She always talked about family, family, family. Here's my family with the Walton's-Mountain-meets-J.R.R.-Tolkien naming scheme; you can tell how important they are to me by the way I never appear on camera or in public without them, but HOW DARE YOU NOTICE/PHOTOGRAPH/MENTION THEM!
It's a crazy, crazy cognitive dichotomy, which I totally get. I love my family, but they are, as I'm sure most of you will recognize, the only people I've ever seriously considered strangling. Family hits you way down deep, right on the Paradox Bone, nestled way down between the spleen and the vestigial tail, only accessible when digesting on an empty stomach.
She talked about how important her family was, and yet she had this super high profile, time consuming, Letterman-noticing job as the governor of a state that is 99% unoccupied by humans. Permafrozen hellscapes need governin' too. Her duties were vast and necessary. Like this one, look:
Who else is going to hold a fish? If the people of Alaska wanted someone else standing on boats bothering mackerel, they'd have made them governor.
And you notice what she's doing when she's holding that fish? Not holding her kids. Any of them. Not even the all-life-is-precious special needs one, who, because his needs are special, requires the most on-camera holding of all.
Like all responsible people in her position, then, Sarah Palin has finally done what is logical and correct: she has quit.
Like I said, I get it. I relate. I faced exactly the same problem when I decided to resign as Third Undersecretary in charge of Car Wash Fundraising and Rice Krispies Treats at the James A. Garfield Elementary School PTA. Sure, there was talk about me being a shoo-in for Second Undersecretary in charge of Science Fair Chocolate Bar Sales, but nope, I just walked away. Meetings were on Tuesdays and Tuesdays are when the boys and I watch "Monster Garage." The price was just too high.
And now, whether Sarah really wanted it to be or not, it really is going to be about family. The example she is setting is an inspiration: finally, a politician is living up to what the cynical (and now shamed, chastened) me assumed was a bullshit persona developed as a marketing hook to sell a candidate like so much Coca-Cola. Or, in her case, Wal*Mart house brand Sam's Choice grape soda.
Such a refreshing change. For contrast, there's the Obamas talking about health care for those most in need of it all through the campaign and the minute they get in office, what do they do? They start actively poisoning children. How typically, tediously sad.
Now that Sarah quit, I can only assume she means to disappear quietly from public life, for the sake of the family she has sworn to protect, usually in rambling statements, spiked with colorful stops and starts, half-recognizable phrasings, contradictory and self-negating verbiage and 35 words where 8-12 would suffice.
No, liberal media, you won't have Sally Palin to kick around anymore. The natural conclusion is that she and Todd will retire to a little cottage on some frozen, frozen parcel of land somewhere around the Arctic Circle, the spit and crackle of burning whole seals filling their grand salon where they will host the greatest, most nimble wits north central Alaska has to offer; a Madame Geoffrin of the North Slope, perhaps occasionally sticking her head up to enlighten us on the latest thinking theological tautology or moose dung jewelry design.
And the whole time, she and her dear family will be up there, safe, surrounded by a cocoon of mutual warmth and comfort and support and closed circuit television and 11 miles of electrified bear fence and an arsenal of small arms.
It SEEMS stupid and unnecessary, but when they find David Letterman dead on the Alaska frontier, his frozen body carrying chloroform, some surgical tubing and a Willow-sized burlap bag, we'll know she did the right thing.
Wink!
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