The author of a blistering Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin says his attempt at a positive piece went so awry, he couldn't even include all the bad stuff he found out.

"The worst stuff isn't even in there," Michael Joseph Gross said on MSNBC.

"I couldn't believe these stories either when I first heard them, and I started this story with a prejudice in her favor. I have a lot in common with this woman."

Sarah Palin is portrayed unflatteringly in Vanity Fair this month.

"I'm a small-town person, I'm a Christian, I think that a lot of her criticisms of the media actually have something to them. And I think she got a bum ride."

"But, everybody close to her tells the same story."

You can read the Vanity Fair article yourself and draw your own conclusions, but he paints Palin as an abusive, combative figure with an extreme ability to lie.

"This is a person for whom there is no topic too small to lie about," he said of the ex-Alaska Governor and mother of Bristol Palin. "She lies about everything."

Meghan McCain has nothing on this. As for Palin's political future?

"If we decide to let her keep lying and getting away with it, she's gonna still be around," he said. "But if we start returning to the standard that a politician has to talk with people, and a politician has to tell the truth, then she's outta here."

"Because she can't stand up to that."

Gross takes exception to criticisms that he wrote a "hit piece" against Sarah Palin, saying "I started this with every good intention. I was just shocked and appalled at every step at what I found. I wrote this story sort of against my will."

"It wasn't what I wanted to write," he adds, noting that the facts do the talking. "It wasn't what I wanted to find. It was what was forced on me by the facts."

Do you like Sarah Palin?