Sarah Palin, during her resignation speech, claimed that she was leaving because she didn't want to be afflicted by her lame duck status and that this is not serving politics as usual.
Well, what Palin has done certainly doesn't qualify as usual, but it certainly was politics.
What she's really saying there is that if she's not running for anything else, she has no reason to govern. What Sarah Palin is essentially telling us is something that we already know, something that "politics as usual" means to most of us: That every cycle of political service is focused, almost entirely, on forwarding the status of yourself or your party to gain or perpetuate power. She had no interest in actually running the State of Alaska. She had every interest in forwarding her own political ambitions.
That's what Sarah Palin is telling us. That her decision is strictly politics as usual, even if it doesn't qualify as being strictly usual.