She’s also threatening the press if they repeat rumors about the construction of her house:
To the extent several websites, most notably liberal Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore, are now claiming as “fact” that Governor Palin resigned because she is “under federal investigation” for embezzlement or other criminal wrongdoing, we will be exploring legal options this week to address such defamation. This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law. The Alaska Constitution protects the right of free speech, while simultaneously holding those “responsible for the abuse of that right.” Alaska Constitution Art. I, Sec. 5. These falsehoods abuse the right to free speech; continuing to publish these falsehoods of criminal activity is reckless, done without any regard for the truth, and is actionable.
Look: it's Palin and she's crazy, so anything is possible.
But the following thoughts are the ones that make sense to me as a long-term Palinologist.
I don't quite buy that this is a brilliant scheme to win everything back by running from the base as a martyr of librul-media meanies. Why? First off, she lies about almost everything, so one's immediate response should be: if she said it, it's probably not true. Besides, if she really thinks she could do more for Alaska by leaving it (a rare display of insight on her point), she could at least do the minimum and finish up her term of office. I mean: I know the endless photo-shoots and Greta interviews can take time, but it's not like she seems to do very much. Her ratings my be sinking like a stone, but they have not incapacitated her. And as every Republican hack has pointed out, quitting a governorship before your first term is over is not exactly a good advertisement for being president of the United States. If she can't handle a few Alaskan bloggers and Steve Schmidt emails, how is she going to handle Khamenei and al Qaeda? Maybe her base is so ga-ga they don't care. But again the whole diva quitting-fit is totally at odds with the core image that turns them on – of a tough-girl, Thatcher-style, play-with-the-big-boys Alaskan Evita. You can't do that and then throw a sixteen-year-old fit and slam your bedroom door when the press gets too tough.
As a governor, she is ineffective; the moment she decides not to run for re-election, she had two choices: either untether herself from political customs and be the governor who spoke truth to power, or surrender to the whims of a legislature and governing apparatus that really grew to – not just dislike her, but hate her. Both options, she must have realized, are entirely untenable. Her relationship with Democrats and Republicans was irritable on good days, and her attempts to straighten her back and yell drew derisive laughter. For someone who has dipped a leg or two into the whirlpool of national politics, the contrast must be scalding. People who know Palin say that she cannot wait to – really wants to – play the role that she believes she now must play.
Okay: she's joining the Beck-Limbaugh-Hannity circus. It sure is more lucrative and far more fun than governing a state. Her main goals in life so far have been money and fame (and photo-shoots); and she doesn't handle power, understand policy or manage people well. So why not earn money from being a celebrity rather than from that excruciatingly arduous thing called governing?
But here's why I can't quite buy this either.
This was obviously an incredibly hasty decision, with no prepared speech, delivered almost to minimize its publicity impact on the Friday of a federal holiday before the Fourth of July. If she were really re-launching her career in a new media-driven, Fox-News, Huckabee-Limbaugh vehicle, she would surely have set up the launch a little better. She can do speeches. She could have done a great one – a rallying cry, a "You won't have Palin to kick around any more" piece of bravado – and launched a big fundraising drive to get her on her way. But no: we get this desperate, unrehearsed, "I'm-not-a-quitter-because-I'm-quitting" stream-of-consciousness. Again, anything is possible, since she's ga-ga, but this really felt to me like a very swift withdrawal to avoid what might be an almighty shoe about to fall to earth.
What could that shoe be? Some unknown ethics inquiry? Some big official scandal about to break? The free house-construction no-one quite resolved? Trooper Wooten's revenge? Bristol can't take the bullshit any more and has sold a tell-all? Levi just got a lot of money from the Enquirer? Sherri Johnston has implicated a Palin in her drug-bust? Did Track get in trouble again? Is there another unplanned pregnancy somewhere? Someone took a hike on the Appalachian trail? Has Lyda Green finally gone nuclear? Has Mercedes got a book contract? Or has she pushed Levi one step too far? Is Trig really Tina Fey's child?
The number of potential enemies and victims with an ax to grind and a lucrative story to tell is endless. Who can say? But the abruptness of the withdrawal is so weird one has to wonder. I mean: she managed to face down a pregnant unwed daughter, an arrested relative, a delinquent son, a secessionist husband, 32 absurd lies (and counting), a completely loopy pregnancy story and carried on regardless, winking and posing away. I mean: those Runners World photos don't look like a a politician in clinical depression, ground down by exposure. So what possible scandal could be big enough to force her to quit this suddenly, without a prepared statement, and shocking her entire staff? What could be so big that this extremely ambitious woman would do something that all but ends her potential credibility as a national politician? No one can elect a president who couldn't even finish one term of office as governor because of press pressure. Right?
