Peggy Pegs Palin

Conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan pens the epilogue on the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, but I don't think Palin's done with us yet. Still, it's scathing stuff:

Noonan's non-no on Palin's no-go.

(HuffPo)

"She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence.

"In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying."

— Peggy Noonan

Read more, if you dare

I don't think anybody has put it any better, except when Noonan put it even more succinctly, very early on, when she was caught on a live mike last year calling "political bullshit" on the Palin pick for VP.

Chuck Todd: "Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?"

Peggy Noonan: "The most qualified? No! I think they went for this — excuse me — political bullshit about narratives."

Chuck Todd: "Yeah they went to a narrative."

Mike Murphy: "I totally agree."

Noonan also reads the beads of people who make excuses for the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, "some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit..."

"I love her because she's so working-class." She is not working class, never was. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class 'tropes.' Because, you know, that's what they teach in 'Ways of the Working Class' at Yale and Dartmouth.

I'm reminded of my sister's harangue. She's in education and says "kids today" are taught that everybody's a little prince or princess, everyone's a winner, except Noonan aims directly at OUR generation:

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

And here's an instance of power speaking truth to power.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

Are you listening Bill Kristol? Do your party a favor. Stop dumbing down to them. Enough of these Dan Quayle-esque dumbasses you keep digging up!

Read of Noonan's scathing eulogy at the WSJ.

Palin's Indenpendence Party

Palin concedes BEFORE the reelection campaign

(Huffpo)

"But you don't hear much of the good stuff in the press anymore, do you?

Some say things changed for me on August 29th last year - the day John McCain tapped me to be his running-mate - I say others changed."

— Sarah Palin

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Something uncomfortable about not having Dick Nixon to kick around anymore comes hauntingly to mind. You KNOW we haven't seen the last of the Palins yet.

Was talking to friends this week about the idea that Palin has transcended politics in the same way Paris Hilton somehow transcends celebrity, both of them becoming demigoddesses that no longer depend on auditioning for a role or campaigning for office.

Both have somehow wheedled their uniquely public persona into something beyond the roles they more ostensibly assume, living life as reality TV characters, albeit characters outside any particular reality TV program. They're multi-media reality stars, born for 24-hour cable, YouTube, txting, tweeting, and blogging.

Their whole lives have achieved a unique status, abiding like those who are famous just for being themselves... instead of any role they might play.

Michael Jackson had achieved it, but he didn't rest well knowing it. He seemed determined to bounce back as a pop star confined by production schedules... rather than inhabit the character of always-on notoriety he had become.

I think Palin recognized this, saw that the Alaska office was just dragging her down, when she could be out on the open road running the Sarah Palin Show... without a state ethics board in tow.

To what end... I don't know. She could just as easily become the political world's Kato Kaelin as she can be Paris Hilton, who has decided to sit back herself, now, to rewrite her place in the world, after notoriety was displaced by notorious.

"Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations - such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters' questions.

"Every one - all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We've won!"

After hearing her concession, Tom in the Richmond asks, "Did she just say that to hunker down and get the job done in the face of adversity is the quitters way out?"

"Really?"

In essence, she said it!

She's also saying it's okay to lie about "Every one - all 15 of the ethics complaints having been dismissed."

"Bitch was toll she abuse her power, and that her husban' abuse her power... when they went on the family feud after the brother in law... using, the full unfaith and power of the governor's office"

— Anonymous Source

Speaking of ethics, maybe something bigger's coming up, and the Palin's are hunkering down or distancing themselves, maybe as money to fight it dries up, but I have to say, I might be more nervous not knowing what she's up to without an ethics committee looking after her from now on.

Tom in the Richmond also wonders, "if she's counting on the fact that people will forget this by the time she's running for president, because all she's shown right now is that when the going gets tough, she runs away.

"I wonder if it has anything to do with other GOP governors getting caught doing super hypocritical things. Is she just trying to stay out of the crosshairs?"

Aye!

My suspicion is; she's realized that the never-ending henpecking of the press, on every stupid thing she's come up with, will not subside, and that it's no way to prepare for higher office, especially when she can reasonably expect to lose reelection for governor in Alaska.

I think she's been properly advised by FOX Noose's Greta Van Stusteren to transcend political office, to operate from her own platform, where she can't be held ethically accountable while she remakes herself for 2012.

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