Palin: Media Martyr's Revenge

The self-styled victim of "the politics of personal destruction" has struck back at her tormenters by leaving Alaska's statehouse with trademark twinkly, crinkly aggression.

Sarah Palin dropped her bombshell on the eve of a holiday weekend, sending TV's talking heads scrambling back from vacation to studios or huffing over long-distance phone lines to parse her resignation.

Their puzzled but predictable responses ranged from William Kristol and Mary Matalin hailing the move as a masterstroke toward the 2012 presidential nomination to the consensus about it as bizarre and, in the words of Republican strategist Ed Rollins, "terribly inept."

In ten months on the national scene, Palin has tried to make ineptness an asset by equating competence with "politics as usual" and picturing herself as champion of the resentful and inarticulate from Joe the Plumber down

Palin's complaints about the media notwithstanding, her next logical move will be to follow the folk wisdom, "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em," and become a commentator for Fox News, where Rupert Murdoch will surely be happy to provide her with an income and national platform to ease the pain of her abuse by David Letterman and Vanity Fair.

In that role, and in lucrative lectures to right-wing Republican faithful, the former Governor will be free to exhibit her 21st century Animal Farm--from the pit bull with lipstick through yesterday's additions, the lame duck who milks a paycheck and dead fish who go with the flow.

In that ramble, Gov. Palin asserted that it would be "tempting and more comfortable to just kind of keep your head down and plod along and appease those who are demanding, hey, just sit down and shut up. But that’s a worthless, easy path out. That’s a quitter’s way out."

Then she quit.

Her future colleague, Mike Huckabee, was rushed onto Fox News to hail her "spunk." Unlike Mary Tyler Moore's old TV boss Ed Asner, Huckabee was both collegially and politically restrained from a more understandable reaction, "I hate spunk."

Waterboarding for Fun and Profit

Christopher Hitchens, who doesn't believe in God or waterboarding as torture, has just cut his list in half after undergoing an aquatic experience (it wasn't baptism) on assignment from Vanity Fair.

After airily dismissing the difference between "extreme interrogation" and "outright torture," Hitchens was challenged to see for himself and, writers being as they are, agreed to do so if the experience yielded a magazine article. He did, and it did, in the current issue under the title, "Believe Me, It's Torture."

For those who want to read about and see a video of how far a portly 59-year-old man with phobias about drowning will go for money and attention, it's all there on the magazine's web site.

Meanwhile, any editor with an idea of how to test the existence of the Deity can be in touch with Hitchens as soon as he catches his breath.