SAY IT AIN'T SO, JOE: Ron Suskind's ''Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President,'' new at No. 2 on the hardcover nonfiction list, may have grabbed all the serious news headlines, but Joe McGinniss's Sarah Palin tell-all, ''The Rogue'' (No. 10), has made for way better copy, much of it scabrously negative. Janet Maslin, writing in the daily New York Times, dismissed its scoops as ''dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access,'' shamelessly padded out with pointless details about the pet birds McGinniss kept in his temporary home next door to the Palins in Alaska (''The grebe chicks have hatched!'') and hearsay about the condition of the Palins' toilet. Palin filed her own review in the form of a letter to McGinniss's publisher threatening to sue. Even Palin's mullet-loving near-miss son-in-law, Levi Johnston, took time out from promoting his own anti-Palin book, ''Deer in the Headlights,'' to trash McGinniss's feebly sourced claim that the former Alaska governor had used cocaine. But the most colorful assessment appeared on Christwire.org, a conservative political Web site partial to Tea Party-friendly wacky animal stories (''Atheists Give Puppy Drugs'') that was outed last year as a joke site aimed at ''something like what The Onion would be if the writers cared mainly about God, gay people and how both influence the weather,'' as Mark Oppenheimer put it in The Times. On Sept. 20, Stephenson Billings, a (fake) blogger best known for the viral hit ''Is My Husband Gay?,'' attacked McGinniss as ''the bastard child of Roald Dahl and Jackie Collins'' and the journalistic tribe he represents as ''polymorphously perverse alcoholics struggling with tyrannical egos and unpaid rent bills.'' Billings even accused McGinniss of slandering the Green Berets in his true-crime book ''Fatal Vision,'' not to mention disrespecting the four-legged troops in ''The Big Horse,'' about the 2003 horse racing season. By betting against War Emblem, Billings charged, McGinniss ''showed little respect for George Washington's men who depended on their fighting equines to bring liberty to a youthful nation, to the work animals that gloriously wrangled open the West to trade and Christendom, to the cavalry soldiers who led us to victory in World War I and to the gracious beasts that to this day inflame many a young woman's heart with the hypnotic rhythm of their gait in the verdant pastures of America's heartland.'' Giddyup! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]