(Title via KagroX — he was en fuego over at his Twittermajigger today.)
What the hell just happened? Is this all an elaborate scheme to provide cover for Mark Sanford? From Palin’s speech:
A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket… and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN.
Maybe she got confused while following the news about NBA free agency (a.k.a. maverickiness). You see, Governor, there’s been a terrible mistake — when a team has a star point guard, they want that guy to re-sign. What you have done is entirely different.
The leading theory when the news was breaking was that Palin was taking time off to prepare for a run for President in 2012, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense… for one, she could have asked a friend, or consulted the Google, to find out that 2012 minus 2009 is three years. I know Presidential campaigns start really early now, but this is ridiculous. Even if she was running for Murkowski’s Senate seat (yeah, good luck with that), the big flaw in the plan is that she’s now painted herself as capricious, erratic, and unable to commit to serving a full term. And crazy. Also.
The better theory, I think, is that there’s another scandal coming. This weird, nonsensical announcement feels a little like the Sanford saga — it’s hard to express it better than Josh Marshall did (he’s really good at this):
As with her speech itself, the tell is that the decision was apparently so rushed and sudden that there was not enough time to come up with a plausible cover story or to get out the word about what it was.
The truth is probably nothing as insane as a tryst in Argentina, although she did mention going to Kosovo, so some adventurous journalists might want to start snooping around there. But maybe the prospect of having to deal with yet another round of scrutiny was too much for her apparently frail psyche. After all, she was KO’ed by a David Letterman joke. Not exactly evidence of thick skin.
When we first saw the news, I thought it was a joke. The things I was seeing in my RSS reader were not making sense. I was sure it was a joke, but I couldn’t find the punchline.
We’re still looking.
Side note: harveyj is actually in town this weekend, so we were somehow in the same place when crazy news broke. (Last time I stayed at his place, Arlen Specter switched parties… we ought to do this more often.)
And let’s not rule out that Palin is actually going to resign the governorship of the old Alaska, but retain the governorship of the new, independent Alaska.
Look, no idea is too crazy at this point.
Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell is calling Palin Alaska’s greatest gift to the U.S.
I suppose this means they’re going to start selling the oil to someone else.