The resignation of Sarah Palin has been a wonderful thing in many respects -- none more wonderful than the strong likelihood that she's finished in politics. But another nice thing about it is that CNN and MSNBC briefly took a break from their new joint status as the Michael Jackson Channel.
Rachel Maddow, back on the air and in fine form, aptly summed up the apparent message of Palin's resignation speech (and multiple interviews while fishing yesterday): "Only quitters stay in their jobs. Only fighters have the courage to quit before the job is done."
Palin's chief complaint -- "Every time we do something we get hit with an ethics violation" -- is almost as funny as Nero Fiddled's new video The Sarah Palin Show with Sarah Palin.
Palin, of course, isn't counting herself out of national politics, although many others are. When she was asked yesterday whether her mountain of ethics complaints would interfere as much with presidential ambition as with gubernatorial effectiveness, she relied on her keen grasp of White House politics. "I think on a national level," she said, "your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out." Of course -- the department of law there in the White House. Why didn't we think of that?
The likely story, advanced to CNN by an unnamed Palin insider, is that "life is not happy for her" these days, and she just wants out. Freed of the burdensome responsibility of being an actual leader, Palin is now free to be the only thing she was ever qualified to be -- a media spectacle, a personality, at liberty to accept ridiculously lucrative book deals, speaking engagements, and, yeah, probably an official presence in the infamous media.
We'll have to see what happens, but at the moment, it looks like the best possible outcome of the entire Sarah Palin blot on our culture: Whatever chance she had of being a serious presidential contender is now destroyed, but we'll probably get more opportunities to see Sisk play her.