All Things in Palin English

The Best is Yet to Come

“ Actually, OS, I'm kinda going through some pain over this [Palin's resignation]  myself. I feel like I've just been told "Middle class? Want right to participate in politics? Shut up and sit down and leave that to the rich betters who can afford to spend half a million on legal fees every half year." I _am_ mad as hell. [Thing From Snowy Mountain] ”

Thing's sediment will serve as a nice segue into Sarah Palin: The Best is Yet to Come by J.R. Dunn [American Thinker]. I've excerpted generously, but still left lots of meat on the table.  “ The response to Sarah Palin's surprise resignation last Friday clearly reveals the limitations of the American political class, right, left, or what have you. There's an old academic joke, probably apocryphal, about Count Metternich, Austria's foreign minister during the Napoleonic era. While attending the Congress of Vienna, Metternich is sleeping off a banquet when one of his aides bursts in at three in the morning. "Your excellency! Count Nesselrode, the Russian ambassador, just died." Metternich jerks awake. "Died, you say? What a terrible thing! I was speaking to him only tonight... Uhh... send a message to the Tsar -- Austria regrets, and so forth..." The aide leaves. Metternich gets up and paces the floor. After a moment he stops and rubs his chin. "So... Why did Nesselrode decide to do that now..." We're seeing the same thing today. Obsessive figures confronted with a simple human contingency and, unable to comprehend what's right in front of their eyes, retreating instead into irrelevant speculation about whatever they know best. Dunn here explains why Palin  is doing exactly what any normal, rational, un-driven human being would do under the same circumstances, before moving on to her obligations. And the GOP? Doesn't she owe her party anything? Just a few short days after her youngest daughter was humiliated on one of the most widely-watched late-night shows in the country, an obvious hit piece appeared in that balanced journal of the higher intellect, Vanity Fair, in which certain unnamed GOP officials revealed the true Sarah Palin: Sarah as Michael Jackson, Sarah the narcissist, who lived in a dream world and was overwhelmed by "demons".  The fact that GOP figures would cooperate with a rag like Vanity Fair in the first place puts a period to any talk of a party connection. The GOP obviously has an agenda. It is not Sarah Palin's agenda. Nor, more than likely, ours either. What about Alaska? Palin is one of the outstanding governors of our time, possibly surpassed only by Rick Perry, infinitely superior to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jennifer Granholm, or Mitt Romney, to mention only a few members of a large crowd. She went a long way toward cleaning up the Anchorage cesspool, wound up the negotiations for a gas pipeline that had been languishing for decades, and put her state on the national radar screen for the first time since 1958. But her usefulness as governor was probably drawing to an end. If she were to show interest in a 2012 run, she could depend on Obama's crew doing everything possible to drag her down -- and going through her state to do it. Her future? She will be back. Not for 2012. The GOP has its plans already worked out. Very clever ones, too. The Republicans will do what they always do when they're up against it: grab an empty suit and run around shaking it in people's faces while shouting, "Here's the man!" By 2012, after his policies really hit home, as gas and home fuel prices triple and quadruple, as medical rationing begins, as the renewed Axis of Evil runs wild across Eurasia, Obama will be ready to drop. At that point he could be defeated by a ticket consisting of Charley Manson and Jojo the Dogface Boy. But the GOP will blow it all the same. Exactly as the party did in '96, following the same script to the letter. They will, to coin a phrase, Mitt it up. Epilogue Democracies never stop halfway, no matter what it is: good or bad, intelligent or stupid, harmful or beneficial, they have to go the whole route before at last changing course. The U.S. could not abandon Great Society liberalism in 1976, it had to wait until 1980. The UK could not put aside postwar Labour policies until they were ground down to the last (the Brits went so far as to elect Harold Wilson to two nonconsecutive terms -- something similar to re-electing Jimmy Carter in 1984. Talk about desperation moves!) While that process unfolded, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan served long apprenticeships, learning all they had to now. Sarah Palin is embarking on the same course now. ”