests of a narrow group, created a spurious “victim class,” then convinced America that theirs was the side of justice.

[...]

For example, the only Christians in attendance at a March 22 EBAH event in Austin, Texas, were a cluster of grim-faced, middle-aged men bearing signs with biting slogans like “God calls fags dogs” and “Lord Jesus, Save the Children from the Sodomites.” By contrast, homosexual marchers and their supporters appeared stunningly normal (another strategy espoused by Mr. Kirk and Mr. Pill). They were an all-American crowd: white, black, Latino, young, old, even toddlers in sunglasses sitting in strollers or on parents' shoulders. Nowhere in sight were the drag queens, dog collars, and other staple depravities of left-coast gay parades.

Abortion as “Black Genocide”

In her January 17 column for World, Vincent argued that President Obama is “the face of the minority survivor” of the “Black Genocide” -- meaning abortion:

Indeed, the face of the minority survivor in the Oval Office racially represents many abortion victims. Ninety-four percent of all abortion doctors are located in metropolitan areas, with seven in 10 of these in predominantly minority-populated communities, according to Care Net, a Virginia-based coalition of more than 1,100 pregnancy resource centers. The result: African-American and Hispanic women, who together make up about one-quarter of the female population, account for 57 percent of the 1.2 million abortions performed in the United States each year. In some urban areas, abortions among minority women now equal the number of live births.

Donkey Cons: Vincent's false and absurd attacks on Democrats

Vincent co-authored Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current, 2006) with Robert Stacy McCain, a book that purports to document “the tragic story of how the nation's oldest political party has inspired, then cruelly betrayed, the hopes of millions of Americans, including many of our friends and dear members of our own families -- as well as sincere and honest officials within the party itself.” The book is marked by shoddy scholarship, falsehoods, and over-the-top invective aimed at Democrats.

No Republican “culture of corruption.” In Chapter 1, Vincent and McCain dismiss out of hand the idea of a Republican “culture of corruption” and openly mocks the idea that Democrats would be able to retake control of Congress in 2006 by campaigning against Republican corruption:

Maybe Democrats think Americans are stupid. (They may be half right; 48 percent of voters apparently thought John Kerry would make a good president.) But just how stupid do they think we are? At this writing, Nancy Pelosi and her friends are talking about how Democrats will win control of Congress in 2006 by campaigning against a Republican “culture of corruption.” This book was conceived more than two years ago, when no one outside of Washington had heard of a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff. (Democrats have reportedly pocketed something over $3 million from Abramoff's clients since 1997, as we'll see in Chapter Twelve.) If Democrats try to make “corruption” the central issue of their campaign, they'll surely lose -- and we'll probably sell a lot more books.

Hey, Nancy: You go, girl! [Donkey Cons, Pages 14-15]

FDR a “puppet” of Stalin. On Page 100, Vincent and McCain wrote:

If anything was red and scary, it was the scab of treachery that [Whittaker] Chambers peeled back to reveal a Democratic administration teeming with a Communist infection, and despite repeated warnings, doing nothing. One member of the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee], a Republican congressman from California named Richard Nixon, believed Chambers. His dogged pursuit of the truth ultimately revealed the extent to which Joseph Stalin was pulling Roosevelt's strings like those of a hapless puppet.

Iraq's really real WMD programs. Vincent and McCain repeatedly assert that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had a “WMD program” that he was hiding from weapons inspectors prior to the 2003 invasion by American-led forces. On Page 105, they rebuffed the allegation that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq:

Democrats, Baathists, and members of the Screen Actors Guild now reading this book are likely sputtering: "[Rep. Jim] McDermott was right! We didn't find any WMD in Iraq!"

That's true if you don't count the fact that two Iraqi scientists, newly freed by American forces, in April 2003 went on the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera and said they had watched vandals loot a Tawitha nuclear facility of 200 barrels of milled uranium oxide, or “yellow cake.” Or the dozen or so sarin and mustard rounds, 7-pound block of cyanide salt, vial of live botulinum, and 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium recovered by coalition forces.

Their source for this claim is a 2005 World magazine article. Unmentioned by Vincent and McCain was the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2004 Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, which determined that the available intelligence did not support the conclusion that Iraq had biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons programs. Nor did they mention the 2004 Iraq Survey Group report, which found that Iraq had dismantled its WMD programs and not made any efforts to reconstitute them prior to the 2003 invasion.

Democrats “perilously close” to committing “treason.” Vincent and McCain wrote on Page 107:

Democrats want to have it both ways: they want to whine that they were gullible dupes apparently incapable of their own competent intelligence analysis and they want to be put in charge of the country and the national defense. For the basest of reasons -- to win a majority power in 2006 -- congressional Democrats at this writing are misleading the American people, lying to them in time of war, sowing doubt among American forces, twisting daggers in the hearts of parents who have lost children, and shilling for the enemy. Constitutionally, that may not be treason. But it appears perilously close.

Clinton intentionally started Lewinsky scandal. On Page 199, Vincent and McCain wrote that there is “merit” to the allegation that the Clinton White House used the Monica Lewinsky scandal to intentionally distract from the so-called “Chinagate” campaign finance investigation:

Admiral [Thomas] Moorer's analysis of Janet Reno's decision to keep the Chinagate investigation in-house, but to unleash Ken Starr on a chubby-cheeked intern, has merit. The appointment of an independent counsel makes headlines and lends heft to allegations. It would be no surprise if the spin-obsessed Clinton administration had deemed it better to distract the nation and lemming press with a titillating sex scandal -- a rap Clinton had already proven he could beat -- than to leave a news hole waiting to be filled with tales of a presidency for sale.