All I know is that if a shoe drops, we probably won't hear about it first from the mainstream media. So stay tuned.
First, I want to thank you for your support and hard work on the values we share. Those values led me to the decision my family and I made. Yesterday, my family and I announced a decision that is in Alaska’s best interest and it always feels good to do what is right. We have accomplished more during this one term than most governors do in two – and I am proud of the great team that helped to build these wonderful successes. Energy independence and national security, fiscal restraint, smaller government, and local control have been my priorities and will remain my priorities.
For months now, I have consulted with friends and family, and with the Lieutenant Governor, about what is best for our wonderful state. I even made a few administrative changes over that course in time in preparation for yesterday. We have accomplished so much and there’s much more to do, but my family and I determined after prayerful consideration that sacrificing my title helps Alaska most. And once I decided not to run for re-election, my decision was that much easier – I’ve never been one to waste time or resources. Those who know me know this is the right decision and obvious decision at that, including Senator John McCain. I thank him for his kind, insightful comments.
The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the “politics of personal destruction”.
How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country. And though it’s honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it’s right for all, including your family.
I shared with you yesterday my heartfelt and candid reasons for this change; I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America. I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. I hope you will join me. Now is the time to rebuild and help our nation achieve greatness!
Michele Madigan Somerville, a self-described "a feminist-progressive living in 21st-century Brooklyn" struggles with, but refuses to give up, on her religion:
Once I accepted that being Roman Catholic did not require that I be a papist — once I understood that it was possible to be simultaneously outraged by and in love with the Church — I saw the obstacles to being a practicing Catholic in a new way.
Here is, to my mind, the best appreciation of America in recent times by an old friend and colleague, the late Henry Fairlie, of The New Republic. A British emigre, Henry was a bohemian, idiosyncratic, Oakeshottian Tory, foe of neocons, and lover of democracy, curmudgeon, lover, bon-vivant and utterly independent, as all the best journalists are. Read the extract below. And buy Jeremy McCarter's wonderful new collection of some of Henry's greatest pieces – journalism at its finest and crispest and bravest. Here's an extract from his essay for July 4 in 1983: titled "My America" on the cover, it's a classic:
I had been in the country about eight years, and was living in Houston, when a Texas friend asked me one evening: "Why do you like living in America? I don't mean why you find it interesting–why you want to write about it–but why you like living here so much." After only a moment's reflection, I replied, "It's the first time I've felt free." One spring day, shortly after my arrival in America, I was walking down the long, broad street of a suburb, with its sweeping front lawns (all that space), its tall trees (all that sky), and its clumps of azaleas (all that color). The only other person on the street was a small boy on a tricycle. As I passed him, he said, "Hi!"–just like that. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before. Yet here was this one, with his cheerful "Hi!" Recovering from the culture shock, I tried to look down stonily at his flaxen head, but instead, involuntarily, I found myself saying in return: "Well–hi!" He pedaled off, apparently satisfied. He had begun my Americanization.
"Hi!" As I often say–for Americans do not realize it–the word is a democracy. (I come from a country where one can tell someone's class by how they say "Hallo!" or "Hello!" or "Hullo," or whether they say it at all.) But anyone can say "Hi!" Anyone does. Shortly after my encounter with the boy, I called on the then Suffragan Bishop of Washington. Did he greet me as the Archbishop of Canterbury would have done? No. He said, "Hi, Henry!" I put it down to an aberration, an excess of Episcopalian latitudinarianism. But what about my first meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of the United States, the Emperor of the Free World, before whom, like a Burgher of Calais, a halter round my neck, I would have sunk to my knees, pleading for a loan for my country? He held out the largest hand in Christendom, and said, "Hi, Henry!"
—July 4, 1983
Buy the book of his priceless essays and read the rest of this one here.
[T]hose who have been following the Alaska blogosphere closely are aware of the rumors bubbling up that there’s something big…something really big that’s headed her way; the iceberg that’s headed for the S.S. Palin. We’ll see.
I think that there's something we don't know about: either a serious health problem or a serious scandal. In either case, it would, I think, have to be a really big deal to make her react in this way. She has shown herself to be more than capable of brushing off smaller scandals, national embarrassment, and a whole host of other things. She did not step down from the governorship when she gave birth to a child with special needs, or when she was asked to be McCain's running-mate. She did not decline McCain's offer because of the potential embarrassment, either to her or her family, of her daughter being unmarried and pregnant. She is no shrinking violet.
Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. Kristol, disingenuous as ever:
It's an enormous gamble – but it could be a shrewd one.
Kristol occupies a central space in the network of right wing media/think tank types. Vast swaths of the Republican intelligentsia are deeply invested in his success, and he invested himself in the success of Sarah Palin. The Palin stocks have now crashed, and that may turn the investment in Kristol toxic. Kristol and his backers will, for a time anyway, deal with the problem by simply refusing to acknowledge that anything has gone wrong. When Jonah Goldberg is jumping ship, though, things aren't looking good.
The main thing I'd point out about Sarah Palin's dazzlingly incoherent farewell is that it's pretty clear she wrote it herself. The proof is in the punctuation. The transcript was posted to her official Web site earlier today. The style is closer to a high schooler's angry diary entry than to an official speech. I've read a lot of speech transcripts. They tend to have fewer words in all capital letters. And fewer things in quotation marks that aren't actually, you know, quotes.
This is a major gamble on her part, but if she gets spots to campaign for others she could build a network on the national level that could in theory catapult her to the Republican Nomination. If she doesn’t get the return calls from local GOPers running for House, State Senate seats, PACs and the like, then she’s toast.
There is another possibility, conceivably—that she is so isolated that she has talked herself into the belief that whatever feels right to her must be the pathway to the White House; that to make her case as a presidential candidate it is plausible to resign from the only marginally qualifying job in government that she has ever held, before she could complete even the first leg of her responsibilities; that disapproval of her decision in mainstream media and political circles will only confirm the narrative of media-led conspiracies against her that will eventually fuel her populist triumph. Stranger things have happened, in Chad and in America. But I’d bet on the dead fish.
Assuming there is no scandal shoe about to drop, to understand what Gov. Sarah Palin is doing, we ought to begin by taking her at her word…She can't fight back — she can't protect her family, her values, her worldview — while she's governor. At the same time, her desire, perhaps conscious, perhaps not, to get into the mix — to be invited to the fancy Washington dinners, to be courted by these very forces – is irresistably pulling her towards the very fight she seeks.
[S]he’s in Nixon position here. She’s finished in the near term, i.e. 2012, but the public’s memory is short. If she hits the trail for some GOP movers and shakers and reemerges in three years or so with an ability to talk shop on domestic and foreign policy, Republicans won’t care that she flaked out on the governorship.
[M]any commentators have taken little more than an hour to proceed from slack-jawed bewilderment to belief that Sarah Palin's unexplained resignation may be a political masterstroke…Either Palin is resigning ahead of some titanic scandal (which should emerge in short order if it exists) or her resignation was triggered by an even more extreme mental instability than we'd previously suspected.
Laura Chase, who managed Palin's first campaign for mayor in 1996, doesn't think Palin is giving up:
She’s like a bloodhound. Once she gets the scent, she's never going to let it go. She gets what she wants or dies trying. She wants to be president now that she has a following.
That was rambling and disjointed even by Palin’s low standards. When I was watching it, it reminded me of a COPS episode, when they are are talking to a guy accused of stealing aerosol paint from a hardware store, and the guy swears he didn’t steal any paint, and yes it is all just a big coincidence that he has a circle of silver paint around his mouth and nose, and yes, it is an even bigger coincidence that there is a paper bag with silver paint in it and no he has no idea why there are empty silver cans of paint in the bag seat of his car and oh, hey, by the way, do you have a light, buddy, and better yet do you gotta smoke?
In her short, lurid national career Palin has not hesitated to expose her children to the potential humilations of the public stage; if we’re now looking at a post-Palin political future—and let’s hope we are—the nation owes those young Palins a debt of thanks for casting their votes in favor of surrendering the statehouse.
I have no comment. Except everything I have posted in the last ten months. We'll find out soon enough. But this could turn out to be as big a media scandal as a Palin one.
my arrival in America, I was walking down the long, broad street of a suburb, with its sweeping front lawns (all that space), its tall trees (all that sky), and its clumps of azaleas (all that color). The only other person on the street was a small boy on a tricycle. As I passed him, he said, "Hi!"–just like that. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before. Yet here was this one, with his cheerful "Hi!" Recovering from the culture shock, I tried to look down stonily at his flaxen head, but instead, involuntarily, I found myself saying in return: "Well–hi!" He pedaled off, apparently satisfied. He had begun my Americanization.
The Dish 